Mike Zimmer--Educator and Candidate for Iowa Senate District 35

And what every American should know about the punishing impacts of Republican efforts to dismantle our public school system...

When Governor Kim Reynolds picked former Iowa District 35 Senator Chris Cournoyer to be Lieutenant Governor, a special election was called to elect Cournoyer’s replacement. That election is on Tuesday, January 28.

Senate district 35 covers all of Clinton County, portions of northern Scott County, and part of Jackson County including the city of Maquoketa.

Democrat Mike Zimmer, the Central DeWitt School Board President and educator is running against Republican Katie Whittington, a party organizer in Clinton County. The Gazette and the Quad Cities times have the story here. Laura Belin has more background here and here.

Zimmer’s website is here, and Whittington’s here.

I spoke with Zimmer on Tuesday on ZOOM and asked him to tell us about his background, why he is running for Senate and to get the educator’s take on how and why Republicans in the legislature are dismantling our public school system. To make a long story short, a friend of Zimmer’s asked if I was interested in doing an interview, and of course, I was. That’s what I do.

We didn’t talk about his opponent because it wouldn’t be fair without allowing her to represent herself.

Zimmer’s perspective is one only someone with boots on the ground could know about what’s happening in our public school system as Republicans in the legislature work to dismantle it before our very eyes. The impacts are monumental and come from every direction, including vouchers, funding, hiring, teacher morale, and more. The Republican attacks are unrelenting and nationwide.

If our public school system fell off the face of the earth, these Republicans would stand at the edge and cheer. Here’s what I think they are up to, from March of 2023.

Zimmer shares insights that every Iowan should know—as well as citizens in every state where Republicans are in charge of state government. Please share this column far and wide—especially if you live in District 35—you can make a big difference. Zimmer is sharing his knowledge and with it he gives us the tools to resist the attacks on our public schools.

If you live in the district and believe in Mike, our public schools, and democracy, lean into getting out the vote for him. For us. Our schools. Our kids and grandkids. Every vote matters.

Below is our ZOOM video, and below that is an AI-generated transcript of our conversation. I apologize for any errors. FYI, this interview was originally set up to run on the Iowa Revolution, a podcast that my friend Spencer Dirks and I do. However, Spencer is a little under the weather, so I posted the interview here instead, so when Mike mentions “listeners” and “show” he anticipated a podcast. But here we go…

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Welcome. I'm speaking today with Mike Zimmer, who's a candidate for Senate District 35 in eastern Iowa. His opposition is Katie Whittington and you're running an a special election to replace Chris Cournoyer, who is now our Lieutenant Governor…Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, thank you very much for hosting me and inviting me to the show and share a little bit with your listeners about who I am. My name is Mike Zimmer and I have lived in the eastern part of the state for my entire life. Basically I've lived in Scott County, Clinton County, and Jackson County, my wife, and I have been married for 42 years. We have five adult children, three of whom are teachers. We have 10 grandchildren. So I just retired as of June 30th 2023 after serving the citizens in the eastern part of the state as an educator. I was 19 years as an industrial arts, industrial technology teacher. I had a small business called Mike Zimmer Construction that we used to help fill the gap between the summer months of being off. And then in 2002, I was hired as the assistant principal at Pleasant Valley high school and I served five years as their assistant principal and then two years as the principal of North Scott High School over here in Eastern Iowa. And then I was asked to come back and serve as the high school principal and eventually director of secondary education with the Pleasant Valley School District. But my wife and I remained living in the Central DeWitt School District the entire time, I drove back and forth to work.

And then I don't think the dust had settled on my retirement papers when I was approached by some local community members, if I would be interested in running for the school board at Central DeWitt. So, that campaign started in October of 2023 and I was elected in November. And at the very first board meeting, I was then chosen to serve as the board president, which I said, was highly unusual for a new board member to come on and then be the board president. But I'm now on my second year, serving in the governance role in education.

So, that's a little bit of my background.

Yeah, let's let's go back a bit. Why did you go into teaching in the first place?

Oh, economics has quite an impact on a person's life choices and in 1979 when I graduated high school we were in the farm crisis and employment was sky high. I was actually making 15% on my savings account while my folks were borrowing 21% to build a house. So at that point in time, I wanted to go into farming and that was not going to happen. And so I ended up, my second passion was in the field of construction. So I went up to the University of Northern Iowa and entered into their construction management program and that was not going well either. So I just kind of fell into teaching and I thought well I'll do this for a couple years and I ended up falling in love with it and, and ended up coaching and being a student advisor and a whole litany of duties as assigned.

