INDIANAPOLIS — Fairfield Community Schools need cash.
The small district in northwest Indiana has frozen salaries in four of the past five years. It’s cut administrative costs. So far, it has managed to avoid teacher layoffs and larger class sizes, but it’s not clear how much longer it can hold out.
School officials have rejected the idea of asking voters — mostly farmers and factory workers — to raise property taxes to give more money to schools. They’ve tried to boost enrollment by offering more programs, including vocational training to draw students from the local Amish community.
Compared to other public school districts, Fairfield doesn’t see much help from the state. Since the state took over school funding six years ago, its contributions to Fairfield have fallen below what others get.
“We’re on the brink financially,” said Superintendent Steve Thalheimer. “We don’t expect as much money as other larger districts receive, but we need funding closer to the state average.”
He may soon be in luck. The state’s next, two-year budget is likely to top $30 billion, with 44 percent of that going to K-12 education. And House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, has said revamping how the state gives money to school districts is a top priority for Republicans who have super-majority control over the House.
That makes school officials nervous in Goshen, a few miles north of the Fairfield district. They get about $1,100 more in state dollars for every student than Fairfield schools.
And, Goshen officials say, they can’t afford to lose any of it.
Two-thirds of Goshen students live in poverty. Almost half are children of Latino immigrants, lured to the area by factories, who speak little or no English.
Goshen uses its state money for school nurses, counselors, translators and a team of specialists who work with failing students and parents who don’t speak enough English to help their children with their homework.
The neighboring districts offer very different perspectives on the complex debate that’s likely to occupy lawmakers for much of the next year. Republicans have said they want to narrow the gap between the lowest and highest funded districts, but it’s not clear what that will entail.
Thalheimer said his district welcomes more money. It now ranks in the bottom 20 of 350 public school districts and charter academies in the state in per-pupil funding.
Yet Thalheimer said he worries that lawmakers will just reshuffle the $6.7 billion spent each year on K-12 education by pulling money from some schools to give to others.
“We don’t want to be known as the district that’s taking money away from the high-poverty schools. I know the challenges they face,” he said. “If all we do is reshuffle the pie, that just shifts the losers and the winners around.”
In Goshen, Superintendent Diane Woodworth expresses a similar fear.
“More money has to go into the pot if we really care about education,” she said.
CLARK AND FLOYD COUNTIES
For the most part, school districts in the region can expect modest bumps in per-student funding for next year.
Every district in Clark County has a projected increase for the 2015 school year, according to school formula estimates from the state. Greater Clark’s per-student funding goes from $6,840 in 2014 to $6,913 in 2015. West Clark is expected to go from $6,170 to $6,223 and Clarksville from $7,149 to $7,200.
The exception to the rule is the New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corp. According to the projections, their funding is expected to decrease from $6,434 per student in 2014 to $6,418. The drop would represent the loss of about $350,000.
Fred McWhorter, chief business officer for the district, said he’s not yet seen the data, but he expected an increase.
He said there’s still time for those numbers to change.
“We’ll see how the legislative plan pans out,” McWhorter said. “Our enrollment’s up a little, so that’s helped us.”
But he said with the state sitting on extra money, he wouldn’t be happy to see the money go away from the district’s general fund it is part of the evening out process.
“I’d be really disappointing if it goes down, especially since the state’s sitting on about a $1 billion,” McWhorter said.
‘HARD LOOK’
While Republicans leaders have called for more overall education spending, how much and where that money will go are unclear. Much depends on the state’s revenue forecast, due out this week.
Gov. Mike Pence has endorsed spending more on education, but in a recent speech he also warned, “Money alone isn’t the answer.”
Pence has proposed spending more on private school vouchers and charter schools, and he said that money should be spent on “funding excellence.”
Woodworth said she worries that means less for traditional public schools with large numbers of students in poverty. Test scores, routinely used to benchmark schools, are typically lower in those schools than in wealthier districts.
“You can tie school performance to demographics,” she said.
But Bosma has promised a “hard look” at how the state’s money is divided among urban, suburban and rural districts.
The disparities in allocations mostly date to 2008, when the General Assembly took over school funding and raised the state sales tax to pay for it. The aim was to give equitable funding to schools from rich and poor communities.
The formula since has undergone multiple changes.
Under the current system, most of the money is divided among schools on a per-pupil basis - so-called “foundation” funding that accounts for 80 percent of the state’s education dollars.
The other 20 percent — $1.2 billion — is earmarked for students living in poverty and is distributed to districts based on the percentage of students with families living near the poverty line.
Districts with the most state funds — mostly in urban areas — receive close to $9,000 per student. Some faster-growing suburban and rural districts get thousands less.
Fairfield Community Schools, for example, get about $5,100 — about $600 less per-pupil than the state average.
IS IT A REAL FIX?
Fixing the formula will be divisive, Bosma predicts, but not along party lines. The split is more likely to be parochial, he said, “because it will impact each one of our school corporations. But it must be done.”
The Democrats who represent Indiana’s urban areas are skeptical.
Senate Minority Leader Tim Lanane, whose Anderson district stands to lose money if the formula is altered, worries that there won’t be enough to help lower-funded districts without hurting others.
“I can tell you what schools are going to take it on the chin,” Lanane said. “It’s going to be the urban area schools.”
Changing the state’s funding formula, others argue, doesn’t necessarily fix anything.
Sen. Luke Kenley, R-Noblesville, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, questions the premise of the state’s large, suburban schools that they need more money to operate. A gatekeeper in the budget process, he argues that just looking at the state funding formula ignores other revenue that schools receive through local and federal taxes.
He cites the Zionsville Community Schools, which are on the low end for state dollars. Accounting for federal and local revenues, Zionsville gets more than $12,700 per student — almost $1,000 more than the state average.
Zionsville officials argue that local and federal dollars are tied to specific uses and cannot be used for operating costs.
But Kenley is skeptical. “They’ll have to show me they need more money,” he said.
Fairfield school officials hope to make that case. Their district is on the bottom rung, even after adding local and federal revenues. When all is counted, their district gets about $10,800 for each student. That’s below the state average of $11,700, and below Goshen’s take of $12,500.
The funding dilemma is especially hard for legislators with a mix of schools in their districts.
Sen. Carlin Yoder, a conservative Republican from Middlebury who sits on the Senate Education Committee, has both Fairfield and Goshen in his district.
He’s a Fairfield High School graduate and knows its funding challenges. Among them are Amish families served by the district who don’t accept government handouts and won’t fill out paperwork for free school lunches and textbooks. Those programs, however, are indicators that often bring more dollars to schools under the current funding formula.
Yet Yoder doesn’t want Fairfield to get more money at Goshen’s expense.
“From where I’m standing, I wouldn’t accuse Goshen of misspending money,” he said. “They’re being asked to educate a large number of students with English as their second language. It takes more money to do that. There’s just no getting around that.”
Changing the formula might be inevitable, he said. “We have to get it right, I don’t think we can make wholesale changes quickly without understanding the long-term impact on our schools,” he said.
News and Tribune reporter Jerod Clapp contributed to this report.