TIMES EDITORIAL: Time to speak up for your children

Are you interested in learning how your children’s schools are performing?

If you are in the market for a new home, you might be interested in the quality of schools in a future neighborhood.

You can easily learn about schools your children currently attend or may attend in The Brazil Times when the annual school performance reports are published each March. Currently, the law requires schools to publish complete annual school performance reports. That will change if House Bill 1003, becomes law. The bill, authored by State Rep. Jack Jordan, R-Bremen, would no longer require schools to publish complete annual reports but replace them with summaries and a reference to where you could look for the complete report on the Internet. When was the last time you tried to navigate a government website to find specific information about your local community? It can be daunting and may seem downright impossible.

Unfortunately, the bill does not specify what information would be contained in the summary. It could be, “We did better than last year” or “We plan to do better next year” and “Here is where you can go to see the full report.”

Originally, Rep. Jordan’s bill sought to do away with the published report altogether. It would be up to the Department of Education to determine how much information would be made public and in what form.

While many of us value the published report, many others aren’t familiar with it and might not go looking for it or choose not to read it on their tablets or smartphones.

The value of publishing public notices in our local newspaper is that it gets valuable data in front of people in a convenient format.

Not long ago, another bill would have eliminated some public notices from local government and would have required those government bodies to publish notices on their local website. When asked for comment, one county commissioner said his county didn’t have the money to maintain such a database of notices and he wasn’t interested in doing so.

So, why is H.B. 1003 even being considered?

“When it was discussed during a committee meeting in the Indiana House the lobbying representatives of school business administrators, urban school districts, school district superintendents and the state DOE called for the elimination of the publication requirement,” wrote Steve Key, Hoosier State Press Association. “None of them said the report didn’t have value – all cited cost savings if they could quit publishing it in their local newspapers. (Note: all testifying against the publication requirement represent the educational establishment being held accountable by the annual performance report.) “

Money talks but isn’t it more important to know how well our children’s schools are doing?

“School districts and charter schools do have to pay for the publication as a legally required advertisement, but the cost is minimized because the state legislature since 1927 has capped what state and local government units can be charged by a newspaper for publishing public notices,” Key wrote.

According to the HSPA, information gleaned from 116 of 292 public school districts, the average cost of the publication of annual school performance reports in 2019 was $859. The average budget for those school districts was $36.85 million.

Isn’t that a small price to pay for Hoosiers to receive the information on how well those schools are performing with the use of those millions of tax dollars?

The fact is, readers often find important information in legal advertisements, such as school performance reports while reading about high school sports and other news about their neighbors.

Not only do we think publishing those school performance reports is important but so did then-President George W. Bush when he visited Indiana. He praised the practice of publishing those reports in local newspapers.

The Indiana DOE reported that in 2019, it had 14,500 unique page views of the school performance reports on its website. (That does not count individuals for an individual could view the same web page a number of times.)

According to the American Opinion Research, posting public notices only on government websites would mean 60% fewer people would read public notices.

We have an opportunity to let our state legislators know we want to continue to see complete school performance reports published in our local newspaper.