Hello, I want to thank David and the rest of the Monroe County Dems for inviting me here this evening. I see a lot of familiar faces. It is so good to see you all at this wonderful venue and event.

I am Chair of the Monroe County Indiana Coalition for Public Education. We’re non-partisan. We’re composed of citizens. We are very grassroots (got very little money). We fight for public schools - the hearts of our communities - at the statehouse via a lobbyist. We donate to candidates that support public schools. And we educate folks about the ever changing state of school choice in Indiana. 

I was invited to talk about school vouchers.  I’ve got this script here as I can easily tangent if I just ramble…and I will confuse you all because school funding is so confusing. 

AND I really want to talk about  fun things! Like how much I love that former teachers are running for office. And I love that Tim Walz went viral over gutters and Menards. I work in residential and commercial construction and gutters is something I sometimes obsess over. 

But back to the matter at hand. I need to talk to you about school vouchers – one of the most radical ideas out there. Vouchers are NOT conservative. They are money pits. School vouchers are public funds that are used in the private sector to help off-set personal, private education costs. 

School vouchers are different from state to state. Indiana alone has three types of education vouchers - 4 if you count the pre-tax Scholarship Granting Organization program (SGO for short). The largest voucher program in Indiana (and one of the largest and oldest in the country) is the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program that has been around since 2011. With this voucher, caregivers use a lump sum from the state to help pay for private school tuition. In Indiana - since around 2008 - the money follows the child, which  set the stage for vouchers in 2011.The lump sum of a voucher is worth 90% of the dollar amount that would go with the child to their public school district. That 90% chunk of change - 6000 something dollars -  goes straight from the government to the private school. 

And let me clarify, Charter schools do not accept vouchers (if you’ve made this mistake you’re not alone - our state government over the past 15 years has made our education system very difficult to understand). Charter schools are considered public schools in Indiana. However charter schools, like private schools, don’t follow the exact same rules as traditional public schools. The further you get from public schools the more the rules change, and the fewer rights you have. And the public - taxpayers and school consumers aren’t clearly told this. Marketing is slick. There are few guardrails. 

Back to vouchers - The Choice Scholarship program has grown over 2,800 % since 2012. What was a program sold to legislators to help the poor, is now accessible to 97% of the population. 

A Family of 4 earning 230,000 or less can qualify for a school voucher. But a family of 4 making over 48,000 can’t qualify for free lunch. And a family making over $33,000 can’t qualify for state subsidized preschool.  

We Hoosiers didn’t get to vote for vouchers.  But we Hoosier taxpayers have spent over $2.16 billion on vouchers and yet we are not keeping up with inflation when it comes to funding our public school system. In many private schools almost all children have a voucher and many of these kids would have never attended public school in the first place. Indiana is crazy radical with taxpayer money. We’re now practically funding three separate K12 school systems. Public, charter, and voucher. If Choice Scholarships were its own general fund appropriation, it would be #5. It costs us taxpayers more than the budget lines for child services, more than the Indiana Economic Development Consortium, more than what the state sends to Purdue, IU, Ball State, etc. Next year, it will likely be #4, jumping ahead of the family and children fund. 

To make matters worse, vouchers affect all school districts. If you picture the tuition support funding bucket from the state—which about 50 percent of our state budget (and why we need teachers in charge of our state)—vouchers get a cut from that bucket. There’s an estimated cost. But there is no cap on choice scholarships. And because it comes from that bucket it affects every school budget. You can have no private schools around you. You can have no child in your district using a voucher. But vouchers affect your school district. 

If you go on the ICPE website - indianacoalitionforpubliced.org, you can see how vouchers affect your school district. It’s a fun game of what would your district gain if vouchers didn’t exist and funding remained the same. For example, MCCSC could have gained $18 million total over the past 7 years. That’s a lot of money. 
 
To top it off there is no accountability to taxpayers. We don’t know how this money is being spent. These schools can legally discriminate even though they are accessing funds from the same bucket as public schools. Public schools must accept all students. 

