Here is the latest Iowa news from The Associated Press at 3:30 a.m. CDT

UNDATED (AP) — State district court judges in Des Moines and Iowa City have declined to halt enforcement of a state requirement for schools to return students to classrooms. The judges Tuesday rejected arguments from two school districts and a teachers union that local officials could ignore the governor and educate students at home due to surging numbers of coronavirus cases in Iowa. In two separate rulings, a Polk County judge said Iowa law clearly establishes state control over the time schools must hold in-person instruction, and a Johnson County judge concluded the governor has broad emergency powers under the Iowa Constitution that local school boards do not have.

UNDATED (AP) — A state watchdog says an Iowa teenager who died of starvation in 2017 could have been saved if social workers and contractors had been more thorough when they investigated her living conditions. The Iowa state ombudsman released its findings Tuesday in the case of 16-year-old Sabrina Ray. She weighed just 56 pounds and was severely malnourished when authorities found her body at her home in Perry in May 2017. Ray’s adoptive parents, who parented foster kids, adopted four children and ran an in-home daycare, eventually received lengthy prison sentences for kidnapping and child endangerment.

DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) — A private eastern Iowa college has announced it will remove a statue of the school’s founder after officials there learned new details about his slave-owning past. The Telegraph Herald reports that Loras College will remove the statue of Bishop Mathias Loras from the Dubuque campus and place it in storage. Loras, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Dubuque, established the seminary in 1839 that would eventually become Loras College. Loras College President Jim Collins says school officials recently learned from a researcher that Loras bought an enslaved woman named Marie Louise while he was living in Mobile, Alabama, in 1836 and kept her as his slave until 1852, and hired her out to collect proceeds for various Iowa ministries.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The spread of the coronavirus continued at a rapid pace in Iowa over the Labor Day holiday as state data revealed increases in hospitalizations and rising numbers of patients treated for the virus in intensive care. The Iowa Department of Public Health reported there were 345 new confirmed cases, reflecting a smaller number due to no testing on Labor Day. Six more people died, increasing the total to 1,173. Numbers late last week and over the weekend, however, remained high with more than 1,000 new cases each day on Friday and Saturday. Over the past seven days the state averaged 750 new confirmed cases a day, an increase of 26% from the average two weeks earlier.