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Fall 2013 — May 2023
The line: The schools record of this history owns the referenda as school record — the filings, the questions, the determinations. The defeat of 2013 as a civic fight is shared ground between that record and this one, and it is told here as a dispute: what the district asked, what the voters answered, and what the district did about the answer.
The ask and the answer: In July 2013 the district filed its building program with the Department of Local Government Finance: a School Building Basic Renewal, Restoration and Safety Project across nine academic buildings, the Administrative and Services Centers and the Baker Field soccer enclosures and storage — bonds not to exceed 28 million dollars. The voters defeated it in the fall of 2013. The consequences were priced within the year: by September 2014 the district faced roughly ten million dollars in cuts by 2020, and the board hired two retired superintendents, Bruce Stahly and Dean Speicher, for 12,000 dollars to study its operations — the report due in three months, the possibilities listed as school closures, redistricting, staff cuts and another referendum. The study's communications counsel warned the district against the very word "referendum."
The return: The district came back in November 2016 with two questions instead of one — an operating referendum for safety, programming, technology and personnel, and a 13-million-dollar capital question for maintenance and repair across eleven buildings and Baker Field, with no new construction. Both passed; the operating question raised the average residential school tax by 22.75 per cent. The work ran from 2017 to 2020, and in May 2023 the voters renewed the operating referendum for eight more years. The fight's arc is thus complete in the record: refused whole in 2013, granted in pieces in 2016, renewed in 2023.
The honest shape of the opposition: No organized opposition to the 2013 question is named in the record reached — no committee, no spokesman, no campaign literature. The "no" of 2013 was an electorate, and the district's own consultants treated the word on the ballot as the problem. The Tribune
Sources:
- Indiana Department of Local Government Finance — the July 2013 referendum filing (28 million dollars; nine buildings, the centers and Baker Field); the November 2016 questions and their passage (residential school tax increase of 22.75 per cent; 13 million dollars capital); Findings and Final Determination 23-002-REF (9 December 2022) for the May 2023 renewal; and the September 2014 cuts and the Stahly–Speicher engagement (12,000 dollars; the warning against the word "referendum"), all as carried in the schools record, Schools & Colleges.