York Institute girls basketball star and Iowa State commitment Reese Beaty will miss the 2024-25 TSSAA basketball season due to injury, according to a Facebook post by her mom, Bethany Beaty, on Monday.

Reese, who will be a senior this year, tore her labrum, the post said. She had been playing with shoulder pain since February and her family decided to get surgery after receiving consultation from Iowa State’s medical team. The recovery time span is six months. 

Beaty was a TSSAA Class 2A Miss Basketball finalist and led York to the TSSAA basketball state quarterfinals last season. She was also a finalist for The Tennessean’s Midstate Girls Basketball Player of the Year.

Beaty verbally committed to Iowa State in July. She reopened her recruitment in March after previously being committed to Clemson after Tigers coach Amanda Butler was fired. Numerous new scholarship offers followed, including Cal, Auburn, Colorado, West Virginia, TCU, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi State, Wisconsin, Michigan and Penn State.

More: How Reese Beaty led York Institute to OT win vs McMinn Central in TSSAA basketball tournament

More: Imari Berry decommits from Clemson women’s basketball after coach Amanda Butler fired

She averaged 17.4 points, 6.5 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 2.2 steals for York last season, leading the Dragonettes to their third consecutive TSSAA state tournament. Her two free throws with 20 seconds left secured York’s 66-63 overtime win over McMinn Central in a Class 2A girls quarterfinal. She finished with a game-high 33 points and six assists. 

Reach sports writer Tyler Palmateer at tpalmateer@tennessean.com and on the X platform, formerly Twitter, @tpalmateer83.

Joe Swanson, a resident of Perry, Iowa, is no longer working in the town he loves and where his kids go to school. That’s because the city’s largest employer, a Tyson Foods pork plant, recently shut down.

Swanson says when the company announced in March they were shuttering the plant, he couldn’t risk unemployment because of his health issues. So when he found a new job with health benefits, he says he took it and left Tyson around six weeks before it officially closed on June 28.

“None of us picked this, and I just want everybody to be OK. Because I know how hard this is going to be for a lot of people,” said Swanson, who worked at the factory for nearly 14 years.

Many of the 1,300 hundred other laid-off employees are now grappling with the same situation — living, but no longer working, in Perry. A new path forward may be somewhere else.

“You have the power to make sure that you find the right opportunity that’s going to benefit you and your family,” Swanson said.

But the reality in Perry is that the right opportunities left a long time ago. The meat processing plant is not modern enough for the company, and upgrades would simply cost too much. 

“Maybe we were hoping for a miracle at first, where we can just turn off the lights on June 28th and turn them back on with a new user. And that’s simply not the case,” said Rachel Wacker, executive director of the Greater Dallas County Development Alliance.

The Tyson plant employed about 25% of Perry’s working-age residents before it shuttered, according to city and county officials. Accounting for workers’ families and businesses directly related to the plant, about 60% of the town is affected by the closure.

Two hundred team members relocated to Tyson facilities in Iowa and outside the state, Tyson Foods told CBS News.

The plight of the so-called “one-factory” town is not new.

In the 1970s, Youngstown, Ohio, was a thriving steel city of 140,000 people. The mills closed, and now the population is less than half of what it used to be, according to U.S. Census data. Ohio was hit hard again in 2008, when a shipping hub in Wilmington closed, leaving 42% of the working age population without a job.

In Farmerville, Louisiana, a chicken plant that employed more than a third of the town shut down in 2009, the CBS News data team found.

Back in Perry, people like Nacho Calderon are learning from history. After being laid off at the Tyson plant, he hopes to become a garbage or concrete truck driver.

Driving garbage trucks in Perry requires a commercial drivers license. The local community college is giving trucking classes for free to give workers a shot at staying in town.

Calderon says he’s sad he lost his job, and also for his coworkers who may not have cars or much money to help them get back on their feet.

As Calderon is still looking for work, Swanson has this advice: “Take control.”

He found a job handling maintenance at an apartment complex out of town.

“[It’s] what I feel like is a great opportunity, and I want that for everyone,” Swanson said.

It’s a hopeful wish for friends who lost their jobs, but against all odds, refuse to quit on their city.

Seeping groundwater. Cracked and bowing walls. Outdated equipment and facilities never meant to be utilized for so long. Des Moines Area Community College Board of Trustees members saw these first-hand Monday while touring buildings on the Ankeny campus slated for possible renovation or demolition under the college’s new facilities master plan.

