As families prepare for the upcoming school year, new education legislation in Iowa passed this summer allows teachers to enforce disciplinary action in response to behavioral problems.
On June 1, Gov. Kim Reynolds, R-Iowa, signed Senate File 2428 into law. The new bill is “an Act relating to education,” that allows for “the discipline of students enrolled in school districts, charter schools, and innovation zone schools who cause violent or nonviolent disruptions.”
Iowa State Rep. Skylar Wheeler, the Chair of the Education Committee, served as the floor manager for the act in the Iowa House of Representatives. Wheeler said headway for the new legislation started in 2023, after a “significant amount of teachers and paraprofessionals” from Iowa’s metro areas came to the state Capitol to “speak about the issue of classroom behavior.”
“I was hearing horrifying stories from people that had taught in a number of different schools who felt like their voices weren’t being heard,” Wheeler told The Federalist.
Wheeler mentioned one teacher at an inner city school in Des Moines who testified to fights in the hall every day and yet the school reported having zero behavioral problems or violent incidents.
This allegation of behavioral incidents being swept under the rug is backed up by several other stories reported in the local news.
One teacher, Tim Rogers, left the Iowa City Community School District because of violence from students and the district’s lack of action on his behalf.
“I know when I was done at four years there, I was wanting to get out of teaching because of my experiences there and how I was treated by some of the students and what the administration did not do to back me up,” Rogers told the school board.
In hearings during the spring, veteran teachers testified to being “kicked, punched, bitten,” and having their “lives threatened” by violent children.
Iowa City parent Angela Stobel said her first grade son witnessed another student attempt to strangle a teacher. The school board did not inform parents about the occurrence until the end of the year.
“It is not okay for me not to know that happened to my son and to be able to talk to him about it,” Stobel said. “So whatever policy stopped me from knowing, just to even discuss with him what had happened that day and what he had seen … I think that needs to change.”
Since the 2021-2022 school year, student violence in Iowa public school classrooms has
led to 1,714 injuries, 1,138 incidents of property damage, and 1,967 assaults.
The Educators School Safety Network revealed in its 2023-2024 report on violent threats that “the number of violent incidents has increased more than 300% from the first year of data collection in 2016-2017 to the most recent school year 2023-2024.” In that same period, the data shows an 83 percent increase in actual incidents of violence.
“We’re not going to be weak, we’re not going to be soft, we’re not going to sweep things under the rug,” Wheeler told The Federalist.
Wheeler says the new legislation is meant to mitigate violent behaviors by empowering teachers to meet with their superintendents, parents, or schoolboards about these issues and give them protection in law so they can speak up without retaliation.
“I think we have a lot of schools where this wasn’t a problem,” Wheeler told The Federalist. “But clearly we were having issues and weren’t getting solutions and we had teachers that didn’t feel safe to teach in specific schools so we were losing teachers.”
Erika Donalds, chair of Education Opportunity at America First Policy Institute, said she was “encouraged” to see Iowa pass the new law.
“The old, Obama-era policies led to chaos in the classroom and prevented student learning. Civil rights enforcement was weaponized to strip teachers of control in their classrooms. Iowa’s new law gives teachers their power back, they can again decide whether the disruptive student can come back to class, or if they need to be removed,” Donalds said in a statement to The Federalist.
Iowa is not unique in dealing with behavioral problems but is one of the more recent states seeking to reverse the damage caused in their school systems by DEI policies.
Teaching children that their actions have consequences might sound like a common-sense school disciplinary policy, but up until last year many schools across America had stopped enforcing the rules for fear of having federal funding removed.
The “Dear Colleague” letter put forth by the Obama Administration in 2014 made it very challenging for schools to discipline students because there was such an emphasis on racial disparities.
In April 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order reinstating “commonsense non-discriminatory education policies” to ensure that “school discipline policies are based on objective behavior, not DEI.”
Jennifer Weber, education policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute, shared the devastating effects and challenges she witnessed while working as a behavioral analyst in schools.
“I saw all the red tape that was happening and a lot of it stemmed from the Obama administration. Schools would spend a lot of federal grant money on these alternative discipline approaches,” Weber told The Federalist.
New York City alone spent $97 million across 10 years investing in alternative approaches to behavior-based discipline, but Weber said it was not effective.
“Instead of providing students with consequences for misbehavior, it put students into a so-called ‘restorative mediation circle’ to talk about their feelings,” Weber told The Federalist.
But Weber said the restorative circle wasn’t a consequence and was often seen as a reward because as a result of their poor behavior, students received one-on-one attention or got out of time in the classroom.
“Behavior is behavior. By trying to make it such a racial issue, it resulted in a lot of schools changing policies to cover up incidents and not suspend kids for fear of facing consequences from the state,” Weber told The Federalist. “Schools were afraid of losing funding and getting in trouble if their data showed that black kids were getting suspended more than white kids.”
In one school Weber consulted with, she witnessed a child throw a Chromebook at a teacher’s head. The teacher had to leave by ambulance and be taken to the emergency room.
“Ten minutes later the kid is back in the classroom and faced little to no consequences,” Weber said. “Think about what that’s teaching the kid and the message it’s sending to other kids. ‘I can hurt my teacher and get away with it.'”
Weber said that in terms of education and behavioral policy, there’s nothing more equitable than setting expectations for students in the school.
“When you actually hold them to a boundary or expectation, that’s how you show them that they belong and that you care,” Weber told The Federalist. “It’s definitely not a one size fits all but I think its got to match and look at why the behavior is happening.”
Weber mentioned working with a troubled black student who was frequently sent in to the principal’s office for behavioral issues. Instead of using the “restorative circle” method, Weber and other teachers applied a traditional behavior-based disciplinary approach.
“We were able to teach him the rules, expectations, and consequences and he was the first one of his whole family to graduate high school,” Weber said. “He had a complete turnaround. As soon as he realized that we actually cared about him and that’s why we were enforcing the rules, he became a role model.”
Rep. Wheeler aims for the new legislation to accomplish just that, while also making provisions for students with special needs who may need a more creative solution to behavioral issues.
“Instead of talking about this DEI crap we should be asking how do I control my classroom? How do I get these kids to understand that I’m the authority figure and that they need to be respectful to myself and to their peers?” Wheeler told The Federalist.
Wheeler said the Iowa legislators pulled some examples from other state legislation like Alabama and Louisiana, but primarily worked with local stakeholders.
“The state doesn’t need to do everything in this case,” Wheeler told The Federalist. “We just need to empower the law as much as we can to empower teachers with the ability to speak up and have protection in law so they can speak up without retaliation.”
