A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

General Assembly’s Fractured Approach to School Size

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Chris Lagoni and Terry Spradlin, writing commentary in the Indiana Capital Chronicle have a column entitled “Fallacies of the School District Consolidation Debate in Indiana.” The whole thing is worth reading, but I wanted to underscore how the General Assembly is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it talks about the benefits of school consolidation. On the one hand, we’re told that traditional public schools really should consider consolidation because of economies of scale and so forth. On the other, hand we have the General Assembly subsidizing private and charter schools with tiny enrollments. The authors point out:

Today, there are approximately 105 charter schools in the state with an average student enrollment of 436 students. Conversely, there are only five school corporations in the state with enrollment below five hundred students. Indiana’s approach is to have the state carry more and more varied and individual expenses for education, not to consolidate them.

They also take a dig at the forgiveness of charter school debt which the General Assembly has not done for traditional public schools. When discussing ways to encourage consolidation, the authors state:

[O]ne of the significant reasons these discussions have fallen apart in the past has been the effect the consolidation will have on local tax rates. Consolidation of districts may impose a higher tax rate on some residents of the new district. In addition, closing a building, expanding another, adding miles of bus routes, and/or planning for a future building could also impact tax rates. About 10 years ago, the Indiana General Assembly forgave $92 million dollars in charter school debt for closed schools. A similar approach could be taken to help communities wanting to consolidate. School districts carry debt, and another community may not want to inherit the duty of paying for debt obligations previously incurred. Elimination of debt obligations would help facilitate additional consolidations.

HB 1376 – School Referendum Election Dates

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Rep. Behning’s HB 1376 would require that school referendums be held only during general elections – except that, in the case of a school district entirely within a municipality, they can be held during a municipal election. My own West Lafayette schools could not have held the referendum it did during the municipal elections of 2023 because, although the vast bulk of the district is in the city of West Lafayette, there are some outlying members of the school district who are not in the municipal corporate limits.

This is part of some ongoing gamesmanship with school funding referendums. It used to be that you could hold those referendums during primaries or even hold a special election if none was taking place in the near future. (West Lafayette’s previous referendum was in 2017 when there were no general or municipal elections). But, as it turns out, when citizens showing up to vote are mostly concerned about education and well-informed about the ballot question, they tend to vote in favor of funding the schools. If the pool of citizens voting are mostly showing up to vote for a Presidential candidate and happen to see the school question at the bottom of the ballot, the support for referendums goes down.

So, advocates for public education tend to want to hold the question at times when citizens attention is more focused; and those who are more inclined to starve public education for resources, are more likely to push for times when voting on school questions is more of an afterthought.

HB 1043: Tax Exemption for Gold and Silver

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I’m getting out over my skis a little bit here because I’m not familiar with the world of gold and silver transactions. But, HB 1043 looks like a tax exemption for gold bugs. It talks about gold and silver coins and bullion as specie legal tender and then exempts legal tender from personal property assessment and from the state gross sales tax. The fiscal note says that the exemptions already in place for certain coins and bullion is already pretty expensive for the State. (A Sales Tax Information Bulletin from the Indiana Dept. of Revenue talks about the exemptions already on the books.) This bill would cost the state more money.

 

HJR 1 – Ballot Initiatives

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Presumably this is going directly into the equivalent of a General Assembly trash can, but Rep. Errington has introduced HJR-1 which would institute a ballot initiative process in Indiana. I see chatter on political boards from time to time where citizens of Indiana see state constitutional amendments initiated by citizens in other states (lately abortion and marijuana seem to have been the big ones) and wonder why nobody does that here. It’s because our state’s constitution doesn’t allow such things where other state constitutions do.

I would be shocked to see it happen here. This constitutional amendment would allow citizens to propose statutes and constitutional amendments independent of the General Assembly. As written, such a proposal would require a petition with signatures from a number of Indiana voters equal to 2% of the voters who voted for Secretary of State in the last Secretary of State election. (That office is during a midterm election cycle, so the number would be lower than some other options — if my math is right, in 2022, there were about 1.85 million votes, meaning you’d need 37,000 signatures until the next election.)

If the new measure requires some kind of funding, it doesn’t go into effect until something happens (General Assembly or initiative) that appropriates the necessary funding. The governor can’t veto a measure and the General Assembly cannot repeal a statute passed by ballot initiative.

