Dealing with spanish tilde in Golang

So I'm trying to enter this string into a mysql database using a sql driver. I get this error -

Do?a Merced Elementary
panic: Error 1366: Incorrect string value: '\x96a Mer...' for column 'name' at row 1

I thought about excluding this entry, but haven't been able to do so. I've tried -

if !strings.ContainsAny(splitStr[2], "U+0303") {
if !strings.ContainsAny(splitStr[2], '\x96') {

but that has not worked.

It would be better to have mysql deal with this, but I'm not sure how.

Any suggestions?

EDIT

This is how I connect to my db

db, err := sql.Open("mysql", "psanker:123@/education_data")
err = db.Ping()

db.SetMaxOpenConns(0)
check(err)
if err != nil {
	fmt.Println("Failed to prepare connection to database")
	log.Fatal("Error:", err.Error())
}

This is where my issue comes

districtResult, err := db.Exec("INSERT INTO districts(name) VALUES(?)", strings.TrimSpace(splitStr[2]))
check(err)

Output of SHOW CREATE TABLE

---------------------------------+
| Table     | Create Table                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
+-----------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| districts | CREATE TABLE `districts` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=35 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci |

Running on an Apple? I assume that should have said Doña Merced Elementary? Yet, to get ñ from x96, you must have started with text in the "MacRoman" encoding.

The simple solution might be to do SET NAMES macroman right after connecting to MySQL.

Please change collation to utf8_general_ci. it should work