If you missed our post-session review via the Zoom webinar we held on May 1st with our president, Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer, and our lobbyist and general counsel, Joel Hand, you can watch it back here. The slide presentation from the event is here. Our follow-up summary to the questions asked during the zoom is here. We were grateful to have around 100 people signed up for this event. We are so glad to have so many of you with us in this fight for the public schools our kids deserve!

If you were with us throughout this session, you know up-close-and-personal how much like the game of whack-a-mole the legislative session is. If you shared one of our calls to action, wrote an email, called a legislator, THANK YOU. This session we had a special group of volunteers who were on our legislative committee, spearheaded by our amazing ICPE Board member, Keri Miksza, who followed the bills and helped us with the calls to action. Those calls to action, the graphics, the blog you are reading, are put together on our website by our extraordinary ICPE Board member, Shelley Clark. With the exception of our lobbyist, ICPE runs on volunteer power and passion–which is why we need YOU in order to continue our work. Volunteer with us here.

Many communities woke up this legislative session and were outraged. The personal, after all, is political. Hoosiers had some (still do!) important questions:

• Why are parents who make less than $45,000 unable to qualify for help with child care and why were there cuts this session to child care subsidies, while parents who are literally millionaires will, the year after next, qualify for a taxpayer-funded handout for their private school tuition in the form of vouchers?
• Why are some public school districts like IPS going to have to close down something like 20 schools as a result of property tax cuts and property tax diverting to charter schools, while those charter schools get an increase in funding and control over resources like never before? Why give this control over assets to these privately run charter schools while one in 3 of them have closed since 2001 in Marion County alone?
• Other community members are devastated that the progress made toward education equity is being rolled back with attacks on DEI?
• Union School Corporation in Randolph county Indiana can’t understand how their public school district, the heart of their community, can be eliminated or dissolved by the legislature with a stroke of the pen and some language slipped into the budget bill. Other small communities are wondering, Will we be NEXT?
• Another outrage this session was bringing politics into the classroom by encouraging and allowing school board candidates to run partisan elections.

ICPE is a nonpartisan organization. The fact of the matter is that it has been a bipartisan attack on public education and it will take a bipartisan pushback to stop and reverse the damage. Democrats in cities like Indianapolis have gotten on board with privatization through charter and innovation schools and Republicans have a supermajority that has successfully pushed for universal vouchers. But politics is about your relationship to power. We are in a power struggle over the health, vitality, and future of public education in this state and country. When the small rural school community understands that their fate is wrapped up in the fate of the urban school community, we will begin to strengthen our cause and we will win. Until that time, informing our communities is our most important step of advocacy.

Join us.

Consider volunteering with us.

Connect with others across the state by signing up for our Grassroots Check Ins.

Here’s a quick Legislative Session 2025 summary sheet that you can share with your neighbors and friends.