For voters in nine Hoosier communities, their most meaningful decision of the 2022 election concerns an investment in their local schools.
It more directly affects people’s lives and the future than any political race or cultural-war-of-the-season. That’s been true in every Indiana election since 2008, when the state shifted to requiring voter approval for property-tax increases to pay for significant operational needs or construction projects in their local school districts. Those choices come in the form of a ballot question known as a referendum. Voters in counties across Indiana have faced those decisions 245 times in the 14-year span. And, 158 times, voters said yes.
This fall, voters will make those choices in Wabash, Brown, Carroll, Steuben, Jackson, Monroe, Allen, Wells and Hamilton counties. Folks in Vigo County may want to study the outcomes of those votes.
Vigo Countians didn’t face such a decision until 2019, when they solidly backed a $7-million referendum to boost teacher pay, particularly the low salaries for starting and early-career teachers in the Vigo County School Corp. Then last May, Vigo voters overwhelmingly turned down a property-tax rise for a $261-million project to renovate and rebuild the county’s three aging high schools and West Vigo Middle School.
Seven of nine local school referendums across Indiana passed in May. Six of the approved referendums will provide operational funds for teacher and staff pay, resource officers, buses, smaller class sizes and preserving music and arts programs. One will pay for construction of a new school in Lebanon, where voters also OK’d an operational referendum.
The two school-construction referendums rejected in May were Vigo County’s high schools project and a plan to expand a high school and upgrade six elementary schools in Franklin Township in Marion County. The rejections came in counties on two different trajectories. Vigo is losing family-age residents and has Indiana’s highest child-poverty rate, according to the annual County Health Rankings from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Franklin Township is a fast-growing community near Indianapolis.
Since the Indiana General Assembly adopted the referendum system for property-tax increases for local school needs, voters have approved 64% of those requests, including 70% for operational funds and 55% for construction projects, according to calculations by Larry DeBoer, a Purdue University tax policy expert. Yet, since the pandemic began in 2020, voters have approved 79% of all school referendums, including 75% of capital (construction and safety) projects.
Such trends don’t influence voters, though. Local concerns drive referendum votes. In May, Vigo County voters had the VCSC’s past troubles and a school closing debate on their minds, too, as they decided the high schools renovation project’s fate.
Still, the choices made by each community on referendums help paint a statewide map of how highly the quality of local schools is prioritized and supported.
Of the nine referendums on local ballots in Indiana for the Nov. 8 election, eight would fund operational needs, and several are renewals and extensions of existing referendums. Wabash County’s referendum involves a $114-million construction project of a new $72-million high school and renovations to two other schools, according to the Metropolitan School District of Wabash County website.
Five of the school districts seeking referendum funds this fall are located in counties highly rated for school funding adequacy, according to the annual County Health Rankings’ 2022 report. Those include Hamilton (fourth-best in the state), Carroll (sixth), Wells (ninth), Steuben (10th) and Monroe (13th). Also among the top 40 in Indiana are Allen (29th), Brown (38th) and Wabash (40th).
Only Jackson County at 82nd-best ranks in the bottom half for school funding adequacy. Will those communities’ track record of generally strong support for funding schools matter in these referendum votes? That’s impossible to predict. Local twists — and the misleading, state-mandated referendum wording — could sway those decisions this time. That said, the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior.
Vigo County ranked 72nd-best out of 92 counties for school funding adequacy in this year’s County Health Rankings. The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute bases those calculations on equity. The needs of each county in the U.S. vary, so the rankings builds those variations into its formula.
Indiana school districts spend about $76 per student annually below the estimated need to support achievement of average U.S. test scores, the Population Health Institute analysts told the Tribune-Star in May. Vigo County falls $311 per-student, per-year shy of that adequate level, analysts Christine Muganda and Michael Stevenson said then.
The slice of Vigo County property taxes going to the local school corporation is relatively low, compared to the state. Vigo has the eighth-highest property-tax rate overall among Hoosier counties, yet the portion paid toward the VCSC’s unit rate ranks 169th-highest out of 290 districts, according to DeBoer’s figures.
Someday, Vigo County residents will have to revisit some sort of decision on rebuilding or renovation of the three high schools, which were built in low-cost style more than a half-century ago and have outlived their life expectancies and prime service years. West Vigo opened in 1960. Terre Haute North and Terre Haute South opened in 1971. Through dozens of community forums and online surveys over the past couple years, participants favored rebuilding or renovating those schools on their present sites. With last May’s overwhelming rejection of the $261-million plan to do that and renovate West Vigo Middle School all at once, some other option — presumably involving a smaller, less lengthy tax increase — will be on that future Vigo County ballot. If the cheapest alternative is the priority, voters might be asked to fund a consolidation of the three high schools into one new mega-school.
School funding decisions made by other Hoosier communities may not influence the future course of action taken by Vigo County. But the comparable quality and appeal of those neighboring counties’ school systems will affect the Terre Haute area’s ability to compete for new businesses, new workers and new residents in the meantime.