SB 129: Reimbursement of Officer Basic Training Expenses by Subsequent Employer

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Sen. Byrne has introduced SB 129 which provides for reimbursement to a unit of government that pays for an officer’s basic training if the officer goes to work for a new employer. This seems to be a particularly pressing issue for smaller units of government to which basic training is a bigger percentage of the budget and which also likely can’t afford to pay the higher salaries. So, a new officer gets hired by a smaller city or county; gets some training on that unit’s dime; and, now having training and experience, goes to work for a bigger agency to make more money.

The bill lists the eligible expenses and then provides that, if an officer is hired by a new agency within one year of completing basic training, the new employer has to reimburse the old employer 100% of the eligible costs; 2/3 of the eligible costs between one and two years; and 1/3 of the eligible costs between two and three years. If the officer goes on to a third employer, there is language allowing the second employer to recoup some of what it paid to the first employer.

The downside of this is that it will tend to inhibit an officer’s ability to leave a bad situation and go to a better one or generally seek employment as he or she sees fit. (In some cases, however, it might enhance the employability if the officer is working for a unit of government that imposes more draconian reimbursement requirements.)

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

SB 105: Update of Drainage Handbook

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Sen. Leising has introduced SB 105 which would require the Indiana Department of Agriculture to update the Indiana Drainage Handbook. The most recent version was revised in 1999. The bill allows for the Department to hire the work out to a private contractor. The current version was prepared by the engineering firm of Christopher Burke & Associates. (Who, for what it’s worth, does a good job with respect to helping out the Tippecanoe County Drainage Board.) The private contractor would work under the oversight of the Department of Agriculture and an advisory board which would have to include certain members (e.g. a County Commissioner, a County Surveyor, a representative of DNR, an engineer, etc.)

One of the things I do for my job is advise our local drainage board. I can’t emphasize how important and overlooked drainage is. It’s one of those things that, when done poorly, can be utterly disastrous; and one of those things that, when done properly, can be almost invisible. Drainage doesn’t happen by accident. Among other things, it involves engineers with technical know-how and local bureaucracy designing and enforcing regulations. When your considering the pros and cons of a political philosophy, you could do worse than think about how effectively that philosophy would handle drainage matters.

Anyway, this strikes me as reasonable legislation. It’s been awhile since the handbook was updated.

SB 130: Deadline to Grant or Deny Order for Protection

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Sen. Becker has introduced SB 130 which requires a court to either grant or deny an order for protection in domestic violence situations within a day of the request. Specifically, this seems to apply to situations where the petitioner is asking for an immediate, ex parte, order. (“Ex parte” means that one of the parties hasn’t been given a chance to present their side to the court yet. Usually, when something is permitted to happen ex parte, it’s done for a brief period of time until the court can conduct a fuller hearing on the matter.) The current statute is here.

Urgency is no doubt necessary in a lot of situations, so the intent of the bill is laudable. But I don’t see any consequences if the court doesn’t issue an order within the day. I suppose you could request the Supreme Court to issue a mandamus order, compelling the lower court to act; but that won’t exactly be speedy either. Maybe there aren’t any great consequences the legislature could impose. Our justice system is designed for many things; but being nimble isn’t one of them.

School Administration Discussion with Teachers Associations

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Sen. Ford has introduced SB 62 which would require schools (through their superintendents) to meet and discuss certain items with teachers’ unions. The specified topics are class sizes and pupil/teacher ratio; hours and prep time; selection of curricular materials; student supports; and instructional materials. These discussion topics are not a bargaining session. Neither side has to make any kind of commitment, and an impasse doesn’t trigger the collective bargaining rules.

There is a provision in the executive session portion of the Open Door Law which permits collective bargaining to take place in executive session. That provision specifically excludes “discussion” as a type of collective bargaining that can take place in executive session. While the proposed legislation strikes that exclusion, I don’t know that it actively says that discussion can take place as part of an executive session. However, it does strike the provision that requires a discussion session to be open to all teachers. It also strikes a provision that says that such discussions are not subject to the open door law. (On the other hand, if it’s just the superintendent and union reps, I don’t think it would qualify as a “meeting” under the Open Door Law in the first place.)

For the most part, this rolls back elimination of teacher discussion obligations passed last year. The proposed version has a more limited list of discussion items than the pre-2023 law. Given the partisan makeup of the Senate, I don’t expect this proposal to gain my traction. But, as a matter of policy, I think it’s good for the reasons I expressed last year.

The new law would strip the requirement that a school discuss the matters at all. It would now say that the school employer may conduct discussions and, furthermore, may do it with a non-representative group of teachers behind closed doors if it so chooses. That last part gives away the game. Cherry pick your teachers, hot box them, and/or play them off against each other to get the answers you want.

