The View From Here

Week five in the Senate included our first day of floor debate. We passed some uncontroversial bills and K-12 school funding.

SF 152 deals with making it easier for members of the military to get their commercial driver’s license. Driving experience in the military would replace the driving portion of the requirements for an Iowa license.

SF 146 prohibits the creation of bots to purchase tickets online. Sometimes people are unable to purchase tickets to an event because bots have bought and horded an abundance of the tickets. They then attempt to resell the tickets at an increased price. The passage of SF 146 should give Iowans better access to high-demand tickets and keep competition for them fair.

The biggest bill we passed this week was SF 167, setting the increase in school funding at $235 million. That means schools will receive $7,983 per student from the state. If you add in the funding from local and federal sources the total cost to taxpayers will amount to an average of $18,722 per student. Iowa’s total amount of state aid is $4.2 billion out of our $9 billion budget.

I have had some complaints that education savings accounts takes money away from public education. Actually, it just takes the state dollars that are assigned to each student and has them follow the student. The public school that lost the student still gets $1,200 for the student that doesn’t attend their school.

The bill that I was most interested in this week was SF 138. This bill would cause standards to be established for an elective course in grades nine through twelve covering Hebrew scriptures and the Bible. The purpose of the course is to show their influence on our culture, art, mores and public policy. It’s hard to understand the early history of our country if we don’t understand how it was influenced by the Bible.

Professor William Jeynes of California State University testified that similar bills have been passed in 14 states. Every school that has included this elective has seen an increase in grade point averages. Professor Jeynes indicated that the Bible has outsold every other book in the world for a long time. It provides the background for understanding many things in our government, literature and art. He mentioned that Shakespeare quoted the Bible over 1300 times. A study of the writings we have of the United States Founding Fathers shows that the Bible was quoted far more than any other source.

It is my contention that many of the social ills we encounter today can be traced back to the expulsion of prayer and the Bible from our schools in 1962 and '63. SF 138 is an attempt to reverse that trend.

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence said it this way:

“The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”

More recently, President Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

Due to the threat of inclement weather, the forum in Webster City scheduled for Feb. 15 has been rescheduled to March 1. It will be held at the Central College Campus at 11:00.