Members of a subcommittee advanced an education bill Monday that supporters said would help parents homeschooling children, but that others said would remove important government oversight of children outside of traditional K-12 school settings.

The legislation, House File 88, includes multiple components related to home schools:

It removes of requirements in state code that require families homeschooling their children provide proof of immunization and blood lead tests.

Homeschooling families would no longer have to submit an “outline of course of study” for their children.

It eliminates current limits in law that only four children who are not related to the homeschooling instructor receive private instruction.

It doubles the current tuition and textbook credit from 25% to 50% for the first $2,000 spent.

Education advocates said the language removing certain legal requirements could put children at risk. Melissa Peterson with the Iowa State Education Association said the current limit on unrelated children receiving unregulated homeschool instruction was put in place through compromises made under former Gov. Terry Branstad’s administration as a way to provide families less monitoring and state oversight while ensuring that there were still sufficient safety and educational professional standards being taken into account.

“One of the reasons why in a compromise achieved in 2013 … is because there was going to be a limitation on how many students you could (teach), and because those students needed to be related, so that we would not have the same concerns about needing a background check, about making sure that students were not exploited or taking advantage of,” Peterson said.

Chaney Yeast with Blank Childrens Hospital said tests on children’s exposure to lead is critical to ensuring they are safe and able to develop in a healthy environment.

“When we think about Iowa’s aging housing stock, and we know that there’s lead in our homes in our rural homes in Iowa and in our urban areas of Iowa, we know for children … that can impact their long-term ability to learn and be healthy,” Yeast said.

Lauren Gideon, a parent who homeschools her seven children and works for Classical Conversations, a homeschool instruction company, said the bill retains parents’ right to have the “primary responsibility” for their children, which includes oversight of their health decisions and allowing them to receive instruction from another parent choosing to pursue private instruction.

“Parents have that jurisdiction, and we have things like due process and innocence until proven guilty to protect them and they belong on that jurisdiction until evidence is provided that they no longer have the ability to exercise their duty as parents,” Gideon said.

Gender-neutral language

The measure also includes a provision discussed as a bill in 2024 that would prohibit the inclusion of gender-neutral language in grades 9-12 world language classes for languages that use a grammatical gender system, like Spanish.

Keenan Crow with One Iowa said there is not currently a problem at Iowa schools’ language classes teaching new, gender-neutral words in languages with grammatical gender systems.

“It’s kind of baffling in its current draft format, because it seems to imply that teachers are … being required to make up words — like new words that don’t exist and aren’t in current usage already,” Crow said. “I think that’s obviously incorrect.”

But Rep. Bill Gustoff, R-Des Moines, who helped author the legislation, said he has received reports from public school world language teachers that said their colleagues have discussed allowing for gender-neutral options for gendered words.

The legislation advanced out of subcommittee with Rep. Heather Matson, D-Ankeny, voting against it. The measure will next be available for consideration by the House Education Committee.