Today’s passage of HB 1423 is a groundbreaking win for Indianapolis students. The bill creates a roadmap for ensuring a sustainable, high-quality system of schools within Indianapolis Public School (IPS) boundaries so that all students can reach their full potential. Crucially, the creation of the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation (IPEC) separates the education of children from the management of operations, allowing educators to spend more time where it matters most: the classroom.
IPEC will be charged with moving forward several critical system-level functions for IPS, charter, and innovation network schools, including:
- Creating a unified transportation plan to ensure that all public school students have access to safe, quality, and efficient transportation.
- Developing a system-level facilities plan that would maintain, and potentially own, facilities for all schools that choose to opt in.
- Levying property taxes for both operating and capital costs so that all public schools within IPS boundaries benefit equally.
- Establishing a unified performance framework, including the default closure of persistently low-performing schools, that charter authorizers and IPS would be tasked with implementing.
- Eliminating the $8,000 per-pupil charter school funding gap by ensuring charters have access to future debt service funds.
The Mind Trust is deeply grateful to Speaker Huston, Representative Behning, and Senator Raatz for their leadership. We applaud Mayor Hogsett for his leadership of the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, a body composed of a diverse group of local education and civic leaders, which voted 8-1 to recommend a series of structural changes that formed the basis of the bill.
HB 1423 represents one of the boldest structural changes of a school system in our country’s history. We urge Governor Braun to sign the bill into law so the hard work of implementation can begin.
