Editor’s note: This is the second part of a limited series about school funding in Brown County. You can find part one here.
Rebekah Bryan slowly walks up and down the aisles of desks in her room, stopping to check in with students in her mass media class — some with their heads in their hands, some with hands raised. Even with their mouths and noses covered, she has learned to read their cues, and adjusts her approach to each.
This is one of the many classes, and grades, that Bryan is teaching this school year in person and virtually. Due to a teacher moving to another school building, Bryan will have taught at least one student in every grade level at Brown County High School by the end of this school year.
Brown County Schools has been in a cost-saving mode for at least the last five years due to declining enrollment. Enrollment affects a large portion of the district’s budget. So, instead of hiring a new teacher when one leaves, current staff are deployed to cover the opening.
“The skill level of a ninth-grader is different than the skill level of a 12th-grader because they’ve had three extra years to practice those skills, so trying to adjust your methods of teaching and the pace can get a little bit overwhelming or a little bit taxing,” Bryan said.
“Just going from, ‘Oh shoot, now I’m back to ninth-grade mode, then, ‘Oh, now I’m in 11th grade mode,’ it adds extra learning for teachers as well.”
At the elementary level as well, budget cuts and declining enrollment also affect the consistency of how many students a teacher can expect to have in their classroom year to year.
At Helmsburg Elementary there’s only one class of first-graders and one class of fourth-graders this year due to the number of teachers in that building. Normally, there are two classrooms of each grade level.
“(With) what our students are used to getting, those class numbers are high,” said Brenda Ely, vice president of the Brown County Educators Association and a teacher at Helmsburg Elementary School for more than 20 years.
“Our fourth grade is sitting at 27 to 29 students right now. With social distancing, there’s almost no place to put them.”
Paraprofessionals help in the elementary school classrooms; however, the number of paraprofessionals employed here also continues to decrease. When the school district’s budget went through its first round of cuts in 2017, eight-and-a-half of the district’s 52-and-a-half paraprofessional jobs were eliminated. Those jobs are also not filled as paraprofessionals leave the district to work elsewhere.
“When we have those (high) numbers (in a single class) or we have kids with severe social emotional issues, we don’t have the help in the classrooms for that,” Ely said.
Teachers also have to be prepared to go to a grade level or building where they are needed if another teacher leaves the district.
“We try not to do that, because we know the best thing for the kids is to have a teacher that has experience at that grade level. But at the same time, with declining enrollment, we also have to go where we’re needed and where that position is,” Ely said.
“There’s a lot of planning, after-hours work, weekend work to meet the needs of our students.”
All that said, Ely also believes Brown County is “absolutely blessed to have some of the best teachers in state of Indiana.” Her three sons all attended school here.
“We have teachers who have stayed here through the budget crisis, through being frozen (at the same salary step) because they’re committed to Brown County and Brown County students,” she said.
Pandemic challenges
The needs of students are having to be met even more now — and in a variety of new ways — thanks to the pandemic.
“We became remote teachers in a blink of an eye,” Ely said.
“It’s really two full-time jobs going on at the same time, and keeping up with it all, it’s amazing.”
The amount of students in class in person or virtually can change at any time, as students are put on quarantine due to a COVID-19 diagnosis or exposures. Some families have decided to keep their students home the entire school year for virtual learning due to COVID-19 concerns.
Amy Oliver, the newest member of the Brown County Schools Board of Trustees, plans to advocate for teachers as they tackle three jobs at once: Remote teacher for quarantined students, in-person teacher, and virtual teacher for those students who have been learning at home since the beginning of the school year.
Oliver left her teaching job at Brown County Junior High School at the end of last school year. Even before COVID-related changes had to be made, she was working 65 hours a week.
“The complexity in it is very hard,” Oliver said, about trying to predict who’s going to be in class when because of COVID-19 exposures, and to shift teaching and expectations for students.
Public schools in Indiana receive funding from a variety of sources, but the biggest source is state “tuition support,” a certain amount per each student enrolled.
Indiana code states that students who attend school virtually are funded at 85 percent of the regular funding level. But last summer, the Indiana State Board of Education passed an emergency rule that allowed school districts to collect 100 percent of tuition support for virtual students until the end of 2020.
After Jan. 1, that funding could return to the 85-percent mark if state legislators do not vote to keep it at 100 percent this session. House Bill 1003 and Senate Bill 2 focus on defining “virtual instruction” for the purpose of state tuition support.
Brown County High School junior Marie Fields is the chairperson for Brown County Students for Equity at the high school. She said the group contacted Rep. Chris May and Sen. Eric Koch about supporting funding virtual learning due to COVID-19 concerns at 100 percent.
“If a student chooses to prioritize their health or their family’s health, their education shouldn’t be jeopardized because of that. That’s a huge equity issue,” Fields said.
Koch said he believes school corporations will be made “whole” when it comes to funding students who attend school virutally at 100 percent.
Bryan currently has 38 students in one remote learning class. “I promise that whatever amount of funding goes to the work that I put in has been put to good use tenfold. I can tell you without reservation that I spend twice as much time planning my remote classes,” she said.
She cannot look over at them at their desks and see them struggling to understand. “Everything I do in-person I have to do three or four different ways to achieve the same thing virtually,” she said.
