What’s the story?
On March 25, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher blocked a portion of Iowa state law requiring school districts to remove all books from public school libraries that contain descriptions of sex acts, as defined by the law.
Locher ruled that the law — Senate File (SF) 496 passed in 2023 — was overly broad and encroached on citizens’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights because “unconstitutional applications of the law far outweigh the constitutional ones.”
What’s the background?
Locher had previously placed a temporary injunction on that portion of the state law, as enacted by Senate File (SF) 496, in 2023.
- Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed SF 496 into law on May 26, 2023
- The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Lambda Legal, and four authors sued to block the law on Nov. 30, 2023
- Locher placed an injunction on a portion of the law requiring the removal of books depicting sex acts on Dec. 29, 2023
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the injunction on Aug. 9, 2024, remanding it to Locher for further consideration according to specific legal tests
- Locher reissued the injunction on March 25, 2025
The law was in effect for the beginning of the 2024 – 2025 school year, and many school districts removed books according to SF 496. Other school districts argued that they didn’t have sufficient guidance to implement the law. Iowa’s Mason City School District used artificial intelligence to identify books they must remove.
Iowa had the second-highest number of incidents of books being banned or removed from public schools after Florida in 2023 and 2024. There were 3,671 instances of book bans across 117 districts in Iowa between January 2023 and October 2024.
Locher argued in his ruling that many books were unconstitutionally removed due to the vague nature and wide application of the law and the guidance issued by the Iowa Department of Education in Aug. 2024. The ruling also argued that the law was unconstitutional because it did not require any “evaluation of a book’s literary, political, artistic, or scientific value before removing it from school libraries.”
State Sen. Ken Rozenboom (R), who serves on the Iowa Senate Education Committee, said, “We worked so hard to get that (language) precise and clear and unambiguous, and I think it’s very clear.”
Not all school districts removed library books in compliance with the law, including Des Moines Public Schools, which said they did not find any books on their shelves that conflicted with the requirements of SF 496.
Iowa state law authorizes school boards to remove books from school libraries at their discretion. SF 496 placed constraints on that authority by requiring the removal of certain books and materials.
Ballotpedia tracks school board authority and constraints on their authority across the 50 states. Read more about Iowa school board authority over topics such as curriculum, parental notification, discipline, the timing of their elections, open enrollment, charter schools, and cellphone policies here.
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