Okay, but you must have loved it in the sense that you can continue along your career and eventually going into managerial positions, supervisory positions. You must have liked that part of it too.

Oh, absolutely. Each portion had a, it's different challenges and I tried to embrace the challenges as they came along. And even though my formal post-secondary education was in the area, the current technology, education field when I entered into the management field I was opened up to the whole world of special education and how to serve parents and students in that realm, I learned a lot about dyslexia, reading and what challenges students that encounter that issue needing support. So there was a number of things that a lot challenged me as I stepped out of the role of teaching and went into the role of management.

Why are you running for State Senate?

Well, kind of my stump speech is ever since the Republicans took control of both executive and both branches of the legislation in 2017, I've entitled it death by a thousand cuts and the first one was the gutting of chapter 20 and collective bargaining where everything else was removed except for wages. And so all those things on working hours, health benefits, everything that chapter 20 used to cover are now, gone or an option to be talked about, that was step one. And then step two, the COVID time was just brutal. And while we were trying to do everything possible to keep our students safe, our staff, safe, families, safe. We were just being attacked at every board meeting by parents, fighting the mask mandates, and all that kind of stuff that we were trying to implement to get people in and following the CDC. And at that time, the Scott County health department’s advice. Once we got through that then it seemed like it just shifted into the attack on anything related to books or anything like that that we're speaking to disadvantaged…students going through different stages of their life that that was just if it wasn't about… anyway, white males or something like that. They had people show up at board meetings and going after us about that.

Then it was followed up by the voucher program of shifting, massive amounts of student dollars into students going into private and charter schools with absolutely no accountability whatsoever. And then it was followed by the dismantling of our Area Education Agencies. So this is just been compounded. And then the continued whittling away of underfunding of our Public Schools, through the Student Supplemental Aid portion of the state's responsibility for that, so that that's been on the education side it's been a lot.

Any other issues that you're going to want to try to help solve, should you be elected?

Well over here in Eastern Iowa. We certainly and like the rest of the state energy production is a big issue and economic development are two that go hand in hand and we're taking a look at the development of these AI facilities that require just a vast amount of energy to run and where are we going to get that energy from. So we're taking a look at that. Wind turbines are a big issue over here of which I have been an advocate of a diversified energy production portfolio. And you can envision, what a wind turbine looks like by going up into Northwest Iowa, up on I-35 and you can see the 400-foot towers. Over here, there was a pause and I will say that I took a pause when I learned more that these turbines that they're talking about putting up here are 600 foot plus, there's nothing like it anywhere in the country right now and we're in a fairly dense population area as far as rural goes. So, this is one where you need to be a little open-minded and you need to listen to the landowners and I always said, I never wanted to be a NIMBY not in my backyard but it does cause someone to pause and say, let's just take a look if this is the right type of energy production for our part of the state.

So those would be an economic development. Again, we've got a lot of initiatives and things on the docket coming from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, that the Biden Administration put in that have been really helping push some projects that we might not have been able to do. Had we not had that.

So what's the morale of teachers you know?

The morale of teachers right now, I would say couldn't get a whole lot lower just from the consistent…I would say degradation of the field, the way legislators that talk about educators—that you're poisoning our kids’ minds and that kids are walking in the front door with one gender and walking out the back door with another gender. And then just the stupidity, I can't say it any other way, of litter boxes in the classrooms and stuff like that. I mean, this stuff is just coming up and it was, I felt like it was almost like whack-a-mole with what are you talking about? So, and quite honestly, the evidence is there in the fact that every single board of educational licensure is now a hard-to-fill position, it used to be that it was math teachers or science teachers or career and technology education teachers that were hard to fill—we can't fill elementary teacher positions, every single—world language teachers. I mean people are just not going into the field.

And some of the teachers are leaving the state. Is that correct?

Well, that would be data that I've not looked at so I don't want to say one way or another if that's happening or not without seeing evidence of that…I have not encountered that personally myself.

It's interesting to me to ponder what the ultimate goal is of the (Republican) legislators and doing the different things that you've outlined from collective bargaining to the AEA’s to how teachers are treated. What do you think the end goal is of these efforts?

