House Committee Approves Homeschool Education “Freedom” Bill
The House Education Committee approved a bill (House File 88) to virtually eliminate oversight of home schooling and blur the lines between home school and private education. The bill’s floor manager is freshman Rep. Samantha Fett (R-Indianola), one of the founding Iowa members of Moms for Liberty.
What the bill does and the League’s reasons for opposing it:
- It removes requirements that families homeschooling their children provide proof of immunization and blood lead tests.
- This weakens public health strategies to combat pandemics and control spread of disease to those who cannot get vaccines.
- Lead exposure is a preventable cause intellectual disabilities and other serious health conditions, so early detection and mitigation is important. This would negate that work.
- Public health experts are already alarmed about dropping rates of vaccinations and lead testing, especially in a state like Iowa with known lead exposure risks. The US EPA notified 330,000 Iowa homeowners at the end of last year that they may be at risk of lead exposure because of lead service lines. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported 9,000 homeowners in Cedar Rapids received notice. Some communities have large swaths of their town at risk, including Vinson (66%) and Anamosa (half of the city).
- Chaney Yeast (Blank Children’s Hospital) told the Capitol Dispatch: “When we think about Iowa’s aging housing stock, and we know that there’s lead in our homes in our rural homes in Iowa and in our urban areas of Iowa, we know for children … that can impact their long-term ability to learn and be healthy.”
- Homeschooling families would no longer have to submit an “outline of course of study” for their children.
- These changes could lower educational standards and leave kids vulnerable to gaps in learning.
- With no oversight, there is no guarantee the parents are doing anything to education their children.
- This is already a very flexible requirement; it is an outline not a full syllabus or lesson plan.
- It is the only mechanism that allows the state to ensure a child is getting basic, grade appropriate instruction.
- It eliminates current limits in law that only four children who are not related to the homeschooling instructor receive private instruction.
- This may be the most dangerous provision of this bill.
- Without oversight, expanding the number of unrelated kids in a homeschool could blur the lines between homeschooling and unregulated private schooling.
- Melissa Peterson (ISEA lobbyist) told subcommittee members that this language was put in place through compromises made under former Gov. Terry Branstad’s administration as a way to provide families less monitoring and state oversight while ensuring that there were still sufficient safety and educational professional standards being taken into account.
- This was considered a fair compromise to balance parent’s rights and state oversight.
- Children will be at risk of sexual abuse and exploitation, allowing a gap in private school instruction that allows unregulated, unlicensed instructors that have not undergone background checks to instruct larger groups of children who are not their own.
- It doubles the current tuition and textbook credit from 25% to 50% for the first $2,000 spent.
- This has not gotten much pushback, but there is a general concern that the state keeps giving financial incentives for non-public school options, which erodes resources and confidence in public schools.
- Mandates that Iowa colleges and universities treat homeschool diplomas as equal to high school diplomas for admissions.
- Homeschooling families always point statistics that demonstrate their students do better than public school students on test scores and admissions, so why is this necessary?
- Advocates against the bill have said there is political motivation for this change, as it feeds into the narrative that “woke” schools are not accepting kids who were educated outside the public school system. There is, of course, no evidence to this assertion.
- Prohibits the inclusion of gender-neutral language in grades 9-12 world language classes that use a grammatical gender system.
- This is purely political and yet another effort to put a target on transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming students. This continues to marginalize and put these students in danger, for a made-up reason.
- World language teachers teach the language and they don’t make up gender neutral terms that do not already exist in that language.
- Keenan Crow (One Iowa) said the bill is “kind of baffling in its current draft format, because it seems to imply that teachers are … being required to make up words — like new words that don’t exist and aren’t in current usage already.”
If you would like to take action on this issue, contact your State Representative and ask that they oppose House File 88. Note that the following legislators are sponsors of the bill: Reps. Brooke Boden (R-Warren), Mark Cisneros (R-Muscatine), Jon Dunwell (R-Jasper), Rep. Samantha Fett (R-Warren), Cindy Golding (R-Linn), Bill Gustoff (R-Polk), Robert Henderson (R-Woodbury), Steve Holt (R-Crawford), and Craig Johnson (R-Buchanan).
There is a Senate Companion – Senate Fine 204 sponsored by Sens. Doug Campbell (R-Cerro Gordo), Dennis Guth (R-Cerro Gordo), Mike Pike (R-Polk) and Sandy Salmon (R-Bremer). It has been assigned to the Senate Education Committee, but not assigned a subcommittee. You can connect with your Senator about that bill too.