Manning Community School District Proposals to create the
Manning Community School District were unveiled in 1957. The election to create the district was held on April 29, 1959. 977 persons voted in ten voting districts, with 916 of them voting in favor and the others voting against. The proposal included moving portions of the
Manilla Community School District into the Manning district. 34 residents in that area voted in favor of moving into Manning, while the other 14 voted against. The Manning district began operations on July 1, 1959. The Carroll County District court judge William C. Hanson decided that the Manning district should remain, and in 1960 the
Iowa Supreme Court ruled in the same way as Hanson. In 1974, the three school districts and the
Carroll Community School District decided that the Eden and Templeton districts would be divided between the Carroll and Manning districts; Carroll got about 89% and 75%, respectively, of the land of the Templeton and Eden districts, with the Manning district taking the remainders. The district had 563 students in the 1995–1996 school year. In the 2004–2005 school year it had 511 students over of area. In fall 2008 the Manning district and the
IKM Community School District began whole grade-sharing, in which one district sent its students to another district's school for the whole day. This arrangement meant that the two districts consolidated their students into each other's schools.
Merge A vote to merge the districts, held on Tuesday April 6, 2010, was in favor of consolidation: the vote tally at the Manning poll station was 477–20; the tallies in Irwin and Manilla, respectively, were 206-26 and 190–20. During the consolidation process, the IKM and Manning school boards continued to operate while a temporary joint school board was also set up. The
IKM–Manning Community School District was established on July 1, 2011, from the merger of the
Manning Community School District and the
IKM Community School District. The superintendent of the district, Thomas Ward, stated that rural areas lost population as increasingly urban areas of the state had the major employment available. The district was previously headquartered in Manilla.
Modern development Trevor Miller has served as superintendent since 2017, and the district entered a sharing agreement with
Exira–EHK to split his time 50/50. In 2020, the districts modified the agreement for the 2020–21 to split his time 80/20 with 4 days per week at Exira–EHK and a single day per week at IKM–Manning. In 2020 there was a vote for a school bond of more than $19 million, but this was voted down. The same result happened in 2021. By 2023 there were plans to add a multipurpose building that also would function as another gymnasium. ==Schools==