General funding needs
The 2021 Indiana General Assembly has at least 40 education-related bills circulating in the House and Senate this session.
Some of the topics include requiring cursive writing to be taught, starting school after Labor Day, requiring teachers to be trained in trauma-informed instruction, training school employees in the use of handguns, and studying student hunger and homelessness.
Since 2016, Brown County Schools 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.
The district also has received grant funding to help sustain programming and pay teachers more, and, in 2016, voters approved a property tax referendum to help give teachers raises.
In 2019, the school district received a five-year, $5.5 million federal grant from the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. With that money, the district has designated a few teachers in each building as “master” and “mentor” teachers to help other teachers learn different methods of reaching students. That money also funds teacher training, evaluations, and a performance-based compensation plan.
“We are doing everything we can at a local level to use our funding resources well,” said Brown County Educators Association President Kristi Billings. “We have an administrative team that is working really hard with what we’re getting, and now we need our community to get out there and help us get more so that we can do even more for our students.”
Gov. Eric Holcomb’s state two-year budget request included an increase of 2 percent in spending in fiscal year 2022 and 1 percent in 2023 for K-12 public schools.
Since 2014, the state has appropriated $1.7 billion in new money for state tuition support. Over the last two years, $763 million in new money for tuition support has appropriated, Koch said.
One piece of legislation currently being discussed would expand the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, which was started in 2011. Through the voucher program, state-supported scholarships are given to Indiana children to attend a school other than their local public school, if they wish. This means that instead of that “tuition support” money going to a public school to educate those students, the state transfers part or the majority of that state funding to a private or charter school, depending on the annual income of the child’s household.
This school year, 266 students who live in Brown County attend a public, charter or private school outside the district, while 1,660 go to Brown County public schools.
The total cost of the voucher program last year school year was more than $172 million, according to the Indiana Department of Education’s annual report on the program. More than 36,700 Indiana students attend more than 300 private schools using those scholarships.
House Bill 1005 would create an Indiana “education savings account” program for eligible students, including students with disabilities who require special education; students with parents who are on active duty or served in the armed forces; and students placed in foster care and who are under the supervision of the Department of Child Services. Money in the savings account can be used to pay tuition at an accredited nonpublic school, or expenses related to education.
Currently, public schools receive additional money for educating students with special needs, and the number of children in foster care in a district also factors into how much a district receives in state tuition support.
According to the Indiana School Boards Association, the bill for the education savings account will cost more than $200 million over the next two years, which would consume most of the $227 million increase in education funding that Holcomb proposed.
HB 1005 also would raise the income eligibility for families to receive vouchers.
There is also similar legislation in the Senate with a price tag of $150 million over the next two years, according to the ISBA.
The state’s budget proposal is currently being discussed in the House. Koch said the Senate will not see the proposal or any changes to it for another month. But he said the forecast so far for the biannual budget may bring positives to the state’s overall budget.
“There are a multitude of factors that influence tuition support to each school corporation. The impact of those factors can often change over time as variables change and as our economy changes. I think the General Assembly should revisit those frequently, and particularly as it relates to rural school corporations, and school corporations everywhere experiencing a declining enrollment and how we might improve the formula to better reflect the realities of school operations,” Koch said.
He said he wanted to “tip his hat” to the leadership of Brown County Schools for doing all they can in light of declining enrollment and tuition support.
“When you compare what they’ve done with what really kind of developed as the recommendations (from the teacher compensation study), nearly every box is checked. … I think that the state policy should be reward those corporations who are making that effort and doing the best they can.”
Retention challenges
As state legislators look at expanding programs to help families access nonpublic school options, rural districts like Brown County continue to struggle to retain students and teachers. BCS has lost teachers due to not being able to pay as much as surrounding school districts, and several teachers already live outside Brown County where housing tends to be less expensive.
In May 2016, voters helped pay teachers more when they approved a referendum for the school district. It added another 8 cents per $100 of assessed property value to property tax bills. One penny of that increase goes to the Brown County Career Resource Center to sustain programming; the rest goes toward raises for certified and non-certified staff. Our referendum is one of the lowest in the state. The highest is $1.20.
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.
A new salary “ladder” was not approved for teachers until 2017. Until that point teachers received stipends and base salary increases.
“We had so many great teachers remain in Brown County through salary freezes of the last decade,” Billings said.
“Those referendum dollars are really truly what gave us any room to make changes to our teacher salary schedule in the last five years since Laura (Hammack) has been here.”
But the district also lost some teachers during that time of salary freezes, Ely added.
“I think it’s super important that everyone understands how vital the referendum has been to keep us afloat and provide our kids with the opportunities to take a variety of classes and just to keep everything running,” she said.
“It would be a different world here in Brown County if we did not have the referendum.”
Billings has been teaching vocal music at BCHS for eight years. When she started, she had a “strong core group of teachers” who started with her. Now, she is the only one left.
“Three of them left to teach in other states, and two of them have gone on to work outside of the public school classroom, to work outside of the profession,” she said.
Oliver said despite referendum support, budget cuts have also resulted in reduction in programs or classes, like French classes at the high school. When that teacher left the district, the decision was made not to fill the opening in accordance with the attrition model.
“The referendum is super important for maintaining, but how much longer are we going to be able to maintain that? We have to keep advocating for more and more funding because we have to be able to maintain those programs,” she said.