School privatization has three main goals: subsidize religious education, weaken teacher’s unions, and divert public funds to private interests. This isn’t privatization, but it’s clearly in support of goal #2. Requiring discussion with someone who represents teachers as a group has been in place for 40+ years. Having teacher representatives and administrators talk regularly is a good way to make sure that issues don’t turn into problems and that small problems don’t turn into big problems. During my stint on the West Lafayette school board, I was one of the board representatives to a discussion group that met once a month. It was not uncommon for those discussions to, among other things, allow administrators to float plans they had and to tweak those plans in a way that helped teachers do their jobs better.

This is anti-teacher, union busting; plain and simple.

Books of 2023

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If I counted correctly, I read about 34 books this year. Some substantial, plenty just for a good read. Books beat just doom scrolling through social media – which I probably still do too much of. Here is the list:

  • Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest – Fernando Cervantes. This was a good one. A very readable history of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
  • Two Nights in Lisbon – Chris Pavone. I did not enjoy this one. A mystery where a woman’s husband disappears in Lisbon. He had a double life. I grew to actively dislike the protagonist and didn’t care what happened to any of the characters.
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson. Bryson is delightful. This was a re-read. Bryson starts with the Big Bang and goes from there.
  • Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Very creative new(ish) science fiction series. Humanity mostly dies out. There are spiders that evolve.
  • 1984 – George Orwell. We all know the book. Good to re-read from time to time. Newspeak is fascinating.
  • Children of Ruin – Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sequel to Children of Time. There’s a third book that I have not yet read.
  • Travels With Charley – John Steinbeck. Steinbeck and his dog Charley circumnavigate the continental U.S. counterclockwise. That book inspired some blog posts. Here’s one.
  • The Big U – Neal Stephenson. Things get weird at an enormous university dormitory. This is Stephenson’s earliest work. It is not his finest work. He recognizes this. I’ve read that he only allowed continued publication because his fans were having to pay outsized prices on ebay to get copies.
  • The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop – Jonathan Abrams. I really enjoyed this one. It is, as the name suggests, a lot of the folks involved in early hip-hop giving their perspectives on what was going on at the time. One minor detail I hadn’t appreciated – the significance of skating rinks as early venues. They had space, decent sound systems, and were usually cheap.
  • River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile – Candice Millard. One of those histories about the outsized personalities of the people exploring the blank spots on the map.
  • Upgrade – Blake Crouch. Crouch writes a good sci-fi thriller. In this case gene editing has made a guy superhuman and hijinx ensue.
  • The Ice Pick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science – Sam Kean. The title tells the tale. A series of chapters telling the story of various misdeeds in the name of science. The title comes from the guy who would go to fairs and perform lobotomies with an ice pick.
  • From Property to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance – Sheila Kennedy and Morton Marcus. A bit of scholarship from a couple of prominent Indiana academics. A plain English discussion of social, legal, economic, and technological trends describing women’s progress from subordinates to (increasingly) equal members of society. It also describes the backlash we’re seeing to those developments.
  • Poster Girl – Veronica Roth. A science fiction book telling the story of a girl who was part of an elite ruling class, who was the face on propaganda posters. When she was young, the elites were overthrown and confined in a ghetto. A decade later, she goes out into the wider world and remains recognizable.
  • Unnatural History – Jonathan Kellerman. One of Kellerman’s Alex Delaware whodunit’s. A fun read, but I don’t remember too much about it.
  • Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage – Rachel Gross. A nonfiction book on the current state of women’s health and its history. The history of overlooking women’s health is almost laughably bad at times.
  • The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West – David McCullough. A history of the earliest settlers in the Northwest Territory – primarily around Marietta, Ohio.
  • The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America – Dean Snow. Ingram was a regular sailor who got marooned in Central America in 1568. Over the course of the next year, he and two other guys walked about 3,000 miles up to the coast of Maine where they were rescued. It was particularly good for giving a sense that what is now the U.S. was a bustling, fairly developed place prior to being ravaged by the diseases that came with contact.
  • Reacher: No Plan B – Lee Child. One of his Reacher action books. As per usual, Reacher is smarter, stronger, and faster than everyone else. The women love him and the bad guys fear him.
