by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
In less than 100 days — 98, if you’re the type who counts — Hoosiers go to the polls.
They’ll vote for secretary of state, treasurer and comptroller. They’ll vote for Congress, half the state Senate, all 100 state representatives, and a long list of county offices most of them couldn’t name under oath. For the first time, they’ll see party labels next to school board candidates, because apparently the one race left in America without a team jersey was a problem somebody needed to solve.
And the most consequential thing on that ballot may be the last thing they get to.
At least 38 school districts are asking voters to approve a referendum in November — the most ever in a single Indiana election. The Department of Local Government Finance has until early August to approve the ballot language, which arrives as a single statutory sentence of roughly ninety words that no Hoosier has ever read voluntarily.
Two things got us here. Senate Enrolled Act 1 will cut school property tax revenue by roughly $744 million through mid-2028, according to the Legislative Services Agency. And lawmakers banned referenda from every ballot except the November general in even-numbered years. Districts that used to get several bites at the apple now get one, every 24 months. Since Indiana swapped its old petition-remonstrance system for actual elections in 2008, 188 referenda have been proposed and 118 have passed — about 63 percent.
Now let me say this plainly, before somebody accuses me of a side. A referendum is neither good nor bad. It’s a mechanism. It’s weather. A hurricane isn’t immoral and a forest fire isn’t a villain — the fire takes out somebody’s house and it also clears the deadwood that made the fire possible. Whether it’s good or bad depends on where you’re standing and what you did before it showed up.
And this weather is coming whether anybody likes it or not. Thirty-eight districts’ worth.
So the useful question isn’t whether you approve of referenda. It’s what actually decides them. And it isn’t the number.
Any parent of a college student knows the call. It comes at 9:40 on a Tuesday, opens with “hey, how’s it going” — a question he has never once asked at that hour for any other reason — and gets to the point in about ninety seconds. Whether you send the money has almost nothing to do with the amount. It has to do with the eleven months before the call. Did you hear from him when he didn’t need anything? Did the last check go where he said it would? Or is the phone ringing because the account hit zero?
I speak from experience. Whenever I called my parents for money, they’d ask what I did with the last money they gave me. I’d tell them I spent it on women and drink, and squandered the rest.
They usually sent it. But they always asked. That’s the part that matters, and it’s the part most voters skip.
Because that’s what a school referendum is. A relationship question with a number attached.
The data bears it out. Larry DeBoer at Purdue, who has tracked this longer than anybody, found the strongest predictors of passage have little to do with the dollar figure. Districts that had asked before beat first-timers. Districts that lost and came back went 9-for-16 after starting 0-for-16 — the kid who got told no, went and got a job, and came back with an actual plan. Growth. Districts under 1,000 students went 16-for-19, because in a small town everybody knows the school and half of them went there.
And here’s the part that should worry the districts: most of them have never made the call at all. Through 2018, only 114 of Indiana’s 289 school corporations had ever put a referendum on a ballot. Six in ten had never asked their voters for a dime. A lot of the districts dialing this November are first-time callers, at the worst possible moment, on the hardest possible ballot.
Last November made the point. Five districts asked voters to renew something they’d already lived with. All five passed. Northwest Allen asked for a first-time levy and was the only one that failed. Same night, same property tax climate, same anger — different relationships.
Which cuts both ways, and here’s where I’d push back on the districts. Some are gaming the calendar. Because referenda are now locked to even-year Novembers, a district whose levy doesn’t expire until 2028 can come asking in 2026, and if voters say no, take another run in 2028 before anything actually lapses. Bartholomew Consolidated lays this out on its own website — its 2020 levy runs through 2028, state law permits renewal in the final two years, so November is the earliest available swing. Call it prudent planning if you like. If your kid tried it, you’d call it something else.
It also explains DeBoer’s oddest finding: referenda used to pass more often in May primaries than in November generals. The primary electorate is the one that knows the district. The November electorate is everybody. So the General Assembly identified the election where these things actually worked and abolished it. You have to admire the consistency.
Which makes Marion County the one to watch. IPS wanted 55 cents. The mayor-appointed Indianapolis Public Education Corporation — which took the levy power from the elected board this year — gave it 37.2, split roughly evenly between IPS and about 60 charter schools. Roughly $221 a year on a $150,000 home. IPS still has to cut. So the call is coming, but it isn’t coming from your kid. It’s coming from a guy you never elected, on your kid’s behalf, and he settled on the amount without asking either of you.
Both sides will have help this fall. Anti-tax groups will work districts they’ve never set foot in, and districts will spend real money on mailers with smiling third-graders on the front. Neither one is your kid. One is the neighbor’s kid on the porch telling you not to pick up. The other is a photo shoot somebody paid for, and it wasn’t the third-graders.
I don’t live in your district. I don’t pay your rate. I haven’t sat through your board meetings or watched your superintendent explain what happened to the transportation fund. So I’m not going to tell you how to vote, and you should be wary of anybody who does — in either direction.
What I’ll tell you is what my parents told me. Nobody’s doing your homework for you. Read the ballot language, all ninety words of it. Find out what the last one bought. Ask what happens at zero, and ask who’s answering the phone.
Then send the money, or don’t. But ask first.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org, an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois, and a teacher who has taught in public, private and charter schools.
