Letters to the Editor: Removal of the term climate change from Iowa Science Standards

We climate science experts at the University of Iowa strongly advise Iowa’s Department of Education to maintain its existing educational standards on climate change. Climate change and human influence on the climate system are scientific facts. The teaching of verifiable science is essential to prepare graduating Iowa high-schoolers for higher education and adult responsibilities; science teaches critical thinking skills useful across the entire life span. If we take the facts out of science education, we impede future Iowans’ thinking skills.

The Department of Education’s proposed changes, out for public comment now, are anachronistic and misleading. They should be tossed out. A standards review committee, with extensive participation from practicing K-12 educators, submitted final wording to the Department of Education in 2024 that retained accurate language regarding climate change. Their wording should be adopted.

If Iowa is to remain competitive in business and agriculture, the effects of human actions on climate change must be studied and understood. For Iowans to remain free of crippling extreme weather and the poor health caused by climate change, we must study human actions on the climate.

The proven fact of climate change must remain in Iowa’s K-12 science standards.

The views expressed herein are not the views of the university or any college or other unit thereof. Rather, they are the personal views of the undersigned.

Charles Stanier, Greg Carmichael, David Cwiertny, Marc Linderman, Matt McGill, David Murhammer, Ted Neal, Jerald Schnoor, Peter Thorne and Jing Zeng, Iowa City

Call to reform nursing home care in Iowa

Early last legislative session, Senate Democrats Claire Celsi and Pam Jochum held a Capitol press conference concerning the Senate Democrats’ request that the Oversight Committee, led by Republican Amy Sinclair, schedule meetings to discuss nursing home care in Iowa. In particular, they were concerned with and alarmed by the number and frequency of documented tragic instances of abuse, harms and deaths occurring in Iowa’s over 400 mostly for-profit nursing homes funded by billions of taxpayer dollars. 

Part of this concern related to reports showing that the Department of Inspections & Appeals & Licensing was failing in its critical oversight responsibilities. Additional information revealed that nursing home staffing in Iowa was among the worst in the nation. This Senate Democrats’ request for nothing more than the opportunity to meet and discuss how to protect and better care for some of Iowa’s most vulnerable citizens was immediately rejected by Senator Sinclair, with Gov. Reynolds echoing the Republican refusal to even meet.

The very first day of this session, Iowa Public Radio hosted a legislative preview broadcast with Senate President Sinclair and House Speaker Pro Tempore John Wills.  I posed the following written question to them that was asked on air by their IPR interviewer: “Last session, you refused to even hold oversight discussions regarding poor nursing home care in Iowa, and lack of DIAL oversight. Will you refuse again this year?” Needless to say, their chorus of refusal was unequivocal, immediate and accompanied by fabricated claims of no responsibility for such oversight, along with other absurdities. Senator Sinclair even stated, “Sure, bad things are going to happen.” Since when did protecting the health, safety, welfare and rights of vulnerable Iowans not become the highest priority of every elected official?

It would not be unreasonable to conclude that there is a connection between this irrational, thoughtless, immoral and harmful disregard and the pay-to-play politics of nursing home care in our state. Iowans might also reasonably conclude that this legislative session will offer more of the same Republican neglect. 

At the very least, the minority Democrats should reintroduce all of the bills offered last session, those that Republicans wouldn’t and didn’t give the time of day to. Just some of these include the establishment of a Long-Term Care Facility Safety Council, the prohibition of mandatory arbitration clauses in admissions contracts, increased penalties for certain safety violations, prohibiting interference by legislators in DIAL’s oversight, additional DIAL surveyors with accompanying budgetary allowance, expansion of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman’s Office, alternatives to institutional care, adult day care provider enhancements, dementia care specialists, direct care worker wage/other enhancements, and an increase in the personal needs allowance. Without misleading, false, incomprehensible excuses, Republicans should at least be required to answer why they won’t even schedule a discussion of the shameful, serious problems everyone knows plague residents.

This session, it is important to add enhanced protections for Iowans, such as disallowing taxpayer funding (over $2 million annually) of the Iowa Health Care Association, the membership association representing for-profit nursing homes, whose CEO in 2022 collected salary and benefits exceeding $788,000. Given the state’s approved $85 million sale of 29 of Iowa’s facilities to a poor performing profit-driven private equity group, it would seem reasonable to establish standards and transparency for any such future transactions when Iowan’ lives, like here, are at stake. And, with Gov. Reynolds’ and Attorney General Bird’s untoward public efforts to eliminate the Biden Administration’s minimum staffing standards rule (predicated upon the industry’s scare tactics, Iowa’s elected officials should prevent some of the 13,000 predicted annual deaths resulting from the rule’s elimination and pass decade’s long-overdue, critically necessary, staffing standards of our own. 

Here's the best question to ask Iowans about these, and other nursing home care measures: “When I grow old and need care, I want to...”

Dean Lerner, Des Moines

Trump knows best

President Trump has unilaterally decided for 340 million Americans that we no longer need to be a part of the World Health Organization. Listen, he knows more about science than all the millions of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, biomedical researchers and public health workers put together.

Besides, he is the only person whose health needs to be protected in America, and his immunity against criminal prosecution probably extends to immunity against viruses.

The thing that people should understand is that even if WHO ended smallpox and polio, what young people have even heard of those things before?

Trump got us out of that useless organization before it could waste time, money and effort on curbing Covid-19 variants, bird flu, and monkeypox. Who needs protection against that diddly stuff anyway? It’s Democrats who are the real menace to society.

Even if germs climb over border walls much more easily than Mexicans, we absolutely must use our limited funds to stop those wetbacks first and foremost. 

Who cares if we no longer have access to worldwide data to help us develop vaccines. All we need is to go to church and remember that Jesus is our vaccine.

Kimball Shinkoskey, Woods Cross, Utah