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July 2020 — 2023
The regime: Indiana stood among a handful of states — seven, in the Indiana Capital Chronicle's account of the change — whose law let public school districts charge families rental fees for textbooks and curricular materials, notwithstanding the state constitution's promise of free public education. The fees were the district's lawful revenue and the parents' standing grievance for decades; the controversy of 2020 is about what the district did to collect them.
The suits: In July 2020, while neighboring districts — Penn-Harris-Madison among them — were backing away from pandemic-era collection, School City of Mishawaka filed 202 small-claims lawsuits against parents over unpaid textbook fees, and 80 more in August: 294 suits since late March, the most filed by any Indiana school district in those months, on the court records reviewed by the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica for their account of 16 December 2020. The sums at issue ran to a few hundred dollars a family, and the suits carried attorney fees on top of them.
The case that carried the argument: Hannah Watts of Mishawaka owed 701.56 dollars for her three children's textbook fees from the year before; she had received a reminder in January and a suit notice dated 7 August. She paid the balance online on the day of the hearing — and judgment still entered against her, because the 233.83 dollars in attorney fees added to her account had not been paid. The district said it was confident she had been notified of the fees; then it announced it would forgive them and ask the court to vacate the judgment, and filed the motion to vacate on 8 December. The district's answer on the record, from its chief financial officer, Alex Newman, was that the district had debated over the summer whether to pursue the fees at all, and filed because they dated to the fall of 2019 and had fallen due in November 2019 — before the pandemic. Both statements stand as the record gives them: the parent's case and the district's, in the same account.
The close of the arc: In the spring of 2023 the General Assembly's budget act, HEA 1001-2023, abolished textbook and curriculum fees at Indiana public schools outright, effective with the 2023–24 school year, with a state appropriation in their place. The practice Mishawaka had sued its own parents under — the practice that made it, for one summer, the state's most litigious district — ceased to exist. The dispute is printed here because its arc closes: a fee regime of long standing, a collection campaign in a plague summer, a parent's judgment over attorney fees, and a statute that ended the regime itself.
Sources:
- ProPublica and the South Bend Tribune (Kim Kilbride), 16 December 2020 — the 294 suits (202 in July, 80 in August), the district's standing among Indiana districts, the Watts case and its vacatur motion of 8 December, and CFO Alex Newman's statement.
- Indiana Capital Chronicle, 28 July 2023 — the seven states that charged such fees, and HEA 1001-2023's elimination of textbook and curriculum costs; Penn-Harris-Madison Schools' fee information — HEA 1001-2023's effect from the 2023–24 year.