During its meeting, the board discussed two capital projects slated as priorities within the facilities master plan. The projects encompass programs in need of larger, more modern spaces.

DMACC President Rob Denson said in an interview that the college hasn’t focused on these buildings for renovations or demolition before now because there have been other needs across campus and a limited amount of money. The faculty and staff have done a lot to keep the buildings suitable for use up until now, he said.

“We want to get every ounce of life out of every facility we’ve got, and we pretty much don’t move on a new facility and tear something down until we’re at the end of life,” Denson said.

Dental programs to find new home

The community college’s dental assistant and hygiene programs were in danger of losing their accreditation last fall due to concerns with program facilities and other areas. The programs received full accreditation in February with the contingency of building a new, up-to-code space. That clinic has been included in the facilities master plan with an area on campus already picked out and the college moving ahead with finding a firm to act as construction manager and contractors.

DMACC Vice President of Operations Bill LaTour said in the meeting that the board should have the chance to approve a recommended construction manager at its October meeting, after which staff can get started on design, development and collecting all the necessary construction documentation. The plan’s timeline has construction starting in September 2025 and finishing in summer 2027, with an estimated total cost of $17 million.

Jeanie McCarville-Kerber, dean of Health & Public Services at DMACC, said the college will need to let the accreditor, the Commission on Dental Accreditation, know that the new facilities will be finished anywhere from six to nine months after the date stated in previous communication, but she hopes there won’t be any issues.

The new 24,000-square-foot clinic will take the place of tennis, basketball and sand volleyball courts located on the Ankeny campus. It has existing parking and better traffic flow for the patients who receive care in the program, Denson said.

As some of the equipment currently utilized by the dental programs is outdated or cannot be moved, such as sterilization equipment purchased to keep the current location in compliance, some items will need to be purchased for the new facility.

“Some of the curricular materials and things that we purchased just to keep this location running will come over with us,” McCarville-Kerber said.

The building currently housing the dental programs would not be demolished, Denson said, as it is used by other programs and is in “pretty good shape.”

A new building for diesel, building trades

Planning is set to begin on a new trades building as well, which would house the college’s diesel programs; fire science; heating, ventilation, air-conditioning (HVAC) training and building trades, among other areas of study. LaTour said the hope is to fast-track the process to construction, which would look similar to the dental building, in order to have them both going at the same time.

The project is estimated to cost $34 million and would be 55,000 square feet, replacing the current, 31,000 square-foot building.

Money for the projects could come from the college’s plant fund, but donations or other sources could contribute to the dental building, Denson said.

Board Chair Joe Pugel asked that the possibility of postponing the new diesel trades building be explored from a cost perspective, in order to see if it would save money in the long run to keep the current facilities working for one to two additional years before starting on a new building.

Jenny Foster, executive academic dean of building trades, transportation/engineering and manufacturing, said the diesel programs are “living on borrowed time” in their current home.

“Is the building functional? Yes. Can students take classes there? Yes,” Foster said. “But at any moment, something could happen, and then we’re in a lot of trouble.”

LaTour said in an interview the buildings proposed for demolition, built between 1969 and 1970, were not intended to last 50 years. During the tour of building 14, the oldest on campus, Foster and Joe Baxter, physical plant and construction services director, pointed out areas in the buildings where cracks had formed on the walls and where water would seep up from the ground, creating times where students and faculty would have to walk through water in the halls.

It lacks a sprinkler system, still houses the original electrical system and, despite repair efforts, still leaks heat in the winter, Baxter said. The things that could be repaired or replaced, like the roof and electrical system, would take anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. With certain problem areas, such as the outdated bathrooms, he said if you update one thing, you need to commit to updating all of it.

Programs housed in the building are also running out of room, with engines and equipment sitting out in the hallway due to lack of space.

In buildings 15-20, which make up a connected semi-circle of classrooms, offices and labs, programs have grown to take up empty rooms left behind by others that moved into new facilities. Baxter said they “truly were built as temporary buildings,” and have bowing walls, issues with standing water and a permanent blockage in one of the sewer lines.

With programs needing more space and buildings far past their prime, Baxter said they’re at a point where decisions need to be made on whether to fix what they can to keep the buildings alive a bit longer or do something more drastic.

“I think we’re kind of on the threshold,” Baxter said. “We can get by for another one to three years, and then at that point in time, three years out, then you’re replacing the roof. So we’re kind of at the end here of, ‘Okay, do we start investing money in this? Or do we start over?’”