It’s really hard to roll back from where we are right now. But we can push our legislators to make it better.  Our state legislators can add guardrails, more accountability, more transparency measures.  They can also establish a moratorium on the expansion of all vouchers.

We Hoosiers can also be better citizens, better community members. 

There’s a lot of school options in Monroe county. And now tax dollars follow a lot of those choices. In 2008, public funds, for the most part, went to 2 public school districts in Monroe County. In 2024, due to choice funding expansion over the years, state tax dollars followed Monroe County school-age children to almost 50 different outside-of-district schools including 10 charters and 11 private schools. 

There’s nothing wrong with sending your child to a private school. But you don’t have to apply for a voucher if you can afford to pay out of pocket. Taking voucher funds affects the bottom line of all public schools right now due to how the funding model works. This affects your community. 

There is also nothing wrong with trying a public school first. Our Monroe County public schools–both RBB and MCCSC—are solid districts. They are filled with so many kids from so many walks of life. Public school is where we first learn to get along with people who may be different from us.  Public schools are the heart of our communities. And a cornerstone of democracy. 

Deep breath! I’m almost done! 

I have three action steps for you: 

1. See if your state legislative candidates signed the ICPE pledge to support public schools, reject expansion of vouchers, and demand better accountability. I know a lot of candidates in this area have signed the ICPE pledge. But we need you to ask candidates of all parties to sign. Because we Hoosier can’t afford more choice.  More choice = more taxes. 
2. Share the pledge list with family members who are torn on who to vote for. The pledge is on our website and there is a handout.  Next year is a budget year. We need to fund our public schools first. Inflation has not been kind. Funding private schools is not in the state constitution. 
3. Join our organization. It’s an annual fee. Our membership dollars pay for a lobbyist at the statehouse among other things.  

Thank you for your time. 
Keri Jean Miksza - Chair, Indiana Coalition for Public Education—Monroe County

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To get a better view, you can access maps and written boundary descriptions on the MCCSC Board Docs. 

​Details on the meeting where the MCCSC school board approved the redistricting map in addition to the background details were thoroughly reported by Dave Askins/B Square Bulletin. The Indiana Daily Student and Indiana Public Media also covered the story. 

The school board district boundaries can be more clearly seen in the GIS. (Note: The new MCCSC school board district boundaries have yet to hit Elevate. But the school district has requested that they be added there.)  

Note that the MCCSC school board race is nonpartisan. If you vote straight Democrat or Republican, you still have to vote for school board candidates. 

School Board Districts on the Ballot This Fall

MCCSC 
District 2, Currently represented by April Hennessey
District 4. Currently represented by Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer 
District 5, Currently represented by Erin Cooperman
District 6, Currently represented by Ross Grimes

The other 3 districts—1, 3, and 7—will be on the 2026 ballot. 

RBB
RBB At-Large, Currently represented by Bradley Tucker 
Bean Blossom District, Currently represented by Jimmie Dale Durnill
Richland District, Currently represented by Lawrence J DeMoss

The other two seats—one for Bean Blossom and one for Richland—will be on the 2026 ballot. Elections in RBB follow the same approach as MCCSC. Everyone in RBB can vote for ALL RBB district candidates, not just a candidate in their own district. 

Upcoming Election Dates for School Board Races
May 21 – School Board Candidate Filing Opens
June 20 – School Board Candidate Filing Closes
July 3 – Deadline to fill ballot vacancy 
October 7 – Voter registration deadline
October 8 – Early Voting Begins
October 24 – Absentee Ballot applications due
November 4 – Early Voting Ends at Noon
November 5 – Election Day 

How to Run for School Board
Indiana School Boards Association (ISBA) has a good primer on how to file to run. It includes information per who can run as well. Additional information can be accessed on ISBA’s Are You Considering Running for School Board page. There are candidate webinars in May. 

What Does a School Board Member Do? 
ISBA has a write-up that explains what school board members and superintendents do. 

