Iowa is consistently ranked among the best states in the country for education, but recent legislation targeting our Area Education Agency (AEA) system puts our quality of education in jeopardy. AEAs were initially created to assist schools with special education programs, but quickly evolved to provide much more than that, as they believe the first step to quality special education is a quality general education. 

AEAs’ work in the background, often out of the view of students to provide services such as professional development for teachers, materials like textbooks and databases, technology support, mental health services and crisis emergency support just to name a few. It cannot be stressed enough how crucial AEAs are to schools.

“They [AEAs] train teachers, they train community members to be paraprofessionals, they provide support for teachers on problem solving if a student is struggling, they help monitor special education, they help analyze assessment data and they assist in curriculum review. They are a vital part of our team, they wear the Johnston jersey,” said Dr. Nikki Roorda, JCSD Superintendent.

House Study Bill 542 is a bill proposed to Iowa’s congress by Governor Kim Reynolds, initially discontinuing all services provided by AEAs that are not special education related before later being amended to only providing services upon request from the school district. 

HSB 542 also places the control of nine AEAs into the hands of the director of the Department of Education, whereas formerly they were each run by a board of nine consisting of former educators and administrators local to the area.  The bill intends to improve special education and close achievement gaps. HSB 542 is currently tabled in the House of Representitives and active in the Senate. 

Legislators in favor of the bill frequently state that Iowa’s special education ranks 30th in proficiency in the United States. This statistic seems alarming but it fails to consider individual progress, on-time graduation rate for students with IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) has risen from 75 percent in 2012 to 83 percent in 2022. This is despite the fact that funding has been consistently taken away from AEAs, in the past 10 years 289.2 million dollars has been taken out of AEA’s budget. 

As it currently stands, AEAs exist separate from the government, but that does not mean they are unregulated. The Department of Education has significant oversight of the doings of AEAs, just not control over them. HSB 542 transforms AEAs to a subsidiary of the government and strips them of all property holdings. 

Furthermore, the bill shifts the AEA’s focus from broadly supporting schools to just special education, putting 72 percent of services provided by AEAs at risk of being cut. These services include social/emotional/behavioral supports, curriculum support, support for new teachers, leadership development programs and crisis emergency support. 

Schools would also lose out on the personal connections that AEAs have made with staff and administrators. The proposed bill significantly reduces the size of the AEA staff meaning people who are usually focused on one school district now would have to cover multiple. 

“Our Regional Director, Rachelle Dawson, is only assigned to Johnston and she supervises all the Johnston AEA staff. So it is like she is part of our administrative team, and that’s similar in the smaller schools,” said Dr. Roorda.

The personal connections Iowa’s AEAs make is what sets us apart from other states, this bill threatens to take that away.

“When the AEAs were created in 1975, it was to be a unique and more local base. So my concern with having it be someplace else is that the Department of Education does not have the broad scope to know everything that is happening in all these places,” said Dr. Roorda.

The beauty of the AEA system is that the services provided are determined by people hands on in school districts, not by a single person at the capital. It is not just that this bill will cut services, it is that it removes the personalized aspects of the services. Not all school districts are the same, they do not all need the same services, broad acts by the Department of Education will not work for all schools. The true purpose of AEAs that legislators may fail to realize is that they provide individualized services to each district, that they operate from within districts, that they are the blood vessels of the education system. If AEAs suffer, schools suffer.