South Dakota's Senate Bill 112 was deemed the "odd bill of the week" by the Rapid City Journal (February 2, 2014). As NCSE previously reported, the bill would, if enacted, require that "[n]o school board or school administrator may prohibit a teacher in public or nonpublic school from providing instruction on intelligent design or other related topics." The newspaper commented, "If South Dakota lawmakers can't tell schools what to teach, some apparently are willing to try the old double-negative end run, and instead prohibit schools from prohibiting what can be taught."
Nothing that the bill "could lead to legal challenge in any public schools that might make ["intelligent design"] part of a curriculum and that teaching "intelligent design" in the public schools was ruled to be unconstitutional by a federal court in the 2005 case Kitzmiller v. Dover, the Journal speculated, "This measure may fall into the category of bills that South Dakota lawmakers file each year just to make a personal political statement." SB 112 is not yet on the calendar of the Senate Education Committee, to which it was referred after its introduction on January 29, 2014.