On Friday, March 3, the Kay Trapp room in Lake Central High School was filled with board members of the Lake Central School Corporation as well as any interested members of the community that wanted to join. The cause for the occasion was a meeting with three state legislators, state Rep. Hal Slager, state Rep. Julie Olthoff and state Sen. Rick Niemeyer who came to LCSC to update the corporation of educational politics in the state of Indiana.
Much of the focus was on new bills being proposed or passed regarding education funding towards Lake Central School Corporation. The first major bill brought up during the meeting was house bill 1009 which mainly caught the attention of those in attendance because of the “Rainy Day Fund” being cut from public schools.
“I think the the main emphasis of the bill was combining our capital projects, transportation and bus replacement fund into this new operating fund and to create more flexibility on a local level on how to spend those dollars, which I can understand. It wouldn’t be a problem for us. What I don’t understand is how there are a lot of parts of the bill that seems like there’s a lot of things in there that I don’t see the need for. For example, there’s a whole list of 20-some funds that requires us to get rid of ‘Rainy Day Fund’ [and] “Safe Insurance Fund,’ which I don’t know why we would want to get rid of those,” Lake Central Director of Business, Robert James, said.
Along with the bills mentioned, one of the main things Olthoff is looking to incorporate into schools is suicide prevention. This would require teachers to train under mentors about preventing suicides amongst teens. This issue arose with Lake County being one of the top counties in Indiana in terms of number of suicides.
“[The bill about suicide prevention] says that staff at the school has to have two hours of suicide awareness and prevention training every two years. We worked with the department of education. We wanted to make sure that it qualified for professional development,” Olthoff said. “I heard from the counselors who have master's degrees and they’re asking ‘why can’t we teach it?’ and we said ‘I don’t have any problem with you teaching it because usually the teacher learns more about the content than whoever is sitting in the audience does.’ There’s a Senate bill coming my way and my bill is going that way. We’re doing some initiatives to move that forward and keep some of our kids from giving up before they need to give up.”
Other notable mentions from the meeting was the idea of requiring schools to start closer to September and issues with the state taking over schools. Lake Central School Corporation is currently ranked 353 out of 370 corporations in terms of money funded to them from the state. The only way to get more money is through a general referendum, but Superintendent Dr. Larry Veracco made it clear that forcing taxpayers to pay more can cause a “crisis.”