Monroe County School Board Forums
ICPE–Monroe County has partnered with the League of Women Voters and the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce to host school board forums and school board questionnaires for school board candidates in districts up for election in Monroe County Community School Corporation and Richland–Bean Blossom Community School Corporation. School board forums for both MCCSC and RBB will be held before early voting begins—Tuesday, September 24, 2024 (RBB) and Monday, September 30, 2024 (MCCSC). 

How to Help with the School Board Forums
If your organization is interested in being a sponsor of this effort, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Organizations must be nonpartisan. 
If you wish to personally help, formerly join us ICPE-MC and contact us at [email protected]. We could use the help from setting up the placards to time keeping. 


*Note that this post is about MCCSC school board districts, which determine who can run for which school board seat. It is not about school attendance zones.

Read at the January 23, 2024 MCCSC Board of School Trustees meeting.

Dear MCCSC School Board Members, 
 
My name is Keri Miksza and I am the current chair of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County. We are a membership driven, volunteer run organization composed of local community members. 
 
Our organization’s vision is for all children to have high-quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities. At their best, public schools bring students together and provide environments where children get to know, respect, and learn along with others of diverse races, family incomes, religions, and worldviews. Democracy needs public schools. 
 
We know that balancing MCCSC elementary schools has been in the works since before the pandemic. For example, in the fall of 2019, the district held a fireside chat covering the history of redistricting in MCCSC that was very informative. It’s now been almost 20 years since the last redistricting effort. And some may say the three rounds of redistricting between 1990 and 2005 didn’t go far enough to balance our elementary schools even though in one redistricting effort in the mid-90s. Understanding the history of our district is important and should be publicly documented for community members to access. 
 
ICPE Monroe County would also like to clarify a 4 year old Capstone report that is being referenced a bit in our community. The 2021 report was the work of masters students in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. It was a summer project. We are grateful to them for their valuable work, but they had limited access to data, limited time, and pandemic challenges. If the board or community refers to that report, they should take this into consideration. 
 
Since the last redistricting effort in 2005, Indiana now operates under a consumer-based school choice landscape created by Indiana’s legislature. Districts of all sizes must be more nimble to best serve school-age community members in the face of state funding not keeping up with the rate of inflation and endless unfunded mandates by the state legislature. They control the purse strings and a lot of the rules.  
 
Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County supports redistricting efforts. We believe that integration by income and race can help realize the full potential of our public schools—the heart of our community. In addition we support MCCSC instituting a regularly scheduled review of our district schools to ensure that they are consistently balanced as best possible. 
 
Balanced schools help to reduce racial achievement gaps; encourage critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity; and can improve students’ satisfaction and intellectual self-confidence. They can help cultivate meaningful relationships between individuals with different racial or socioeconomic backgrounds, which in turn impact how diverse students treat one another. 
 
ICPE supports transparency, good research, and community involvement, which includes the employees of MCCSC, in this endeavor. Transparency helps create trust. We realize that balancing is NOT easy. It never is. We encourage all to read the historical Herald Times articles available via our amazing public library. Our community is not perfect. We humans can be close-minded in the face of fear of change. But hard things can be done for the sake of all of our community’s children. They are our community’s future.
 
Thank you.

A lot of us lean on measurements because we don’t want to be disappointed. We want the best, even if “the best” is subjective. What are the top Italian restaurants in South Bend on Yelp? What state has the cleanest air? What’s the best washing machine? What is the most fuel-efficient SUV? How does GreatSchools or Niche rank the schools in the district that you are moving to? 
 
There is a lot of choice in Indiana when it comes to schools, so much so that it feels that K12 education has been transformed from a common good into a consumer good. We really want the best for our children. That’s obvious. In places where there is a glut of choice, we lean on data even more than we lean on soft ads guaranteeing things like small class sizes or schooling that is flexible to the learning preferences of the student. After all, we know those paid ads are from a school that wants the backpack full of cash your child might bring, be it from your bank account or the state’s account or an SGO or a little bit of all three.

Third-party sites like US News & World Reports, Niche, and GreatSchools pull data from the state school report card site, InView (formerly Compass). And then companies like Zillow pull data from Niche and Great Schools to help sell real estate (home buyers crave information).
 
