Elle Moxley came to WFIU in 2012 from The Examiner, a community newspaper in suburban Kansas City. She previously worked for KBIA-FM in Columbia, Mo.; The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill.; and the Associated Press in London. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri, where she studied multimedia journalism and broadcasting.
Kindergarteners and first graders are already being taught using the Common Core State Standards. Indiana planned to add second grade next year, but that plan has been put on hold pending a legislative review.
But what happens next is unclear. According to the bill Gov. Mike Pence signed into law last week, the State Board of Education can take no further action to implement the Common Core State Standards. Yet the legislation also leaves any standards adopted before May 15, 2013 in place.
Proponents of the new standards argue pausing implementation of the Common Core will leave teachers unsure what to teach next year. But the bill’s statehouse advocate disagrees.
“I don’t know how stopping and taking another look at this in any way is worse than moving forward with something we think is bad,” says Sen. Scott Schneider, R-Indianapolis. Continue Reading →
Lisa Coughanowr, a kindergarten teacher at East Side Elementary in Brazil, reads aloud to her students. She asks questions about the story to check their understanding.
About 86 percent of Indiana third graders passed a statewide reading exam in March that will allow them to advance to fourth grade.
More than 11,800 students will have to retake the IREAD-3 this summer or risk retention.
We’ve posted complete statewide results of the exam to two easily-searchable tables. You can find results for your school or your district. (This year’s data also includes results for non-public schools.)
State education officials released the results with little fanfare. Superintendent Glenda Ritz has been fiercely critical of the high-stakes exam, citing it as the primary reason she ran against former schools chief Tony Bennett in November.
Ritz, a former teacher who worked as a media specialist in Washington Township, has said repeatedly Indiana needs to rethink how it handles students who aren’t reading at grade level. Continue Reading →
Superintendent Jon Willman, right, and members of the Hamilton Community School Board take questions about a proposed tax levy increase during a public meeting ahead of the November 2012 election. The referendum passed with 74 percent of the vote.
Less than a quarter of Indiana school corporations have pursued a referendum in the five years since the state legislature changed the way districts can levy taxes for construction and operating expenses.
Fourteen of the 67 districts have made two or more appeals, including two school corporations that passed construction referenda Tuesday — Hamilton Southeastern and Noblesville. The seven questions that appeared on the ballot in this week’s special election bring the total number of school referenda in Indiana to 88 since 2008.
(Scroll down to find StateImpact‘s scorecard on five years of school referenda is after the jump.)
The [Louisiana] judges’ decision appears to make it particularly hard for the program to be revived by the legislature, as it will probably require a separate funding source, banning lawmakers from redirecting state per pupil aid from school districts that students use voucher to leave in favor of private schools.
This is about as far off the recent Indiana Supreme Court decision, which upheld a similar program here a little over a month ago, as the court could have gone.
For Indiana, it’s significant because it likely leaves the Hoosier state standing alone as the prime example of a very wide-ranging voucher program. Continue Reading →
Five of the seven Indiana school corporations asking for tax levy increases succeeded in Tuesday's special election.
Four more votes — that’s all it would have taken to tie a close election in Porter County Tuesday night. The Metropolitan School District of Boone Township asked voters to approve a 23-cent tax levy increase per $100 of assessed valuation: 543 said yes, 547 said no.
Boone Township already has one of the highest tax rates in the state. But it hasn’t been enough to make up a shortfall in state funding.
“Once again, funding for education depends on where you live,” says Superintendent George Letz. “I don’t know why the legislature does not ever get that point across that there’s still unequal funding in the school districts of Indiana.”
Five of the seven Indiana school corporations appealing to voters for additional funding succeeded at the ballot box Tuesday. The other loser was the Knox Community School Corporation, which had hoped to raise $16 million to rebuild part of its elementary school. Continue Reading →
Like many Indiana schools built in the 1950s and 60s, Snider High School in Fort Wayne wasn't built with security in mind. The school is getting a newer, safer entrance as part of a district-wide building project.
