Playground Battleground
This is national school choice week, something we’ve talked about here on KXEL in other contexts. And the focus has certainly been on how to educate our young people here in Iowa.
It started when Gov. Kim Reynolds, during an interview with a Des Moines television station, addressed the concept of parental involvement in schools by reading rather graphic material from a book included in school libraries that describes gay sexual acts. In essence, she was saying, this is in schools…and parents should have a say on whether their children should have that available to them.
Then came a victory for the state at the Eight Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals yesterday, overturning a district judge’s injunction that barred the state from imposing a law banning schools from imposing mask mandates. That case was brought by parents of children who were at enhanced risk of harm due to their physical condition. The lower court judge said they had a valid argument and threw out the entire law; the more rational appeals court agreed that those children in those schools had need for relief, but that it should be on an only-as-needed basis, and not some sweeping removal of a valid state law.
To me, that’s nothing more than certain schools that declare themselves to be peanut-free zones because a student might suffer an extreme allergic reaction to being exposed to nuts. Those regulations properly benefit certain students…but not by having all school buildings and all students in a district subjected to what for them is an overly-broad rule.
Taken together, those are both arguments that school districts should not overly intrude into the rights of individuals, or go against the wishes of parents—without whom, after all, there would be no students.
These issues…how to raise the next generation of society…are too important to fall under one-size-fits-all rules, whether it has to do with content or safety.
