Indiana charter schools: Heather Harris on innovation agreements

I do want to shift to talking about the Institute for Quality Education.

But before I do that, is there any questions I've overlooked in this discussion? Does it in terms of the rhythm of the interviews or anything?

The one thing I would say is what's interesting to me is you look at charter schools and you look at the partnerships with the innovation schools and IPS.

Yeah.

I think there's a narrative that we hear in the community that is, I'm not for charter schools or I'm only for IPS schools.

I'm only for public schools.

I'm only for private schools, right? And I think there's so much good that's come out of these partnerships over now many years.

And when you go out, when I go out to national conferences around the country and And I say I'm from Indianapolis and I proudly say that people are always like, wow, how did you guys get this done? Right.

How did you work with your legislature? How do you get these partnerships in place? I have a call tomorrow, actually, with someone on the West Coast saying, wow, how did you guys get this done? Now, we were trying to learn from you.

We want to try to do this as well.

And so I always have to try to step back from what I would say, those small P politics that kind of creep in to these conversations to say, that we really have been able to get a lot done.

What keeps me up at night is that as the financial picture for the district becomes more dire, right, in terms of the amount of money that they may or may not receive, that we lose these kinds of core partnerships and we lose what other people see as something to be celebrated because we're so in the minutia of the minute that we're not stepping back to think about all the things we've actually really accomplished collaboratively.

That's what I think about.

We've got If you think about it, more than 61% of the students currently enrolled in IPS schools attend an innovation school.

And when you add in the charters that are not partnered with IPS, that's about 10 more percent.

So 70% plus of the kids are attending a non-direct run school.

So our landscape has changed.

And so I hope that we really make sure that we do everything in our power to preserve these family options.

the choices that families have are driving those numbers and making sure that they have the option of, I want to go to CFI or I want to go to Edison or I want to go to a private school, right? It's really creating, I think, for families opportunities to find the best fit at the right time for their student.

And that, to me, is something to be celebrated.

And I hope we As we change and navigate all these new paths, I hope that we can stand firm on those core principles of making sure that students and families have options in transportation, which I'm a big advocate for because nobody can take advantage of any option if they don't have the opportunity to get to where they need to go.

And for our low-income families, that is critical because they just simply don't have a lot of opportunity otherwise to access different educational opportunities.

Yeah.