That's a great question, and I would say that the end goal is the dismantling of public education and that's the direction that the legislature has in mind that they want to model us off of some southern state that they're looking at that they think that's the correct way to go. I'm not sure. But Iowa used to be able to take pride in the fact that it was number two, sometimes number one in the nation, as far as student performance. And we have now dropped down to, I think somewhere like in the mid 24-25 range.

And, that as I would say, come straight back to continued year after year after year of underfunding schools. And if you ask our Republican friends, they'll turn around and say, oh no, we fund it. Well, they fund what they want and we have 45 different, what is called categorical funding. And if they want to support a talented, a gifted program, they'll put some money there, which is all fine….but the bottom line is to run a school day in and day out you have to have appropriate funding coming in through the supplemental student aid.

Maybe you could enlighten us on this but the Republicans have been saying they've given the teachers a great raise, you know, I don't know if they say the largest raise in state history or whatever. But it was a large raise that they gave teachers—the teachers that I know talk about how that was implemented, that it really wasn't very large. I think one teacher said she was making 300 dollars more a year or something but then also that has been very disruptive to the system…it pits teachers against each other because if you go do all the hoops, get all the advanced education, get your master's degree or whatever and you do it and if and you get the education that sometimes the teachers that didn't go get that extra education, but have been there longer are being paid more, is that your understanding of how it's been working and as sort of disrupting and pitting teachers against each other?

Yeah. And being on the school board, we're still trying to work through the repercussions of this and I'd like to give you an example of where, if the legislators had been funding the schools at the appropriate level, through the natural negotiation we would have teacher salaries where they need to be, but because it's underfunded every single year, now, teachers wages just keep falling further and further and further behind and then all of a sudden the legislature has to come in and, you know, give us this grandiose program which I'm not, I'm not going to dismiss, but it was so ill thought out that it has just absolutely decimated the current salary schedules that teachers have and again, salary schedules can be you… I'm not opposed at stepping back and looking at, maybe restructuring that. But what happened is, is that this is all based on what's called TSS funds and what the state giveth, the state can taketh away. And what I don't think, what I guess what I'd like to say is that you're listeners need to understand is that every single school district has two salary schedules.

They have one that's based upon the state aid formula and then they have one where the state is backfilling with these TSS dollars. And if the state ever decides that now they can't fund us anymore, then they have a backstop of how to pay teachers without that extra money coming in. That's what happened in this case. And what happened is that yes, some teachers that were close to the 50,000 range, they would get that bump up and those teachers that were close to 60,000 range, they would get that bump up regardless if they had a master's degree, or to your point if they had been taking additional advanced coursework, that was just thrown out the window.

The other piece that the state didn't even ask about, is that when I would hire a teacher, if they came from out of state, I would grant them those years of experience, whether they were in Michigan or Ohio or wherever it was at and then they would come in and I would place them on the salary schedule with those years experience just coming in.

But then, when we would enter them into the system that the state would see, it would start from when it would show up as if this was their first year teaching in Iowa, which it is. But if that makes sense, we were giving them advanced status on their years of experience—that wasn't showing up. So, when the legislature put this together, they didn't even think to ask about—Hey, are your teachers really on this pace of the salary schedule? Or we're just going to look at their years of experience in Iowa. What happened was it became an unfunded mandate for our school district, to the tune of about 90,000 dollars of which we had to advance our teachers with. But we didn't get TSS funds to support that. The other thing they left out is they didn't ask about counselors and they didn't ask about nurses who are on the teacher salary schedule.

Well, I hadn't heard that before that's an issue that's been underreported it seems to me.

They did backfill the counseling position over the summer because the feedback was so negative going, what are you doing? Now you're going to create and we're going to have to pull our counselors and our nurses off the salary schedule and have a second pay scale for them, we're not going to do that, no school district. I should say that most school districts would not do that. They're going to end up just taking out of their general fund to fund the nurses and any other positions that are on that salary schedule that aren't teachers to bring them up to the same level as the teacher, if they're on the salary of the keep them equal at the teaching staff.

So, tell me about the impact the vouchers have had on local public schools and your district.

