State district court judges in Des Moines and Iowa City have declined to halt enforcement of a state requirement for schools to return students to classrooms. The judges Tuesday rejected arguments from two school districts and a teachers union that local officials could ignore the governor and educate students at home due to surging numbers of coronavirus cases in Iowa. In two separate rulings, a Polk County judge said Iowa law clearly establishes state control over the time schools must hold in-person instruction, and a Johnson County judge concluded the governor has broad emergency powers under the Iowa Constitution that local school boards do not have.
Some 4,000 customers in Johnson County were without power Tuesday morning and early afternoon…impacting thousands of students on their first day of school. Iowa City school officials say online learning was impacted at seven of its schools. Students at Clear Creek Amana Community School District were also impacted…students were dismissed early because of the outage.
State representative Ashley Hinson of Marion is the Republican candidate for first district congress…she told me recently that politicians in Washington, D.C., can learn a few things from how things are done in Iowa. You can hear the full interview by going to the podcast section of kxel-dot-com.
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Ashley Hinson serves the Marion area in the state legislature and is running to be Iowa’s first district representative to Congress…she told me recently why she’s running. Hear the full interview as a podcast at kxel-dot-com.
The City of Cedar Rapids is warning residents that someone claiming to be an employee of the City Assessor’s Office is coming to homes and asking for an inspection. The office said this person does not work for the department and anyone who does has a city issued identification badge. City officials say the person is asking to inspect their home to determine if the property is vacant due to the derecho in August. Anyone who comes in contact with this person is asked to call police.
Monticello schools shifted to online instruction Tuesday and Wednesday as a result of four positive cases for COVID-19 reported since Friday afternoon. The school district has had to quarantine approximately 140 students in K-12. Several parents have informed the district of their child showing symptoms of the virus and have been tested. The district is waiting on the results. All sports competitions are cancelled for the week. The district asks parents to monitor their child closely for symptoms and keep them home from school if they are sick.
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A state watchdog says an Iowa teenager who died of starvation in 2017 could have been saved if social workers and contractors had been more thorough when they investigated her living conditions. The Iowa state ombudsman released its findings Tuesday in the case of 16-year-old Sabrina Ray. She weighed just 56 pounds and was severely malnourished when authorities found her body at her home in Perry in May 2017. Ray’s adoptive parents, who parented foster kids, adopted four children and ran an in-home daycare, eventually received lengthy prison sentences for kidnapping and child endangerment.
As a Marion-based state representative, Ashley Hinson says her record in Des Moines shows what she would do if elected as Iowa’s first district member of Congress in November. The full conversation with Republican Ashley Hinson is a podcast at kxel-dot-com.
A private eastern Iowa college has announced it will remove a statue of the school’s founder after officials there learned new details about his slave-owning past. Loras College will remove the statue of Bishop Mathias Loras from the Dubuque campus and place it in storage. Loras, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Dubuque, established the seminary in 1839 that would eventually become Loras College. Loras College President Jim Collins says school officials recently learned from a researcher that Loras bought an enslaved woman named Marie Louise while he was living in Mobile, Alabama, in 1836 and kept her as his slave until 1852, and hired her out to collect proceeds for various Iowa ministries.
