TCU’s community task force sets highest priority on Lonsdale school

Three members of the 2025 Tri-City United Schools Volunteer Community Task Force presented to the school board their recommendations for the district at their last meeting on Tuesday, May 27.

The task force met on five occasions in April through May, doing a site visit at each school to see issues first hand. The superintendent, each school’s principal, and other staff lead a tour of the schools, followed by a separation of the staff and task force to come up with their own opinions about each site.

According to task force member Maggie Stensass of Lonsdale, the task force focused on three things: Does it make sense for the kids, does it make sense fiscally, and does it have community support?

Lonsdale’s growth and outlook for student population ranked highest on the task force’s list. One of the members who presented, Wayne Gieseke of Lonsdale, entered his daughter into the school district after seeing what TCU was doing. Gieseke says, “We targeted the district in the process of moving.”

It was suggested from the task force that they would like to see Lonsdale to either have a very large expansion or perhaps even an entirely new building built that could house not just from PreK-6 but through eighth grade to encourage more students that are currently deciding to open enroll into New Prague and Northfield. “Lonsdale is growing, and that’s not going to slow down,” said Le Center’s Brandon Brockway, the third member of the task force that presented.

Brockway said that expanding Lonsdale to go from sixth to eighth grade would match with the rest of the district since Montgomery and Le Center both have schools that go through eighth grade. He also noted that this was a top priority in the 2023 task force that was assembled.

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Their second recommendation was to expand further the options and space available in career technical education (CTE) and agriculture at the high school. “They weren’t able to offer ninth-graders welding, because they didn’t have room, with all of the spots filled up by older students,” said Stensass. “Also, they aren’t able to offer welding and shop at the same time because they don’t have the space to do it separately.”

Stensass continued, “As a farmer in the community, I think it’s really important we are investing in the future of agriculture and other blue collar fields. I think that we can look at this as a way we can invest in our community to stay within our community.” She said that this way students can get a job right out of leaving high school. Stensass said her husband was a product of benefiting from ag and technical career courses in high school where he worked as a carpenter after high school and during college for another career where he was paid much higher wages than if he had not benefited from such training.

Matching funds were recommended to be sought in connection with the ag and CTE expansion, citing that there are shortages in these industries and a lot of businesses may want to partner or have funds available to help that happen for the district.

The third recommendation from the task force was to use the remaining funds to do infrastructure maintenance and upgrades in general.

Lastly, regarding the budget for the district to do such changes, the task force recommended the district bond for $35-40 million. The tax impact on a median home would represent a $68 a year increase for those that reside in the old Montgomery-Lonsdale District 394,  and an increase of $73 a year for those that reside in the old Le Center District 392.

The above recommendations were 100% unanimous from the 20+ community task force members. According to the community survey conducted by SiteLogix, which had a 4.5% response rate, the average amount a person in the district would support would be $88.08 a year.

The priority ranking list that the task force came up with, based off of the site visits and the community survey results that were presented to them, are as follows in summary.