DES MOINES, Iowa — An Iowa senator said it took her five years, but she is now one signature away from eliminating voluntary diversity plans in Iowa schools.
"I think it was COVID; I think it was the inability to access in-person learning; I think it was the of the revelation of the documents that Local 5 referenced, the fact that a student was raped and wasn't allowed to leave,” Sen. Amy Sinclair, R-Allerton, said. “I think it was a perfect storm of everybody realizing, suddenly, that the decisions were not being made in the best interest of individual students."
The bill, which passed the Iowa Legislature Tuesday, would ban voluntary diversity plans.
"I think it's a great bill for parent choice, for student choice and allows parents to decide what school is best for their kids,” Rep. Dustin Hite, R-New Sharon, said.
Only five districts have them in Iowa: Davenport, Des Moines, Waterloo, West Liberty and Postville.
Right now, these schools can to deny kids transfer requests if it will throw off the ratio of kids who do and don't qualify for free and reduced lunch at a specific school.
"We have roughly 60,000 students in the state of Iowa who are denied the opportunity to open enroll in the same way that the other 420,000 kids in Iowa can,” Sinclair said.
This bill ties closely with an investigation Local 5’s Rachel Droze has been conducting into why the Des Moines Public School system denied students from transferring out of the district.
Reasons for some late application denials were published online and included student names and personal information.
One student not allowed to leave the district was an alleged rape victim being followed around school by her alleged attacker.
Local 5 spoke with a few Des Moines parents who were told their students couldn't transfer because of the district's diversity plan.
One mother, who spent years fighting Des Moines to let her daughter leave, finally got approved to transfer this year. But, the mother said she’ll still be relieved if this bill gets signed that no one else will have to go through what she did.
There are some that feel this bill is a path to segregation.
Civil rights groups have said without voluntary diversity plans in bigger districts, districts could wind up having higher-income kids attend certain schools in one area of a district and lower-income kids attend schools in other areas.
This bill now heads to Gov. Kim Reynolds’ desk.
Reynolds’ said she supports the legislation when Local 5’s Rachel Droze asked her about it Wednesday.