  • The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder – David Grann. A British ship, part of an effort to cause trouble for the Spanish, wrecks off the coast of South America, leaving survivors stranded on a desolate island in Patagonia. They don’t play nicely with one another. Members of the warring groups manage to get back to Great Britain and tell conflicting tales.
  • The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music – Dave Grohl. An autobiography by Foo Fighters front man, Dave Grohl. He seems like a good guy, and he has some stories to tell.
  • This Time Tomorrow – Emma Straub. Fiction about a woman turning 40, mostly focused on her relationship with her father. Time travel is a plot device. I liked this one a fair bit.
  • Pines – Blake Crouch. Crouch is a good author and this one was decent, but it wasn’t among my favorites of his work. An FBI agent comes to in a little town where he was doing an investigation. But things get weird and all is not what it seems.
  • Fairytale – Stephen King. King is at the top of the heap for a reason. He produces quickly and consistently. A kid helps a cranky old man and ends up finding a portal to a fantasy land that needs his help.
  • The 90s – Chuck Klosterman. A nostalgic recounting of the decade. Like any retrospective, it has to simplify. And, looking back always minimizes the things we were afraid of (because we survived them) and highlights the things that were cool or interesting (because the mundane isn’t worth mentioning.)
  • Light Bringer – Pierce Brown. The sixth installment of the Red Rising series. If you like that kind of science fiction, it’s a great series and Light Bringer was one of the stronger books.
  • John Dies at the End – David Wong. Kind of wacky, kind of gory. A surreal story that was funny but, if I’m honest, not one of my favorites.
  • A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over the Heartland and the Woman Who Stopped Them – Timothy Egan. While there are some details about the prior history of the Klan and some of the doings in other places, this is mostly an account of D.C. Stephenson and the rapid rise and fall of the Klan in Indiana. Very well told and right in my wheelhouse. Timely as well inasmuch as some of the social dynamics that let Stephenson thrive seem to be problematic once again.
  • Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth – Reza Aslan. A pretty interesting account of the historical life of Jesus, as near as we can tell.
  • Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan – Herbert Bix. This is one that I’m very happy to have read, but it was a bit like homework. The book spends a good amount of time on Hirohito’s upbringing and sets the stage with enough detail about the Meiji era as well as his father’s reign and how those informed the early part of Hirohito’s reign. One thing leads to another and, before long, Japan’s acquisition of chunks of China is proceeding apace. Then it has the tiger by the tail. Domestic politics were such that Hirohito and those in his circle didn’t see a way (and it’s not clear they had any appetite to do so in any event) to back away from imperial expansionism without support at home collapsing. They seemed to have kind of known that they had no clear exit plan once they attacked the U.S.
  • Termination Shock – Neal Stephenson. One of Stephenson’s more recent books. A Texas billionaire who made his money with Buc-ee’s style gas stations shoots a bunch of sulfur into the air in order to slow down global warming.
  • Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The story follows some of the stars of “hard action sports.” Basically death matches where individuals convicted of rape and murder are put in a reality TV, gladiator setting. If they survive long enough, they get their freedom. Mostly, they don’t. The story – particularly the footnotes – provides a lot of criticism of our own, actual prison system.
  • Lost in the Valley of Death – Harley Rustad. This has an “Into the Wild” vibe about it. Young man wanders around rather than getting a job. It doesn’t end well.
  • Boys from Biloxi – John Grisham. A Grisham page turner. It follows the lives of two kids from Biloxi who grow up into adults on opposite sides of the legal system.

HB 1016 – Limitation on School Board Candidates

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Rep. Morrison (and co-authors Teshka, Morris, and Prescott) have introduced HB 1016 which would prohibit employees or “agents” of schools from being on the school board. So far as I can tell, “agent” is undefined.

Because this provision is in IC 3-8-1-34 regarding candidate qualifications, this would prohibit employees or “agents” from being candidates — not just from serving on the school board. There is currently a provision in IC 20-26-4-11 which states that an individual who is employed as a teacher or as a non-certified employee is ineligible to be a member of the governing body of the school corporation.

There is a provision with respect to employees of certain units of government (County, Cities, Towns) that ends up meaning that they can run for office as an employee but, if elected and they take office, they cease to be an employee. I suspect the same would be true under current law for school employees.  This new law would disqualify school employees from being candidates in the first place. It would also exclude “agents,” whatever that means exactly.

It’s unclear what exactly this bill is trying to accomplish. It seems like it is not accomplishing a great deal, but maybe is an effort to limit people knowledgeable about local school operations from being on the school board. (It doesn’t seem to do much of anything with respect to conflicts of interest because, again, there is a law on the books about school employees serving on the board.)