Soon the state will put in place more school measurements. 2021’s HEA 1514 requires the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) to develop dashboards that “[promote] transparency and multiple student measures, including longitudinal measures.” You can see some plans here. And you can read more on the development in a recent Chalkbeat article. 
 
But shouldn’t the existing measures be reviewed before adding more measures? Are some of these existing measures flawed? Should we give credence to the flawed measures used in marketing by schools or third parties like Niche or GreatSchools? ​

To zero in on one category of data, let’s look at how graduation rates are calculated. Does it make sense that a high school can lose over half its 9th grade class after 3 years and still have a graduation rate of over 90 percent? It is, in fact, completely possible given how IDOE calculates these numbers. 
 
The flaws in graduation rates have been highlighted in the news over the years. A 2019 Chalkbeat report suggested that struggling high schoolers were being counseled into homeschooling so that schools could avoid reporting them as dropouts. In 2006 the Indiana Chamber expressed skepticism about official graduation rates. And back in the Bobby Knight era, the graduation rates he claimed for his IU basketball players were the subject of scrutiny and questioning. (Even before the World Wide Web we couldn’t keep data straight.)
 
IDOE has a five-step formula for calculating graduation rates that is set by statute, and they perform audits every four years. And yet we still have market-driven problems that are produced by the need to be the best school. It is no surprise that the drive to maintain graduation rates and score high points on other forms of measurement on the state report card, as seen on InView, has led to a push-out problem. 
 
John Harris Loflin of Parent–Power Indianapolis conducted a recent study of the graduation rates at one school. (The study has broader implications; Loflin says, “Although the report is about the Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School, it serves as a call for transparency regarding graduation rate figures for all Indiana public schools.”)

For example: For the 2020 school year, Tindley had a graduation rate of over 90%, yet it had lost over half of its 9th grade population by the time that cohort were seniors. What happened to those 46 students? Did they graduate elsewhere? Were some told they weren’t a good fit? Would you send your child to school that has a less than 50% retention rate for a cohort? It is also important to note: Tindley is a charter school that has an accelerated program. It prioritizes college admission above all else, with an image of college acceptance letters under its mission statement.

​Tindley is not an easy school. But it is a school to which people aspire to send their children. They also have a solid boys’ basketball team. You can’t see that in the data. But you can learn about that by talking to people who know the school. More about that in a bit. 
 
Finally, Tindley’s graduation data is all over the place, which makes one wonder what other data is all over the place? How can a consumer make a good decision when the data varies from site to site? 
 
Here are the Tindley graduation rates found on various sites within a search conducted in less than 1 hour. Niche: 85%, GreatSchools: 98%, U.S. News & World Report: 81.1%. 

​The worst one is the state website, InView. On InView’s main page, Tindley has a graduation rate of 95.1% for the 2019–2020 year.

​Using the “Compare” feature you get an 81.1% graduation rate—for the same year? for a different year? With no explanation or visible reason, the shopping comparison tool produces a different graduation rate. It’s bad that the state website can’t even produce consistent or CLEAR data. 

Simply put, data this confusing, opaque, and contradictory is bunk for a consumer. My advice to parents and caregivers is to ignore all this data. It is flawed to the point that you can’t really get a clear picture of what happens in a school. Instead, rely on word of mouth. Call and visit the school you are exploring as a possibility for your child. Follow the school on social media. Attend a PTO meeting. Attend a school event. Ask important questions like, Are your teachers state-certified? How long is recess? Do you offer music, gym, and art? Do you have an after-school or before-school program? What happens if my child falls behind or excels faster than other children? Do you have a school therapist? Is the school financially stable and when is your charter (if a charter school) up for renewal? Ask to speak to parents who send their children to the school. Word of mouth may be your best option. Caveat emptor! 

–Keri Miksza

For more on marketing and schools, read this blog post about virtual charter schools.
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For more writing about school reform in the Indianapolis area, follow Parent Power on Facebook and read more critiques and research by John Harris Loflin.