The textbook-fee and fee-as-tax lawsuits: the state cases, PHM as plaintiff four hundred times, and the 2023 abolition

1974–2023

No fee-as-tax suit names Penn-Harris-Madison as defendant in the record searched — and the row closes anyway, because the fight over whether a public school may charge for the schooling itself was fought in this county, by this county's district, and then by this district as the charging party, until the legislature ended it: The constitutional question is Article 8, § 1 of the Indiana Constitution — common schools "equally open to all," "tuition shall be without charge." It was litigated first from this county: in Chandler v. South Bend Community School Corporation, 312 N.E.2d 915 (Ind. Ct. App., June 27, 1974), a class action brought by Lillie Chandler, the Court of Appeals upheld the South Bend schools' textbook rental fees — the constitution, the court held, does not require textbooks to be furnished free. A generation later the question returned in broader form: in Nagy v. Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation (Indiana Supreme Court, March 30, 2006), a mandatory $20 "student services fee" was struck down as unconstitutional under the same clause — and the Supreme Court expressly declined to follow the Court of Appeals' reasoning questioning textbook rental fees, leaving the textbook question open at the top of the state's law even as it closed the services-fee question. Those two cases are the fee-as-tax record of record, and the first of them is this county's own.

PHM's part in the controversy is the inverse of a defendant's, and it is documented whole: the district charged the fees the cases fought over — textbook rental and course fees — and sued to collect them. ProPublica and the South Bend Tribune documented the practice in December 2020: "Penn-Harris-Madison filed more than 400 lawsuits against parents in 2018" over unpaid fees, a collections docket run through small-claims court until the district paused it in the pandemic (its executive director of business services, Jerry Hawkins, is quoted in the report). The boundary contrast is printed at boundary size only: the School City of Mishawaka, next door, filed 294 such suits from late March 2020 alone and unwound at least one default judgment on a paid balance that December — Mishawaka's whole, marking what the practice looked like at its most aggressive, two districts from this ground. PHM's one federal education suit in the record reached, Reinoehl v. Penn-Harris-Madison (S.D. Ind., dismissed August 30, 2024), is an evolution and Establishment Clause case, not a fee case — printed so the search for a PHM fee suit is shown to have been run, and to have found the district on the other side of the docket.

The end of the controversy is legislative and dated: HEA 1001 (2023) eliminated textbook and curriculum-materials costs at Indiana public schools; the statute now in force (IC 20-26-12-1) requires curricular materials be provided "at no cost," with only a fee for lost or damaged materials surviving, while the small-claims collection statute (IC 20-33-5-11) outlives the fees it once collected. PHM's own fee-information page carries the change. The row's three tests: the record is the appellate reports, the statute book and the press of record jointly; the contest was genuine and ran fifty years; and its place-significance is exact — the fees were charged in, and collected from, the households of this ground, by the district this ground's children attend.

Sources:

1. Chandler v. South Bend Community School Corp., 312 N.E.2d 915 (Ind. Ct. App. 1974), via Justia — the class action and the holding on textbook rental fees.
2. ACLU of Indiana, release of March 30, 2006, and the opinion record — Nagy v. Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp.: the $20 services fee struck; textbook fees expressly left undecided by the Supreme Court.
3. ProPublica / South Bend Tribune, Ellis Simani and Kim Kilbride, December 16, 2020 — PHM's 400-plus collection suits of 2018 and the pandemic pause; the School City of Mishawaka's 294 suits and the December 8, 2020 vacatur, printed at boundary size.
4. PHM Schools, fee-information page (phmschools.org), read November 2026 — HEA 1001 (2023) eliminating textbook and curriculum costs; IC 20-26-12-1; IC 20-33-5-11.
5. Reinoehl v. Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp. (S.D. Ind.), dismissed August 30, 2024 — an Establishment Clause case, printed to show the defendant-side search was run.