JEFFERSON, Iowa — The Democrat and Republican candidates for the district 47 seat in the Iowa House of Representatives met in a forum here Thursday night, exchanging views with decorous civility that was a model of enlightened self-government.
The hourlong Q&A session made for a sober and serious exercise, punctuated by only a few moments of levity, as when the moderator from the Jefferson Rotary Club, veteran newsman Rick Morain of Jefferson, was moved to intervene and gently remonstrate with his wife before she fell to badgering one of the candidates over the matter of private-school vouchers.
Of the half-dozen questions posed by the audience of about 25, the issue of school vouchers set in highest relief the differences between the candidates, with Republican Carter Nordman saying he supported the governor’s voucher program and would have voted for it last May and Democrat Gary Overla saying he “vehemently opposed” the governor’s signature legislation.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ private school scholarship program, Senate File 2369, would have diverted $55 million in public-school funding into the creation of a state-run scholarship fund that Iowa families — with incomes as high as $111,000 for a family of four, which is 400% of the federal poverty level — could have used to attend private or parochial schools or to home school.
The measure passed in the Iowa Senate in March 2022 but never came to a vote in the House because Republicans, despite their holding a 60-40 majority in the House, failed to whip up enough support to pass the bill. Rural Republican lawmakers in particular expressed concern the bill would hurt their school districts, especially in the 42 counties that lack private schools, such as Greene and Guthrie counties in district 47.
Some 240 of Iowa’s 327 school districts do not contain a single private or parochial school.
Reynolds’ displeasure at her voucher plan’s failure was made manifest in June, when she endorsed several primary-election challengers to Republican incumbents in the Iowa House, including two-term incumbent Rep. Dustin Hite of New Sharon, who chaired the House Education Committee and lost his primary.
Nordman, a 2021 graduate of the University of Northern Iowa who served as vice chair of Iowa House Ways and Means Committee during his first term, avoided all such primary-election anxieties by enthusiastically supporting the governor’s private-school vouchers.
“I was in favor of the voucher program that the governor laid out last session,” Nordman said at the Jefferson forum. “It never came to a vote on the House floor, but I would have supported it.” He said the bill would have affected at most about 10,000 students out of Iowa’s total public-school student population of 500,000.
Nordman also noted the “extremely small amount of money allocated towards” the voucher program as a fraction of the total state budget and even as a portion of the total appropriation for education. “It’s a small program,” he said. “Essentially, it’s a pilot program.”
Whether large or small, vouchers are opposed on principle by Overla, who did his student teaching at Dowling Catholic High School in Des Moines and has taught social studies at Perry High School for 23 years.
“I’m opposed to the voucher program,” he said. “When we talk about these 10,000 students that we’re going to give these vouchers to, I would ask, Where are they going? I don’t think there’s enough room in our parochial school programs and private school programs to handle 10,000 students, and not everybody’s going to take that opportunity either.”
Overla also said that private schools do not have to meet same standards as public schools, such as providing services for students with physical disabilities or with social and emotional challenges.
“If the private schools want public money, then the private schools need to take everybody and provide an education for everyone,” he said. “I don’t see them doing that so that’s why I’m opposed to it.”
The crux of the voucher question is parental control, according to Nordman, who said students should not be trapped in “failing” schools.
“The important part about this is parental choice,” he said. “This really became a conversation after COVID-19, when we saw a number of schools decide that they were above the law, and that they did not need to follow the state’s guidance and laws that we created. You have the Des Moines Public School System who said, ‘You know, even though the legislature is telling us to put our kids back in the classroom,’ which, by the way, Iowa was the first state in the nation to do so, they said, ‘No, we’re just going to do what we think we should do and not put our kids back in the classroom.’ As a parent that cannot afford a private school or cannot afford to home school or can’t afford to go a different route, why should you be stuck in a system that is failing your student?”
Nordman said parental choice involves not only questions of personal and public health but also differences in moral and political ideology. Many public school districts across the U.S. have been roiled over the last two years about COVID-19 policies and mask mandates as well as critical race theory and sexual and gender identity.
“This last legislative session,” Nordman said, “we had oversight hearings on Ames public schools that were producing and distributing pamphlets that said that throwing rocks and bricks at cops was a form of social justice. If you’re a low-income family, and your kid is being indoctrinated by this crap, why shouldn’t you have an opportunity to leave? So that’s why I support it.”
Nordman’s mention of indoctrination apparently reminded Overla about claims made by state Sen. Jake Chapman, who presided over the opening of the 2022 legislative session by saying that public school teachers have a “sinister agenda” and “wish to normalize sexually deviant behavior against our children, including pedophilia and incest.” The Adel Republican also said the “media” wants “to confuse, misguide and deceive us, calling good evil and evil good.” Overla seemed to mock Chapman’s fear-mongering rhetoric.
