2024 Indiana Legislative Agenda

THE INDIANA SMALL AND RURAL SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION BELIEVES:

  • In the leadership of Local School Boards made up of engaged citizens closest to the school, represent the most invested groups properly-suited to guide the operation of the local school district while making important decisions involving budgets, leadership, curriculum, shared services, cooperative agreements, district organization, and district improvement. (Local Control)
  • Local control should guide contract negotiations, not state-wide mandates for salary floors or areas of endorsement.

 ●    The Indiana General Assembly should fully fund new laws and administrative code mandates that require adding staff for a specific state-mandated program, supplementary staff training time, or specific school security procedures and equipment and document the impact on school districts’ local financial resources. (Unfunded Mandates)

●    All Redevelopment Commissions, including Residential TIFF districts, formed in Indiana should include an appointed non-compensated school board member or school board member designee as a voting member representing any school district located wholly or partly within the unit. 

  • The General Assembly should NOT expand voucher funding for general education or the Indiana Education Scholarship Account Program that incentivizes the withdrawal of students from public schools to access a paid benefit. 

THE INDIANA SMALL AND RURAL SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION SUPPORTS:

  • Legislation and public policy requiring all Indiana schools receiving public funds to meet and report the same operational, accountability requirements, academic, and rigorous legal standards while being held to the same equal access requirements public schools are required to follow. 
  • The definition of curricular materials should be expanded to include books, the hardware used or consumed by a student during a school year, computer software used in an individual student’s curriculum, digital content,  consumable class materials used for instruction, learning management systems, CTE instructional supplies, and art supplies, and any high school class based curricular costs for a dual credit course.
  • Residential TIFF districts be approved by a local school district before moving forward.
  •  Reinstatement of the small schools grant to help cover the costs of the Pathways, add school counselors, and increase teacher pay. 
  • We support the expansion of rural broadband funding and public-private partnerships that reach the last mile.
  • Career Scholarships Accounts should not be funded with tuition support dollars.  
  • Remove the mandate for continued data collection and inclusion of post-secondary benchmarks in the Evaluation Dashboard. The data produced has no real information for schools to use that is not already available.   
  • The Indiana General Assembly needs to make structural improvements to how virtual schools are administered. 
    -Students facing truancy charges should not be allowed to transfer to a virtual school or homeschool. 

-Parents up for educational neglect charges should not be allowed to transfer their children to a virtual school or homeschool without the approval of judicial authorities. 
-Entities documented to have provided intentionally fraudulent student data should have their accreditation as a school and ability to receive state funding revoked.  
-Full-time virtual schools should submit different DOE-AT data documenting students with no LMS activity on a particular school day as an absence equating to an attendance event or absence.