Editor’s note: This is the first part in a limited series about school funding in Brown County. Part two will run in the Feb. 10 paper.
On Wednesdays, teachers and staff in Brown County schools wear red.
It’s how they show their support for a statewide movement called Red for Ed.
The campaign focuses on improving school funding in Indiana. It has three main priorities: Fair and equitable funding; retaining teachers and increasing teacher compensation; and improving student learning conditions and meeting students’ needs.
Public schools in Indiana receive funding from a variety of sources, but the biggest source is state tuition support, which is based on student enrollment.
For several years, Brown County Schools has continued to see declining enrollment for many reasons, including a lack of affordable housing for families to move here and an increasing 65-and-older population. This affects the district’s budget, causing cuts to be made.
Since 2016, the district has cut more than $4.5 million from its budget using a variety of methods, including not replacing teachers who leave, switching health insurance plans, and teaching certain Career and Technical Education courses that are reimbursable by the state.
Changes at the state level have also resulted in reductions to Brown County Schools’ budget, along with the budgets of other rural districts.
Part of the calculation of how much money districts receive per student is the “complexity index.” Previously, the complexity index was based on the number of students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch in the county. Starting last school year, it is now based on the percentage of students who qualify for SNAP or TANF and foster students.
More than half of the students in Brown County qualify for free or reduced lunch. But those who qualify for SNAP or TANF benefits is lower, as not as many eligible families choose to use those benefits.
The number of students in the district along with the number of English learners here are also factors in the calculation. The district also receives money each month for honor students, special education students, and the CTE courses.
“You’re always sort of playing chase to the number of students you’re serving and the number of dollars you’re generating,” Superintendent Laura Hammack said.
“When you are serving a school community of six buildings across a county, it’s very difficult to reduce expenditures in order to align with that revenue decline because you have the same number of physical plans and same number of staff employed. It’s a tough thing, and it’s a sincerely tough thing for rural communities because of the expanse and area that we serve.”
Hammack joined a virtual panel of teachers, parents and a Brown County High School student to discuss the challenges of school funding on Jan. 25.
Last February, Gov. Eric Holcomb created a statewide commission to study teacher pay and then make recommendations. The Next Level Teacher Compensation Commission issued a report late last year. Recommendations in the 97-page report were separated into two sections: for public schools to implement and for state government to implement.
In her Superintendent’s Corner column which ran in the Jan. 27 Brown County Democrat, Hammack reported that Brown County Schools had already implemented most of the 13 recommendations for public schools over the last five years. Those recommendations included adjusting teacher and staff ratios where appropriate and passing an operating referendum.
Voters approved an 8-cent referendum for the school district in May 2016. One penny of that is used to sustain the Brown County Career Resource Center; the rest goes toward raises for certified and non-certified staff. Brown County Schools has given pay raises to employees for the past five years from that referendum money.
Before the referendum passed, Brown County teachers had been frozen at their current salary step due to a law passed in 2011 that prevented teachers from moving up the salary schedule solely on experience. After it passed, referendum money funded a 2.5 percent raise for the 2016-17 school year.
The Next Level Teacher Compensation Commission reported that teachers in Indiana are underpaid compared to other teachers regionally and nationally.
Indiana ranks 38th out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for its average starting teacher salary, which is $36,498, and average teacher salary, at $51,119.
The compensation commission determined that the average teacher salary should be $60,000 per year to make Indiana competitive.
There are 123 certified teachers working in Brown County. The average base salary here is $51,000, Hammack said.
Cost and effect
Being underpaid has a ripple effect on new teachers entering the profession, the quality of instruction, and retention and attrition of educators.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provided correlations between average teacher salaries and student proficiency, showing that as teacher salaries increase, so does student performance.
“If there was one message I would want to get out about Red for Ed, it would be that it really is at the core of it, it’s about our students,” said Brown County High School English teacher Rebekah Bryan, the district’s Red for Ed coordinator.
As coordinator, Bryan helps the campaign and any events here locally, like picking out the designs for the shirts teachers wear each Wednesday. She picked the two slogans for this year’s shirts: ‘Fund our Future’ and ‘The future of Indiana is in my school.’
“Yes, it is teaching funding and teacher respect, but the reason we want all of those things is so we can make what we do for our kids more effective,” Bryan said.
There has been a 29 percent decline in the number of people who complete teacher preparation programs in the last five years, according to the report.
In 2018, Indiana’s attrition rate — teachers leaving the profession — was 13 percent compared to the 8 percent nationally. This is not just an Indiana problem. In 2019, twice the number of educators left the profession nationally in 2019 as compared to 2009.
Amy Oliver, a lawyer most of her life, became a teacher at age 45. In six years, she taught 13 different subjects, from social studies, to intro to computer science (a CTE course), to mass media.
Last January, Oliver began counting her work week hours. “I worked about 65 hours a week. I just couldn’t figure out how to not,” she said.
Oliver left her teaching job at Brown County Junior High School at the end of last school year. She is now the newest member of the Brown County Schools Board of Trustees, where she plans to advocate for better pay for teachers.
“With COVID, I can’t even imagine. Again, you take that workload and in some cases double it. That’s what our teachers are doing,” she said.
“My issue with public teaching is we’re not allowing teachers enough time in order to prepare for those classes. Our contract is a half-hour at the end of the teaching day and we just don’t have enough hours in order to be able to prepare for that many preps and all of the other things that are required of us.”
