It’s been an article of faith around Indianapolis for four decades that white students and families are fleeing neighborhoods comprising the Indianapolis Public School District (IPS).
Well, I finally got the official school district enrollment data by race/ethnicity from the Indiana Department of Education last week.
IPS, the school system businesspeople and school reformers love to kick around, exhibited something different this 2013-2014 school year. The second smallest non-Hispanic white enrollment decline since data’s been kept.
IPS’ white enrollment declined by just 40 students this year. You read right – 40. Compare that with white enrollment declines of 913, 388, 18, 188 and 476 the five previous school years.
For comparison, the Speedway and Franklin Township schools lost more white students (41 and 45 respectively) this year than the far larger IPS.
Non-Hispanic white students are still a minority in IPS with just 6,290; compared with 6,745 Hispanics and 16,087 African-Americans. But the miniscule decline is cause for celebration.
Meanwhile, the larger story is the continued decline of white students from the township public school districts in Indianapolis-Marion County.
School reformers, including the city’s Charter School Office blindly refuse to acknowledge that demographic reality.
Last school year, 44,104 non-Hispanic white students were enrolled in Marion County’s 10 school districts other than IPS. This year just 43,201. That’s a drop of 903 students; 2.0 percent.
That decline isn’t a one-year phenomenon. White students have been fleeing the township schools, plus Beech Grove and Speedway, at far higher rates than whites have fled IPS.
Ten years ago, in the 2004-2005 school year, 55,774 white students were enrolled in the city-county’s 10 township districts. Ten years later white enrollment is 43,201, a drop of 12,573; or 22.4 percent.
Ten years ago, there were 10,913 white students in IPS, compared to today’s total of 6,290. A decline of 4,623 students.
Township schools have lost almost three times the white students as IPS. So, why the continued emphasis of luring young upscale whites with families into IPS neighborhoods, when the largest decline in white students are throughout township neighborhoods?
Why do school reformers, who preach school competition, not insist on charter schools in township neighborhoods? Wouldn’t that help attract white families with kids?
Another new trend this school year.
I wrote late last year that Black enrollment had increased in IPS. The final official totals confirm that as Black enrollment grew 355 to 16,087 thus stemming a decline that began in 1997.
While I still have the greatest respect for former IPS Superintendent Dr. Eugene White, understanding the changing nature of the demographics of the IPS district and its neighborhoods wasn’t his strong suit. And that lack of understanding permeated many of White’s top staffers.
Including, apparently, IPS’ now cashiered former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Debra Hineline; of the now infamous phantom $30 million deficit.
In the same week when the IPS Board was formally firing Hineline, she told the Indianapolis Star that IPS’ revenue is declining because student enrollment is declining.
Hineline was CFO when the district submitted its official enrollment data for the 2013-2014 school year in September and October of 2013.
That data did not show a decline. Instead it showed an increase in enrollment.
IPS’ official 2013-2014 enrollment, according to the Indiana Department of Education, is 30,813 – an increase of 1,010 (up 3.4 percent) from last year’s enrollment of 29,803.
That increase will raise IPS’ funding between $6.5 to $7.5 million.
Hineline was still CFO when IPS submitted its required mid-year enrollment update to the state. That showed enrollment was down about 110 students from the fall count. Still an enrollment increase from the previous school year.
Knowing what your enrollment is, data that determines your revenue, should be something the CFO of a major school system has at their fingertips.
For Hineline to continue to preach the discredited gospel of IPS enrollment declines in the face of the reality of its enrollment rise this year; demonstrates to me that if she didn’t know her district‘s enrollment numbers; what other numbers was she deficient at?
Deficits and bloated estimates of expenses, maybe?
What I’m hearing in the streets
Listening to Mayor Greg Ballard talk about the problem of violence at a so-called “Community Conversation” last week at the Central Library, it was obvious to me that the mayor doesn’t have a real clue about how to deal with the violence impacting our city.
To hear the mayor tell it, all we have to do is match parents and young people to mentoring help and the problem will be solved.
That approach is naïve at best and disingenuous at worst.
At the event, officials handed out a sheet listing 57 “mentoring organizations.” Some are well known, but many more aren’t.
At the meeting (and on the air), community folks have said they want and need more info about organizations that could help.
Unfortunately, all the city has provided is a list of organization names. No contact info, no explanation of what they do.
The mayor’s office and his major city departments employ a bunch of highly paid PR people who do little for their lofty salaries. With few exceptions, these PR types adhere to the mayor’s mantra of ignoring and marginalizing Indy’s Black media.
Why hasn’t the city put the PR mavens to work providing media with contact info and brief summaries about these 57 mentoring groups central to Ballard’s anti-violence strategy?
The media would probably profile those groups in newspaper, TV and website stories and radio and TV interviews.
If the city is providing the media with virtually no information on how these organizations can help Indy families in need, how will those families get that information?
Mayor, do you have an answer?
Oh, I forgot, our mayor doesn’t communicate with critical media like Black newspapers.
See ‘ya next week.
You can email comments to Amos Brown at acbrown@aol.com.