Well in our district at Central DeWitt, our total enrollment, we’re a 3A School. Meaning we've got about a little under 1500 kids K through 12 and we have a wonderful working relationship with our Catholic School, Saint Joseph and DeWitt always have. They've been excellent partners with us. So we haven't seen a big influx of one way or the other. We’ll continue that partnership with them, but I think it's important for your listeners to know that private, and parochial schools have received support from all taxpayers. They receive support and transportation, purchasing of textbooks, food, and nutrition. As a matter of fact, it amounted to about 50 million dollars that parochial and private schools would get in those types of support. So it wasn't like, they were not getting anything. And I supported that, but this of the full amount of dollars going to the students and going to schools with no school board with no accountability, that's a bridge too far.

And don't the public schools create the special kind of of paperwork and lesson plans for the kids that might need a little bit of extra attention in the private schools as well? So aren't you performing that service for them?

Well, again, a public school means that we are charged with educating all students in Iowa. Regardless of disability, race, creed color, religion, sexual orientation. We educate all.

A parochial school or private charter school, they pick and choose the students that they want and that's a big difference and when you pick and choose the students that you want, you're looking for that target audience, that if I could say students that function between, I'm going to use standardized, test scores, students have function between the 50th and maybe the 80th percentile because there we can educate everybody kind of pretty much the same without a whole lot of variation but the students that are on either end of that required different services and oftentimes those are smaller number of students which means that the cost to educate them are more. But you know, what as a public school? We take that on and we and we provide those services.

Well, nationally, there's lots of data that show that there's a whole lot of private schools that don't perform as well as public schools. Is that an issue for you?

Well it is, but that's if the parochial and private schools are required to complete in Iowa, the student’s performance profile. In other words, they're required to take the Iowa student assessment a student…ISASP…they don't have to do that. They do not have to report that. So it's hard for me to say what their performance is if they're not having to take the same performance measurements that the public schools do.

A lot of that money is going out of state companies to manage it. It's not even staying in Iowa.

That's correct.

Are there any teachers in the legislature right now that you know of?

I believe there are but not very many and their voices have been pretty muted.

Yes. Okay. Well, a whole lot of lawyers and farmers are in the legislature, and seems to me that well, I've always loved my teachers, I love what public education does. I'd like to see some more, but…I very much value our public education and there's a good private school around here too so I don't have an issue where I live…only with the overall funding and the no accountability and things like that, they're problematic…

Yeah, and Robert I would absolutely support your commentary on parents choosing to send their students to a charter school, a parochial school they have every right to do that. As a matter of fact for years and years and years, I worked with the comprehensive private instruction piece in which students going there were responsible to take the same assessment test as their public school counterparts, I would review curriculum. And that parents would be choosing just to make sure that they knew that. Yes, the curriculum you're choosing, is going to allow your student to be successful on these statewide assessments. But outside of that, we provided support. I always kept the door open to say, hey, if your child would like to come back to the public school for say, a technology class, for advanced math class, we always left that open, I will say that the legislature went a step too far with the independent private instruction called IPI. I think that was a step too far because there's no accountability whatsoever. And also just for your listeners, I find it a little ironic when the legislature puts in place this truancy law and they still allow parents to tell us…if the parents are paying attention they can pull the IPI card out and say no, no. You get out of here I'm taking care of my kids. You have no right as a government to be stepping in and the truancy pieces out the window. So…it's just interesting.

Well, is there anything else you'd like to add today Mike, other than people should go vote?

Going out to vote. This is a short and intense voting window, it's Tuesday, January, 28th. We have early voting occurring in all three counties in Jackson, Clinton and Scott County. So that if the weather turns bad or something happens, or work schedules or whatever people can start voting now, I would say that the absentee ballot and all that, that's long passed to get that return back so that window is closed now.

Okay, well, unless you've got something else you'd like to add, I think you've shared a lot of information about yourself and why you're running, and I appreciate your time.

No, thank you, Robert, very much…

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I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please check out our work here. Subscribe! Become a paid subscriber if you can afford it. Please and thank you. We need you. Thanks for being part of the team! Want to buy me lunch or a cup of coffee? Venmo @Robert-Leonard-238. My friend Spencer Dirks and I have a podcast titled the Iowa Revolution. Check it out! We can get ornery. And have fun! I also publish Cedar Creek Nature Notes, about Violet the Dog and my adventures on our morning walks at Cedar Bluffs Natural Area in Mahaska County, Iowa.

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