Ken Rozenboom. (photo from IA Legislature.)
A key senator says priority issues are included in an education bill House Republicans just expanded to include things like alternative pathways for teacher licensing and defining what would be considered age appropriate school library books.
Senate Education Committee chairman Ken Rozenboom, a Republican from Oskaloosa, says rolling those other bills into one 40-page package is how the legislative process often works.
Rozenboom’s optimistic House and Senate Republicans will settle on a final package soon. “Bottom line is we need to do something, I believe, for our parents with some of the battles we’re fighting around the state in different places,” Rozenboom told Radio Iowa.
The bill in its initial form came from Governor Kim Reynolds and GOP Senators approved the bill two weeks ago after some tweaks. Rozenboom will be meeting with the governor’s staff to review the House changes and additions. Representative Skyler Wheeler of Hull is chairman of the House Education Committee. Wheeler said Republicans intend to help parents assert their rights in schools.
“Parents send their children to school to learn reading, math and writing,” Wheeler said Tuesday during House debate. “When they do this they are putting trust into the school and the staff there. Unfortunately some of that trust has been broken by schools pushing wokeism.”
The bill would require an administrator to notify a parent if a student asks to be known by a different name or pronoun at school. It also forbids instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through sixth grade classrooms.
Democrats say the bill has a number of flaws. Representative Sharon Steckman, a Democrat from Mason City, is a retired teacher. Steckman said letting people become teachers after taking an online course should not be included in the package.
“I believe there seems to be a trend here. We need a workforce, so let’s lower all the requirements,” Steckman said during House debate. “…I’d like to know what your vision for education is. Is it excellence, which we used to have, or is it mediocrity?”
Representative Sue Cahill, a Democrat from Marshalltown, objects to changes in the Board of Educational Examiners, so there’d be an equal number of parents and licensed educators on the board. “If you had plumbing problems in your house and the plumbing licensing board was called in to review the work and the issue and the license of the professional, this would be like having five plumbers, one plumbing store owner and five people who had flushed their toilet that morning decide on the quality of the work,” Cahill said during yesterday’s debate.
The board is currently made up of nine teachers or school administrators and just two public members along with someone from the Iowa Department of Education.