Blogs

As Iowans headed to the polls this week to elect local school board members, they faced an issue beyond the usual ones of taxes, student achievement, teacher pay, curriculum and enrollment.

This year, school board and administrators’ performance and trustworthiness were front and center in some school districts. And on that, for voters, it is what they do not know that might hurt them.

Case in point: The state’s largest district, the Des Moines Public Schools, was thrust into the national spotlight two months ago when federal agents arrested Superintendent Ian Roberts for being in the United States without legal permission.

Only then, and only by the belated work of journalists, did the public learn that he had fictitious entries on his resume and that the district had withheld facts and information about him.



Not surprisingly these days, free speech on college campuses is back in the headlines.

That makes it worthwhile to highlight the seven-page policy the Iowa Board of Regents wrote to proclaim how it values and protects freedom of expression at the three state universities.

Before getting to that, it is important to note the regents did not start with blank slate when they crafted their policy.

First, they and their policy must comply with the First Amendment, which became part of the Constitution when the lands of Iowa still belonged to France. Second, any sidestepping of the First Amendment could prove expensive for government administrators who discriminate among speakers based on the content of their speech.



The nation’s founders got right to the point when they laid out how to treat the First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, the press and the rights of people to assemble and to petition the government. They used only 45 words, without asterisks.

Their simple words should lead to simple conclusions. Yet, recent Iowa cases illustrate why people in general, and educators specifically, are perplexed about what is protected and what is not.

I spoke to two groups in recent weeks, and people at both gatherings wanted to know about the work of the organization I lead, the Iowa Freedom of Information Council.

If I had known then what I know now, I could have been more effective. I could have advised them to wait a week or two and watch the news surrounding the arrest of Ian Roberts, superintendent of the Des Moines Public Schools since 2023, for an illustration of how secrecy breeds distrust.

Last Friday, federal immigration officers took the 54-year-old administrator into custody, ostensibly to enforce a final removal order a federal immigration judge issued in May 2024. Roberts’ biographical information on his employer’s website says he grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of immigrants from the South American nation of Guyana. As of Monday, authorities were holding Roberts in a Sioux City jail pending deportation.

During decades as a journalist, I had countless conversations with interesting people — future presidents, wannabe leaders, governors, business executives, religious thinkers, crooks, and ordinary folks who made a difference in their own corner of the world.

With soldiers headed to our cities and chaos in our nation, now is a good time to remember one difference-maker. My memories of Wade Meloan remain sharp almost 50 years after I met the retired druggist in the Mississippi River town of Oquawka, Ill., just upriver from Burlington.

On my first trip to Oquawka, I quickly learned it was no secret Wade had a much younger girlfriend. She was 30. Wade was 65. Her name was Norma Jean.

Government regulates business to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. That is the theory behind enacting and enforcing regulations, and it is a commendable mission.

But, too often the regulators seemingly do not want the people they are supposed to protect to know which businesses fall short of the minimum expectations spelled out by these regulations. The regulators seemingly do not want people to know when and how businesses fail to meet the baseline standards.

Each time that happens, the mission of government regulations fails the public.

Iowa Capital Dispatch and its investigative reporter Clark Kauffman recently shined their spotlight on what appears as another lapse by regulators to remember they work on behalf of the people of Iowa and that disclosures of their findings serve the public interest.

Lyman Dillon resides in the dusty recesses of Iowa history for his role in 1839 in one of Iowa’s earliest infrastructure projects.

Dillon’s work also figures indirectly in a modern-day lesson on how NOT to run a government.

This how-not-to-do-it tutorial occurred last week during a Jones County Board of Supervisors meeting. A similar lesson is playing out in Storm Lake to a growing audience of discontented residents there.