“When I hear some Republicans talking about teachers and their evil agendas and things like that, it kind of ticks me off,” said Overla, whose candidacy has been endorsed by the Iowa State Education Association and the Perry Education Association. “I would say that if I had the power to brainwash kids, I’d brainwash them to turn their stuff in. I’d brainwash them to not use the f-word in the hallway.”
Apart from education, Nordman, who has garnered endorsements from the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and the Iowa Association of Business and Industry and who recently sold his successful carpet cleaning company and is now studying for securities exams in order to become a wealth manager, said cutting taxes and growing Iowa’s workforce will be the greatest challenges facing the Iowa Legislature when it convenes in January.
Overla said the legislature will also have to grapple with the challenge of financing care facilities, while “more and more long-term care facilities are facing less and less funding.” He said his wife, Susan Mack Overla, sits on the board of directors of the Spurgeon Manor in Dallas Center, where the average cost of care is $350 a day, and funding is running at only $250 a day.
Some sensitive subjects, such as abortion and transgender athletics, were also raised by questions from the forum audience. Both candidates described themselves as “pro-life” and eschewed extremists from both political parties.
At present abortion in Iowa remains legal up to about 20 weeks of pregnancy. In 2018 Gov. Reynolds signed a so-called fetal heartbeat bill, which banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, but a Polk County District Court judge enjoined that law, preventing its enforcement.
The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old “Roe v. Wade” decision in June, and in August the Iowa governor filed a motion requesting the district court to lift the injunction on Iowa’s six-week abortion ban. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the sound detected by an ultrasound at six weeks of pregnancy is not a heartbeat because the fetus’ heart is not fully formed.
At Thursday’s forum, Nordman did not state his position on the fetal heartbeat bill, which the legislature passed prior to his election to the Iowa House, but he noted the question will be made the subject of a constitutional amendment in two years, when Iowans will make their voices heard at the ballot box.
Nordman did express his compassion for “mothers who are struggling” and said he supported a bill in the last session that would legalize over-the-counter birth control prescriptions by pharmacists. He said he “absolutely supports” exceptions to an abortion ban in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.
“There are people in my party who I think are way too extreme on abortion,” he said. “The Democrats also have extremes in their party. The federal Democrats just voted for a bill that would allow abortion up to the day of birth. That’s extreme. There are Democrats on record voting for that. Iowa Democrats? It’s the same thing. They would introduce a bill, if they had the majority, to allow abortion up to the day of birth. That’s extreme, and Iowans are not for that. I’m not for that. The country’s not for that.”
The “day of birth” claim, often attributed to pro-choice Democrats by pro-life Republicans, is deemed a red herring because about two-thirds of the 900,000 annual abortions in the U.S. occur at eight weeks of pregnancy or earlier, “and nearly 90% take place in the first 12 weeks,” according to estimates. Only 1.3% of abortions occur at 21 weeks or more, which is when fetal viability begins to become technologically possible, and this is what Republicans mean by the “day of birth.”
While calling himself pro-life, Overla said the “parental choice” so beloved by Republicans when the dispute is over public school curriculum should also extend to this personal medical decision.
“Where I differ from Carter is that I don’t believe it’s my right to take that decision away from another person,” Overla said. “I think this is more of a decision that should be made between a woman and her doctor, a woman and her health care provider, and as a politician — See? I did the right thing. I left my wife at home so she’s not here to come over here and smack me. Honestly, my wife hates to hear me talk about abortion because, she says, ‘What’s your knowledge of it? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Your perspective is not the same.'”
The opinions of males might bear little weight in the abortion argument, but a male will nevertheless soon represent Iowa House District 47 and will make decisions regarding the reproductive rights of females in Iowa.
Nordman prefaced his remarks on abortion by saying, “We have to understand that we’re talking about two human beings here. We’re talking about the mother, and we’re talking about a baby.” In his rejoinder, Overla challenged Nordman’s premise.
“You said we’re talking about two people, the female and the baby,” Overla said. “If we’re talking about science, as long as that baby is still in the womb, I think it’s part of the woman, so it’s not necessarily an entity of its own. It’s reliant on that umbilical cord. I don’t support abortion but, again, I’m not going to take it away from someone.”
Overla also said he opposes the fetal heartbeat law: “The six-week ban? I’m opposed to that,” he said.
As for other time limits, Nordman said he voted to reduce to 20 days the period during which absentee ballots must be requested and returned in Iowa — between Oct. 19 and Nov. 8 in the current general election cycle. He said that “we don’t need a lingering 40-day election.” Overla said he “would like to see voting access expanded and not restricted.”
Both candidates pledged themselves to accessibility and transparency while in office.
Dallas County voters may cast in-person absentee ballots at the Dallas County Auditor’s office during normal business hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday until Nov. 7 at 5 p.m. A satellite polling place will be open at the McCreary Community Building at 1800 Pattee St. in Perry on Wednesday, Nov. 2 from 1-7 p.m.
