Mabel-Canton Public Schools (MC I.S.D. #238) is a school district headquartered in Mabel, Minnesota.[1] The district, which also serves Canton, has a single campus with all grades, K-12.
It includes sections of Fillmore County and Houston County.[2] [3] It also has an agreement with the Decorah Community School District to take students from parts of Winneshiek County, Iowa.
the district had a total of about 280 students.[4] Another school district document circa 2020 gave the enrollment count as 283. The area of the district is 116.42sqmi.[5]
On July 1, 1966, the consolidated school district, a merger of the Mabel and Canton schools, opened. The district began using blue and white as school colors, with one each from a predecessor district. Red is used as an "accent color".[5]
In 2001 the North Winneshiek Community School District ended its high school program. That year it entered into an agreement with Mabel-Canton Schools to allow students from its boundary to attend the Mabel-Canton high school program.[6]
In 2018 the combined interim board of Decorah Community School District and North Winneshiek district in Iowa approved an agreement with Mabel-Canton, effective for five years, to allow students in the former North Winneshiek district boundary to attend Mabel-Canton if they choose.[7] Decorah CSD had absorbed North Winneshiek CSD effective July 1, 2018.[8] The agreement applies to any post-merger resident of Decorah CSD who is geographically closer to Mabel than to Decorah, Iowa, where all Decorah CSD campuses are located.[9] In April 2019 the Mabel-Canton district anticipated that an additional 15-20 students from North Winn would begin attending Mabel-Canton in the start of the subsequent school year.[10]
In 2018 the Minnesota Legislature gave the district $433,500 to improve the security of its campus.[11] This was in response to a wave of school shootings occurring elsewhere in the country.[4]
The school gymnasium has the logos of the two predecessor districts and of the North Winneshiek district. Phil Richert, a former North Winneshiek board member, donated the North Winneshiek logo in a period prior to 2020, inspiring the Mabel-Canton leadership to get the other two.[12]