Teachers are also responsible for teaching social-emotional learning by incorporating regular lessons into schools depending on the grade level. Those lessons reinforce concepts such as kindness, responsibility and respect, and reward students for good behavior. That started around 2016.
“I’ve always called it, ‘One more thing.’ We do this to teachers. We just say, ‘Oh here, do this one more thing.’ I’ve had a lot days where I just couldn’t do one more thing,” Oliver said.
Kristi Billings is president of the Brown County Educators Association. She said the primary way declining enrollment affects teachers is that they have to work more. “We end up having teachers that have to cover more content,” she said.
“Rather than only teaching ninth-grade English, you’re now teaching ninth, 10th, and maybe a section of 11th grade as well. The workload for teachers increases pretty significantly, because even though it’s fewer students, you still have to prepare for all of those different content areas fully, which adds a lot of hours to your day.”
Workload has increased even more with the pandemic, as teachers are required to adjust to changing quarantine schedules and teaching both remote and in-person classes.
“From a student’s perspective, you can definitely tell that our teachers, this year especially, are more exhausted than ever,” BCHS junior Marie Fields said.
“I know our teachers try their hardest to be lively and energetic, but it’s hard for them whenever they’re having to balance, like Amy (Oliver) said, 65 hours of work a week,” Fields said.
“You can tell that in a teacher. It just ultimately makes the learning experience a little less engaging and exciting whenever your teacher is literally exhausted.”
The state’s part
Gov. Eric Holcomb’s state two-year budget request included an increase of 2 percent in fiscal year 2022 and 1 percent in 2023 for K-12 tuition support.
If public school enrollment continues to decline in Brown County, the school district will continue to have to find ways to save money as less comes in from the state.
The Indiana General Assembly will be considering multiple education bills this legislative session, including whether or not to fund students who are learning virtually at 100 percent of the tuition support level, and whether schools will be held harmless for ILEARN test results, which are factored into accountability grades.
In a story in next week’s paper, teachers will discuss their feelings on the proposed legislation and share ways the community can help.
Bryan said that it is important to understand that the Red for Ed campaign is not just about teachers wanting to be paid more, but it’s about the students and making sure they all have an adequate education.
“I feel like initiatives like this Red for Ed can turn into, ‘Oh, those teachers are just whining again.’ We’re not. If I was whining, I am qualified to do other things. Every single person on this call is qualified to do other things,” Bryan said.
“There is not an educator in Brown County that I would say is not intelligent enough to go do any other thing we desire. We stay where we are because we love our kids, we love our students and we love our community.
SCHOOL BUDGET BASICS
Public schools in Indiana receive funding from a variety of sources, including state tuition support and property taxes.
Brown County Schools’ budget operates out of two main funds: education and operations.
State tuition support — a certain dollar amount for each student enrolled — go into the education fund, while the operations fund receives money from property taxes and other sources, Superintendent Laura Hammack explained.
The referendum money, which also comes from property taxes, has its own fund. It goes toward paying staff.
The district’s debt service fund is used to pay off any liabilities the district holds, like bonds or leases, and is funded by the same revenue sources as the operations fund.
The rainy day fund gets excess revenue.
There are rules for how money can be spent from each fund. The education fund can only be used to pay employees who are in the classroom, including teachers, paraprofessionals and principals. Hammack and other staff who not have a direct role in the classroom are paid from the operations fund.
“Those are rules, and we have to comply with the rules because those rules are checked during your every-other-year audit that the State Board of Accounts deploys for every school district across the state,” Hammack said.
Where BCS stands
At the Jan. 7 school board meeting, financial consultant Bob Harris presented an update on the district’s financial condition for 2020.
“With all of the things and issues that all of us had to deal with in 2020, Brown County Schools had an exceptional financial year. Our operations and our educational fund continue to have great cash balances,” he told the board.
In 2020 the district was able to increase its cash balance in those funds, he said. The district’s debt service fund also continues to have a “solid cash balance.”
“Believe it or not, this year we were able to increase the cash balance of our rainy day fund to over $2 million. The self-insurance fund is just amazing. It’s now in excess of $1.8 million,” Harris continued.
When Hammack took over as superintendent in 2016, the district’s health insurance fund was in the negative. By 2019, it was in the black by over $1.2 million. R.E. Sutton & Associates came on board after Hammack took over as superintendent to help change the district’s insurance plan.
In 2019, the school board approved a contract with Compass Group USA Inc. to start running the food service department through its Chartwells division. The food service department’s budget had been running $150,000 to $200,000 in the negative for a few years prior.
At the Jan. 7 meeting, Harris told the board that the switch was resulting in gains in the budget. “Chartwells has really indicated that 2021 may be just as good of a year and that would be amazing,” Harris said.
“Overall, the financial picture for Brown County Schools is just very good.”
Looking to the new year, Harris said the district would be focused on this year’s state legislative session as lawmakers consider bills regarding K-12 funding in general and funding for virtual learning.
Corporation treasurer Julie Smith also gave an update on the interest the district earned on its investments last year. Due to the pandemic, the district made $34,000 in interest this year, which is a 78 percent decrease from 2019.
“The interest rates fell so low that really there was just very limited increase in any of the investment income as experienced by districts across the nation,” Hammack said.
“We’re just pleased in this climate that we didn’t lose anything.”
Most of the finances are invested in the TrustIndiana fund, and the district has money in PNC bank because that is where the district’s checking is done.
