BizVoice -- March / April 2018

March/April 2018 – BizVoice/Indiana Chamber 55 “It (the current school situation) doesn’t make the job any easier,” admits Jay Julian, president and CEO of the Muncie-Delaware County Chamber of Commerce, which is also responsible for economic development activities. “It gives us talking points (or required explanations) other communities don’t have.” Casey Stanley, vice president of product management and marketing for Ontario Systems, acknowledges the talent gap and skills shortage, adding, “As part of that cycle, if you are not attracting new businesses and not growing new businesses locally, that contributes to a quality of place issue. Employees have the ability to choose where they work every day; they choose with their feet.” Geoffrey S. Mearns, the BSU president who assumed that role in May 2017, is even more direct. “We know that a community is dependent on the quality of its public schools. Businesses want to move to where people want to live, so we need to do even more to make Muncie a vibrant community – and it starts and ends with the public schools.” Long-term slide MCS is where it is today, in part, due to the economic changes that have taken place in east central Indiana. “The economic transition from an industrial economy to a more knowledge-based and advanced manufacturing economy is hard,” Stanley emphasizes. “Are there things the community could have foreseen and better planned and better acted upon, rallied together and done 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago – absolutely. The planning and execution hasn’t been perfect and clearly it hasn’t in the Muncie Community Schools. It’s an extreme case.” While not alone, MCS has seen dramatic enrollment decreases – from nearly 19,000 students in 1965 to what will be projected at less than 5,000 in the 2018-2019 school year, according to Steve Wittenauer, a retired superintendent and founder of Administrator Assistance. That organization served as the emergency manager for MCS over the second half of 2017 and was given further control of finances and academics at a mid-December meeting of the state’s Distressed Unit Appeal Board (DUAB). “Everyone knows that once your enrollment drops, and with the formula where it’s at where the money follows the student, there are cuts that probably have to be made,” Wittenauer shares. “We believe this problem originated over a multi-year period of time. And maybe they could have done a little bit more to address those situations as their funds became less and less because of the lower enrollment and lower (property tax) assessment. That’s something that they probably didn’t do as good a job as they would have liked to have done.” More recently, local decisions were made to use $10 million from a 2014 bond issue (intended for improvements to school buildings) on operating expenses. Unique solution Both Stanley and Julian point out that Delaware County is home to three of the top high schools in the state – Muncie Burris, the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities, and Yorktown. The first two are managed by Ball State. And both community leaders note that academic performance in MCS is trending up. Yet, according to local reports, there are 1,200 students who live within MCS but attend school elsewhere. The problems are clear. The road to a solution took a sudden turn after that December DUAB meeting, according to Mearns, when EFFORT