Editor’s note: This is the third part of a limited series about school funding in Brown County. Parts one and two ran in the Feb. 3 and 11 papers.
Brown County has at least 1,856 school-aged children living here, but only 1,590 attend Brown County public schools.
The 266 students who go elsewhere equal about $1.65 million that Brown County Schools is not getting.
Tuition support funding from the state follows the student, so that money goes to the public or private schools those 266 Brown County children are attending.
An unknown number of other children living in Brown County are home-schooled; they are not included in the 266 figure. Home schools are not required to register with the state, so the exact number of home-schooled students here is not available.
Each fall, the Indiana Department of Education releases a Public Corporation Transfer Report.
Toward the end of 2019, Brown County had 231 students attending a public, charter or private school outside the district. A year later, toward the end of 2020 after the pandemic had hit, that number was 266.
Before 2018, school districts did not know where all their students went if they decided to transfer. Transfer data was first released in 2018 as a result of a Senate bill authored by Sen. Eric Koch in 2017, after he spoke with Brown County Schools Superintendent Laura Hammack. The new law required IDOE to provide all school corporations with specific data about students who transfer to charter schools, voucher-receiving private schools or other public schools each spring and fall semester.
Brown County Schools receives $6,236.61 per student in state tuition support funding, which then goes into the district’s education fund. That fund can only be used to pay employees who are in the classroom, including teachers, paraprofessionals and principals.
Of the 266 Brown County students who go elsewhere, 221 attend another area public school. The largest number of students go to Nineveh-Hensley Jackson United School Corporation (Indian Creek), with 123 students enrolled there from Brown County, according to the IDOE report.
Bartholomew County Consolidated School Corporation has 36 Brown County students enrolled there, and Monroe County Community School Corporation has the third-highest amount of students enrolled from Brown County, at 27. Other districts that attract Brown County students include Martinsville, Mooresville and Franklin.
A total of 18 students attend charter schools, and another 23 use state-provided Choice Scholarships to attend private, faith-based schools.
Choice Scholarships allow families to send their children to schools they might not otherwise be able to afford, with the state sending a portion of its “tuition support” to that school depending on the family’s income and other factors. Awards range from 50 to 90 percent of the amount the student’s home public school would have received to educate that child.
For school year 2018-19, 24 students living in Brown County used Choice Scholarships; in the first part of school year 2019-20, 26 did. Those scholarship amounts totaled $97,217.53 for 2018-19 and $116,152.05 for the first part of 2019-20, according to the IDOE’s Choice Scholarship Annual Report from June 2020.
A bill is pending in the General Assembly that would raise the income eligibility for families to qualify for Choice Scholarships.
Brown County is not the only district experiencing enrollment decreases from students transferring elsewhere.
According to the most recent report, Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation had 7.9 percent of its total student population go to another public school, charter, private or online option.
Indian Creek had 13.4 percent of its population transfer out, Monroe County Community School Corporation had 11.2 percent, and the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville had 21.8 percent of its students transfer out.
That transfer percentage for Brown County is 16.7 percent.
Reasons to go
Why do Brown County families decide to take their tuition support elsewhere?
There are a variety of reasons, including wanting their children to have a Christian-based education at a private school, the proximity of other schools to their parents’ jobs, bullying concerns, athletics programs, and issues with class schedules or programming, according to local parents who answered that question on our Facebook page last week.
Amanda Congrove graduated from Brown County High School. She moved away from the county, but about two years ago, she moved back with her husband and 10-year-old son.
Her son finished third grade in Brown County and started fourth grade here before the family decided to enroll him in the International School of Indiana on the Butler University campus in Indianapolis.
Congrove’s husband works in Carmel, so he is able to do school drop-off and pick-up daily.
Congrove is a former French teacher, so making sure her son was able to learn at least one foreign language is important to her.
“Right now he’s learning Mandarin Chinese. He’s in a language immersion class with a host of different kinds of kids that are both local and international. The faculty has a lot of diversity of all kind of experience — not just racial diversity, but of all kinds was what we wanted to make sure he was comfortable with and had good exposure to,” Congrove said.
“The way the international school does it at the elementary level is language immersion, so two-and-a-half days a week everything is in Chinese. All of his instruction is in Mandarin. There’s just not a lot of places that can compete with that.”
Congrove said the decision to switch schools was not due to a bad experience in Brown County. Her son had been attending Sprunica Elementary. “He had a really good year in third grade … and he was really looking forward to fourth grade down here,” she said.
