Ronak Shah: Charter opt-out shows facilities plan should be scrapped

Update: This column has been updated from the version that ran in the IBJ print edition on Feb. 13 to reflect a change made after IBJ’s deadline to exempt IPS from the bill’s facilities provisions.

In kindergarten, my teacher had us create time capsules. I buried one with all hope of returning in the future. But as time went on, I figured I’d never see mine again.

Decades later, my teacher reached out. Her class had unearthed the capsules, and she brought me the contents. Candy wrappers, projects I was proud of and notes from friends. I was stunned and grateful that my elementary school was still keeping watch over the keepsakes of my time there.

Places hold a special place in memory. Homes, schools, wedding venues — you form a relationship that hits you like a rush of nostalgia at reunions and homecomings. Losing a building is like losing a family member.

Maybe that’s why the plan to make Indy schools give up their buildings has become such a lightning rod.

Calls and emails have been going out from organizations including RISE and Empowered Families that tout support for the universal transportation plan in House Bill 1423. Ensuring every child can get to school safely and quickly is a broadly popular idea, and this bill requires every public and charter school within the Indianapolis Public Schools district to buy into a transportation plan under a new mayor-appointed board called IPEC. With this economy of scale and as townships struggle with their own bus systems, a mayor-led board could perhaps eventually include them in a citywide student transit plan.

But notably, the advocacy messages scarcely mention HB 1423’s facilities plan, which would turn management of all school buildings to IPEC, too. Despite being packaged with the transportation plan, the facilities provisions are confusing, less popular and severable. Indeed, the bill’s author, Rep. Bob Behning, amended the bill to allow charter schools to opt out of the facilities plan. And this week, the Senate allowed IPS to do the same to prevent the obvious double standard. He noted that many charters were concerned about losing buildings they had acquired through private funds. Behning noted that many charters were concerned about losing buildings they had acquired through private funds.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Our Legislature is quite accustomed to taking a hammer to every issue IPS faces. But in this case, we are rushing a complicated idea through a short legislative session based on a plan created by a volunteer board in only six months. The facilities plan takes up the majority of a 115-page bill that gets longer with every amendment. Keeping up with these changes means either taking it on as a full-time job or trusting lobbyists to interpret the changes for us.

Clearly, this problem is not a nail.

What happens if even a quarter of schools opt out? What if all of them do? At the bottom of that slippery slope is the system we have today but without capital and debt funds from property taxes. How does a school system with more bureaucracy and fewer resources benefit anyone?

So where do we go from here? We’re being told we have to solve facilities and transportation at the same time with the same tool. That’s far from the truth.

The transportation plan is popular, simpler and has needed minimal amendment. Let’s give that a shot, and let’s guarantee an operating referendum on the books that everyone will benefit from. HB 1423 also establishes a shared performance framework that would give Indy’s mayor an important stake in the schools of the city. Let’s move forward with that, too.

But let’s put down that hammer and set the building plan aside, along with the morass of debt and capital management that comes with it. Let’s leave our schools in local hands where they belong and let those hands use their full toolbox to solve this problem themselves.•

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Shah has been a middle school teacher in Indianapolis for 13 years.