ICPE issued the following statement on the diploma redesign and ICPE board member Keri Miksza presented it during the final public comment meeting of the State Board of Education on November 8, 2024. 

Dear Dr. Jenner and the Indiana State Board of Education members,

Indiana Coalition for Public Education (ICPE) is an organization that advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.

ICPE has watched the progression of this diploma. To this day, communities are still confused. Legislators are still confused.

Due to this confusion, ICPE is concerned on behalf of communities around this state. We are concerned about the following:

• Cost. How much will this program cost? Has there been an LSA analysis done on the recent version? The new diploma is 42 credits with a possibility of a student earning 60 credits. What is the cost for this additional 2 to 20 more credits? Since the Great Recession of 2008, state tuition support funding has not been keeping up with inflation. While the Indiana General Fund has grown by 62.46%, the K-12 Tuition Support Budget has grown by only 38.37%, well behind inflation. The Tuition Support Budget funds nearly all personnel working in public, charter, and voucher-receiving schools.
• Transportation. How will children safely get to and from, apprenticeships, credentialing opportunities, and work-based learning experiences?
• Background checks. How will we ensure background checks are being done for all parties working with children inside and outside the school building as well as online? We have a responsibility to keep our kids safe.
• Special education, ELL, and transient students. How will we as a state ensure that our most vulnerable kids don’t get lost in these new diploma programs and seals?
• School counselor shortage. Ensuring students check all the boxes of the diploma and various seals requires school counselors. The ratio of school counselors to students is around 1:650 in Indiana. According to the American School Counselor Association, the recommended ratio for school counselor to student is 1:250. To successfully implement a vastly new and complicated diploma system such as this will require an enormous effort to train middle school and high school counselors and more than double their ranks.

Again, how much will all of this additional programming and staff cost the state?

To close, we ask that you do not pass this without a thorough fiscal analysis and calculation of needed staffing for all schools to pull off the seals successfully.

Kind Regards,

The Board of Directors of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education

Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer (President) • Marilyn Shank (Vice President) • Marvin Ward (Treasurer) • Anne Duff (secretary) • Dountonia S. Batts • Shelley Clark • Dr. Tony Lux • Dr. Jennifer McCormick (emeritus) • Keri Miksza • Dr. Patricia Payne • Dr. Suellen Reed • Glenda Ritz • MaryAnn Schlegel Ruegger • Tim Skinner • Dr. Victor Smith