“But we ultimately decided to move him because we heard about the international school.”
“We talked about this with his fourth-grade teacher. We wanted to make sure we had a super clear picture, we were doing the best thing we could for our son,” she said.
Congrove said her family does not qualify for state Choice Scholarships, also known as “vouchers,” so that was not a factor in leaving the district.
She said she received a “great” education here in Brown County as a student, and her decision was more about getting important courses to her son earlier in his education career. “It’s not like I transferred from somewhere else and had my nose turned up,” she said.
“We are happy with our decision — not to say we don’t have our eyes and ears open; we are paying attention,” she said.
Tabitha Hilligoss has two children, ages 11 and 4. The family lives in Brown County, but her 11-year-old is a fifth-grader at Indian Creek Intermediate School.
Hilligoss has lived in Brown County all of her life and graduated from Brown County High School in 2004. Her daughter started elementary school at Sprunica Elementary, where she stayed until she completed third grade.
The biggest factor in moving her to a different district was that Hilligoss felt her daughter’s needs were not being met in the classroom. “(There was) constant extra work at home on this, but because she didn’t meet a certain criteria, she just fell between the cracks,” she said.
She said her daughter also experienced bullying. “She would get really upset about going to school, cry at school, not want to go to recess, and even tried to leave school one time,” she said.
“Sunday nights were always meltdowns and just became too much to deal with.”
Hilligoss decided to run for school board while her daughter was a student here in 2018, and her daughter’s experience factored into her decision to run, she said. She did not win election.
Her daughter made the switch to Indian Creek in fourth grade. “It’s been nothing but great ever since,” Hilligoss said.
“Her mental wellbeing is so much better than it ever was two years ago. I cannot see us ever coming back.”
Brown County Schools has a bullying reporting system that students and parents can use at brownco-in.safeschoolsalert.com. Reports can be anonymous and made by phone, text, email or the website.
Since 2018, Brown County students also have been receiving social-emotional learning lessons in class that help them deal with conflict, act with empathy and develop other citizenship skills.
Opting in
Brown County Schools also has experienced an uptick in students who live outside of the county and choose to come here.
In 2017, 33 students attended school in Brown County who did not live here. In 2020, that number was up to 69.
“It’s a gift to have students who live somewhere else, but choose Brown County Schools to receive their education,” Hammack told the school board at the Feb. 4 meeting where she presented the 10-year vision for the district.
Those 69 students equal about $415,000 in tuition support to the district’s education fund.
Smaller class sizes and closer relationships are among the reasons students and parents choose to go here.
Amanda Fortier’s son is one of those students who opted in from out of the county.
The family lived here from 2010 to 2017. Her son started second grade at then-Nashville Elementary School. The family moved to Columbus, but her son wanted to stay in Brown County High School for the remainder of his freshman year. He went to Columbus North High School for his sophomore year.
“He didn’t care much for Columbus North. The school was too big for him, coming from a smaller community,” Fortier said.
“He didn’t get the one-on-one personal experience that he got from his teachers from Brown County,” she said.
This will be Fortier’s third child to graduate from BCHS.
Wendi Gore, a Brown County Schools employee, brings her three children to school in Brown County every day from Bartholomew County.
Her daughter asked to transfer to Brown County High School from Columbus East after her freshman year there.
“Yes, we are small and there are disadvantages, but she had the opportunity to create relationships with her teachers and to not be a number,” Gore said.
“She is graduating this year, one of the top students, was able to be involved in her passion for theater, and has some great possibilities for furthering her education.
“People have to make the best choice for their families, and I know my daughter has no regrets for choosing Brown County.”
School changes
Declining enrollment is forcing some changes in the structure of Brown County schools.
In the past 10 years, the school district has lost the equivalent of two schools’ worth of students. Further declines are projected as the county’s 65-and-up population increases and the child-rearing-age population decreases.
On Thursday, Feb. 18, the school board will be asked to vote on implementing more cost-cutting strategies, including the closing of Brown County Intermediate School. It would be remade into the Educational Service Center and house the Brown County Career Resource Center and a daycare/preschool program.
Under the reorganization plan, current fourth-graders would remain in their elementary schools for fifth grade. Current fifth-graders would move to the junior high school for sixth grade, and the junior high would be renamed Brown County Middle School. The middle school then would serve all the district’s sixth- through eighth-graders.
To keep the number of certified staff in line with the closure, and to avoid firing teachers, retirement incentives are being offered to teachers and non-certified staff like custodians.
