Iowa allows for students to receive religious instruction

Iowa will allow students to receive religious instruction during the school day by passing a new law that one nonprofit organization characterizes as a victory for parental rights. 

Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed House File 870 into law Friday. The measure allows parents to send their children to attend “a course in private religious instruction that is provided by a private organization” during the school day. The parents must notify the school that their children attend and that such a course does not “require the child to be absent from school for more than five hours per week.” 

Reynolds’ approval of the measure follows its passage in a nearly unanimous vote of 96-2 in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a 47-0 vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. Only two Democrats in the Iowa House voted against the legislation, while no members of the Iowa Senate opposed it. 

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Additional provisions of the legislation require the religious organization that offers such courses to maintain attendance records and assume liability for anything that happens to the children while they attend the classes.

The measure clarifies that parents are responsible for transporting their children to and from the religious instruction courses. It prohibits the use of public funds by school districts to send children to such courses and the use of public school facilities for religious instruction. 

The legislation includes a right of action for parents to take against any school district or school that does not allow their children to attend religious instruction during the school day and amends the definition of “chronically absent” to exclude absence from school to participate in religious instruction. 

“Parents have the right and responsibility to guide the upbringing and education of their children. The government should not stop families from raising their children in their family’s faith,” said Greg Chafuen, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal nonprofit organization, in a statement. 

Chafuen said the law is consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1952 case Zorach v. Clauson, which described religious released time as in line with “the best of our traditions” and determined that such programs did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Other states with laws allowing for religious released time include Ohio and Oklahoma. 

Ohio’s religious released time law drew scrutiny from the separation of church and state advocacy group Freedom From Religion Foundation.

“If parents want their children to learn about the [B]ible, there are some many ways to do it without cutting into valuable school hours,” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor in a statement released following the law’s passage in 2023.

FFRF claimed it “received several complaints from families in different school districts alleging that non-attending students were given busy work, or no work at all, as a consequence of staying behind during released time classes.” The atheist group said it “received at least one complaint reporting that a school assigned non-attending students additional homework seemingly as punishment for refusing to participate in a released time program.”