Wild Willpower's Official Platform:
"Upskilling Iowa"—Education Plan
New Classes and Programs for Public Schools

By Sondra Wilson | Updated August 4, 2026

This Upskilling Iowa PDF includes a plan for new classes and learning programs, and this second PDF on:

1.) Increasing teacher pay and issuing a one-time payment to all educators from the Reserve Fund;

2.) Polling to receive direct input from educators and solve all sorts of problems across the state;

3.) Ending the unconstitutional school voucher program, which is robbing Iowans of $342 M/year in services (school funding, healthcare and rural hospitals, libraries, rental assistance programs, and more);

4.) Two new powerful sources of revenue to fund schools for generations while reducing property tax pressure across the state!

Crossover With Wild Willpower's Justice Reform Plan

 

Teaching law classes to seniors, as described in the first PDF, directly corresponds with Wild Willpower's Justice Reform Plan. Additionally, Wild Willpower strongly opposes Iowa's ESA program. Our reasoning is found within the article series Iowa's Broken Judiciary, and below. 

Public Funding Requires Public Civil Accountability
Wild Willpower Opposes Iowa's ESA Program Because It Worsens the Current Civil Rights Crisis

 

Iowa’s Education Savings Account program directs public funds toward tuition and other qualified expenses at accredited nonpublic schools. Beginning with the 2025–2026 school year, eligibility expanded to Iowa resident K–12 students attending accredited nonpublic schools without the earlier income limitations. [19]

Accreditation provides some oversight. It does not resolve the deeper constitutional and civic concern raised when public money supports religious instruction about the identity, morality, and legal rights of fellow citizens.

Teaching a child that the Creator of the universe condemns LGBT+ people is not a morally neutral educational choice. A child who is LGBT+ may carry that message as fear, shame, or self-rejection for the rest of life. A child who is not LGBT+ may carry it into adulthood as a belief about how neighbors should be treated, which civil-rights protections deserve respect, and whether religious doctrine should govern people who do not share that doctrine.

Those lessons do not remain confined to theology class. They can shape jurors, voters, legislators, judges, employers, landlords, parents, and public officials. They can shape whether future adults defend equal protection—or join political movements committed to removing it.

Some religious communities openly speak of establishing “God’s kingdom on Earth.” That aspiration can inspire extraordinary compassion and service. But when it becomes a mission to place one denomination’s interpretation of divine law above the civil rights of people who believe differently, it collides with the constitutional structure that protects religious liberty for everyone.

I do not accept the claim that God declared LGBT+ people sinful. Human beings wrote, selected, translated, interpreted, institutionalized, and enforced the texts through which that claim has been passed down. Many Christians and Muslims sincerely regard their scriptures as the flawless word of God. Other devout Iowans—including me—hold less conventional beliefs about scripture while remaining deeply committed to God and to the life and moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

I describe myself as an unorthodox Christian. I am grateful to live in a country where I may say that publicly without being imprisoned, exiled, or burned as a heretic. Generations of Americans—including veterans who defended our constitutional order—preserved that liberty.

But religious liberty cannot mean freedom for the majority’s theology and submission for everyone else. It must protect the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, unorthodox Christian, and transgender Iowan alike. It protects the right to teach faith within a religious community; it does not give that community a superior claim to write its theology into civil law for everyone.

Passing a multiple-choice civics examination does not necessarily show that a student understands why constitutional government restrains the majority, why religious liberty also requires freedom from state-imposed theology, how minority rights survive political hostility, or how citizens seek redress when government becomes the source of injury.

Iowa should therefore require meaningful curriculum transparency and civic accountability wherever public education funds are spent. Families and taxpayers should be able to determine how publicly supported schools teach:

• constitutional government and the separation of powers;
• religious liberty and the prohibition against governmental establishment of religion;
• equal protection and minority rights;
• the history of government persecution and religious coercion;
• civil-rights law and the right to petition for redress; and
• the distinction between personal religious conviction and lawful governmental authority.

This is not a demand that Iowa dictate anyone’s private faith. It is a demand that public financing not become a vehicle for preparing future voters to use governmental power against citizens whom their theology teaches them to condemn.

Education should prepare young Iowans to recognize an abuse of governmental power—even when those exercising it speak in the language of their own faith.

Diamonds Among a Dunghill—So That Unorthodox Christians May Have a Voice:
Jefferson, the teachings of Jesus, and freedom from imposed theology

 

Thomas Jefferson also separated the moral teachings he attributed to Jesus from doctrines and additions he believed had accumulated around them. In 1820, he assembled what became known as the Jefferson Bible, formally titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, by selecting passages from the Gospels and omitting material he considered miraculous or inauthentic. The Library of Congress preserves the work and describes that process. [1]

Jefferson repeatedly described the teachings he attributed to Jesus as morally exceptional. In his October 12, 1813 letter to John Adams, he described the material he considered genuinely Jesus’s as

“as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”

He also characterized the resulting teachings as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” [2]

Jefferson’s religious conclusions were his own, not a constitutional creed that others must adopt. But his example demonstrates something essential to American liberty: a person may revere Jesus, reject claims made in Jesus’s name, question inherited interpretations of scripture, and remain a full participant in public life.

That freedom matters to me personally. My understanding of Jesus centers upon mercy, courage, opposition to hypocrisy, concern for people cast aside by society, and the moral obligation to recognize a wounded human being before defending an institution.

Iowa’s publicly financed education system should not teach children—expressly or by omission—that only conventional believers possess legitimate moral voices. Nor should it prepare a single religious voting bloc to use state power to impose its interpretation of God upon minorities.

The consequences are not merely theoretical. Civil-rights litigation arising from my attempt to preserve protections against governmental overreach consumed the same time and resources needed for my ballot-access campaign. Unless the Iowa Supreme Court grants relief in Wilson v. Pate, Iowa’s gubernatorial debates will proceed without the perspective of an openly transgender, unorthodox Christian candidate whose platform directly challenged the use of religious and governmental power against minorities.

Religious freedom does not mean that conventional Christians alone may define God, morality, citizenship, or the laws under which the rest of us must live.

Endnotes

[1] Iowa Department of Education, Students First Education Savings Accounts, explaining eligibility, qualified expenses, and the expansion of eligibility to Iowa resident K–12 students attending accredited nonpublic schools beginning with the 2025–2026 school year.

[2] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, Oct. 12, 1813, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Founders Online, National Archives (describing material he considered genuinely attributable to Jesus as “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill” and discussing his extraction of Jesus’s moral teachings); Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (c. 1820), Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress. Jefferson elsewhere characterized the teachings he attributed to Jesus as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”