Iowa bill to create school ‘threat assessment teams’ advances

DES MOINES — Iowa school systems would have the authority to create assessment teams to improve student information sharing and collaboration when a student exhibits behavior that might threaten school safety under a bill advanced Tuesday.

House Study Bill 47 would allow collaboration between schools and government agencies to provide services to students enrolled in grades from kindergarten to 12th grade who are “experiencing or at risk of an emotional disturbance or mental illness, or who pose an articulable and significant threat to the health and safety of any person.”

The bill would authorize school districts, accredited non-public schools, charter schools and innovation zone schools to create these threat assessment teams.

A three-person Iowa House Education Subcommittee moved the legislation forward Tuesday after hearing testimony and considering potential amendments. The bill, sponsored by the Iowa Department of Public Safety, would allow teams to coordinate resources and share student records or information.

Currently, requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, create legal barriers to accessing and sharing student information. FERPA is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records but gives parents the right to access them.

“We're just trying to extend this runway for information sharing between these entities to be able to secure resources for students prior to a targeted act of violence occurring,” said Josie Wagler, representing the public safety department.

This bill comes just over a year after a shooting at Perry Middle and High School that killed a sixth-grade student and a principal and injured six others. The gunman, a 17-year-old student, killed himself.

In 2024, there were 330 school shootings in K-12 schools across the country, according to the National K-12 School Shooting Database.

Rep. Henry Stone, R-Forest City, said this bill would help prevent situations in the future like what happened in Perry.

“In light of what happened to Perry, this is something that we need to take serious, and we need to institute these procedures,” Stone said. “As retired military members, all of our agencies talked to each other, and that's how we got the mission done. Our kids are our mission.”

Threat assessment teams could include local law enforcement officials, representatives from juvenile court services, mental health professionals, social services representatives and school officials.

Mary Nelle Trefz spoke on behalf of Iowa ACEs 360, a group focused on preventing and responding to childhood trauma. She noted the bill does not include training requirements for threat assessment team members.

“There's a lot of prevention focus on this. However, a lot of details are left unsaid,” Trefz said. “There is a lot of vagueness and ambiguity, which I know has its merits, but if done poorly, these threat assessment teams can have unintended consequences.”

Lisa Davis-Cook, representing the Iowa Association for Justice, questioned the bill's definition of “experiencing or at risk of emotional disturbance” as a benchmark for assembling a threat assessment team, saying it is too broad.

“The breadth of these terms that they're using, where the student is experiencing or at risk of emotional disturbance or mental illness, lots of things can be a mental illness that a student can be suffering from and it doesn't necessarily mean they're a threat,” Davis-Cook said. “They don't have to have mental illness and be a threat. They can just have a mental illness.”

Davis-Cook used an example from one of her members who had a 9-year-old child whose parents were going through a divorce. The student ended up flipping a table and yelling at a teacher.

“Is that a risk because it might hit another student? We just think that some of that is so broad that it may be interpreted in different ways,” Davis-Cook said.

Stone said he understands that the bill needs more guardrails and supported tweaking it as it moves forward. Rep. Monica Kurth, D-Davenport, said she supports the bill’s intent but believes it should be tightened. She did not sign on to advance the bill.

“I had concerns initially about the confidentiality and the requirements for FERPA,” Kurth said. “I think that we need to take that a little bit more strongly into account.”