If voters in Starke County approve a 28-cent tax levy increase Tuesday, students at Knox Elementary will get a new wing — and the district will get a safer, more secure administrative office.
“Right now the superintendent’s office is located in the middle of the school,” says Knox Superintendent A.J. Gappa. “With all the school safety concerns, having the superintendent’s office in the middle of the elementary is not an ideal location.”
Instead, the proposed construction plan isolates Gappa and other administrators on one end of the building, farther from students.
The district isn’t pitching its referendum as a school security upgrade — Gappa says the portion of the elementary flagged for replacement was built in the 1950s and is now out-of-date — but add Knox to a growing list of school corporations using construction referenda to rebuild with safety in mind. Continue Reading →
Carpe Diem Indiana announced Monday that opening the Fort Wayne campus, Carpe Diem-Summit, will be postponed because of delays in finalizing a lease agreement. Despite the delays, the school still hopes to locate at The Summit, a building on the former Taylor University campus, at 1025 W. Rudisill Blvd.
Carpe Diem-Summit was approved to model Carpe Diem-Meridian located in Indianapolis. The school would be run by Carpe Diem Learning Systems, an education management company based in Arizona. The Indiana Charter School Board approved the application for the Fort Wayne campus earlier this year with one key condition.
The school serving grades six through 12 was to show evidence by July 15 that its enrollment would fall between its break-even point and its goal of 130 students for the first year. The break-even number would likely be about 100 students. Continue Reading →
Zach Chatham, 24, graduated from Indiana University with degrees in business foundations, economics and policy analysis in December. He's since worked at a restaurant and a bank.
This post was written by Rachel Hartog, an Indiana University journalism student and WTIU intern.
But students who don’t use vocational education as a stepping stone to a higher degree may find themselves competing for jobs with overqualified college graduates who can’t find work in their chosen fields. As many as 53 percent of people under the age of 25 with bachelor’s degrees are unemployed or underemployed — and they’re taking jobs traditionally occupied by high school graduates.
Emily Kitchen graduated just one year ago from Indiana University in Bloomington but has already applied to more than 60 job openings without landing more than a temporary position at a trade association in Washington, D.C.
“It’s hard after a long day to come home and apply to jobs,” says Kitchen. “They say that applying to jobs is a job in itself, and it’s true. It can get very discouraging and disheartening very quickly.” Continue Reading →
Facilities Manager Darren Hess and Snider High School Principal Deborah Watson explain Fort Wayne Community Schools' plan to renovate 36 buildings.
As a rule of thumb, for every ten cents a school corporation asks for when proposing a tax levy increase, it knocks a percentage point off the number of voters supporting the referendum.
“In a close election, that could make the difference,” says Purdue agricultural economist Larry DeBoer. “Though most of these elections haven’t been that close.”
Before 2008, Indiana school corporations could levy up to $2 million without asking for taxpayer approval. But changes to how schools are funded have sent an increasing number of districts to the ballot box in the last five years. Only 16 of the 40 districts that have pursued major construction projects have succeeded.
That has DeBoer and others who study school finance curious about the future of facilities maintenance in Indiana schools.
“Will it be the case that some school corporations find that they can pass the referendum and therefore they can keep their facilities up to date and have new buildings and better facilities,” he says, “while other school corporations perhaps cannot?” Continue Reading →
Last year voters residing within the boundaries of Fort Wayne Community Schools approved a $119 million building renovation project, including major construction at Snider High.
For years, neighboring states have asked voters to approve rate increases when local schools wanted to construct new buildings or renovate old ones. But Indiana is still relatively new to referenda. Since 2008, 80 school referenda questions have appeared on the ballot.
It might sound like a lot, says Larry DeBoer, an agricultural economist who studies school finance at Purdue, but it’s not relative to the total number of districts in Indiana.
“Most school corporations have not touched this thing,” he says. Continue Reading →
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