Latest news with #HouseBill1001
Chicago Tribune
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
New Indiana enrollment quotas could reduce local campus degree offerings; eliminate programs
New state law enrollment quotas on Indiana's public university degree programs could have a large impact on regional campuses and lead to the elimination of some degree programs. At the session's end last month, GOP lawmakers added the quotas to House Bill 1001, the state budget bill, approved and signed by Gov. Mike Braun last month. The addition received little public scrutiny until a story appeared recently in the Indianapolis Star. Universities with degree programs that fall under the quotas for three consecutive years must request permission from the Commission for Higher Education to continue them. Those quotas include an average enrollment of 15 or more for three consecutive years in bachelor degree programs, 10 students in associate degree programs, 7 students in master's programs and 3 in educational specialist and doctorate degree programs. In 2023, the number of Hoosiers with college degrees ranked 43rd in the nation, while studies cite more educated citizens lead to stronger state economies. Some educators worry the quota law will lower the state's attainment rate even more. According to data in the Star's recent story, 76% percent of bachelor degree small enrollment programs at IU Northwest in Gary and 53% of bachelor degree small enrollment programs at Purdue University Northwest in Hammond and Westville could be affected. The data calculations came from the National Center for Education Statistics as compiled by DATA USA based on 2022 or 2003 data. Future data tracking from the Center could be in peril. In February, the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, terminated $900 million in contracts in the U.S. Department of Education including the National Center for Education Statistics. State Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, said regional campuses like IU Northwest and PNW don't draw as many students as their main campuses do to always support enrollments of 15 or above. Smith is also an education professor at IU Northwest, although he's announced his retirement effective at the end of May. 'Often we have to offer independent studies and use adjuncts in those classrooms to keep costs down,' he said. 'They don't understand what we have to do to meet the needs of the students in our area,' Smith said of Republicans who control the General Assembly. 'I think the system is not broken. It's because they have all this power and they are control freaks,' Smith said. 'Their argument was less government and now they're in everything.' Republican lawmakers defended the quotas saying they'll lead to better efficiencies on campuses. Officials at Indiana and Purdue universities didn't respond to email requests for comment. Sources, however, say the quotas triggered concern across university campuses. A recent social media post by a member of PNW's Social Work Club alerted students to the new law. The post stated PNW's new social work bachelor program averaged 13 students from 2021 to 2023, leaving it in jeopardy. The post urged students to send testimonials to the Commission on Higher Education. PNW's bachelor in social work program has been accredited by the Council on Social Work Education until 2031. Graduates are eligible for state licensures as social workers in the job field that shows increased employment projections of 7%. Several STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, programs at IU Northwest could also be in jeopardy. They include biology, biochemistry, computer and information sciences, engineering and math, radiation therapy and informatics. PNW degree programs with smaller numbers include computer engineering, electrical engineering, general chemistry and physics, history and math. Braun, who appoints 12 members of the 14-member Higher Commission board, supports the enrollment review process. Griffin Reid, spokesman for Braun, said in an email: 'This provision ensures our state-funded universities are preparing future college graduates for professional success with degrees that are in demand in Indiana. Universities will be able to request (the state) continue degree programs that fall below this threshold and are of specific interest to the state.' The next meeting of the Commission for Higher Education is July 10. Bill Hanna, executive director of the Dean and Barbara White Foundation, represents Northwest Indiana although his current term expires June 30.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
From Schools to Taxes: How Recent Indiana Laws Impact Gary
What happens at the Statehouse certainly doesn't stay there, and for cities like Gary, the ripple effects are impossible to ignore. As Indiana lawmakers wrapped up this year's legislative session, several key bills, namely SB 1 and HB 1001, emerged that could reshape how Gary collects tax revenue and even communicate major decisions to residents. Local and state lawmakers warn these changes could threaten Gary's finances and strain the public school district. The long-standing compact between the cities of Gary and Chicago that established the Chicago-Gary Regional Airport Authority is set to be formally dissolved. Under the new legislation, the Gary Common Council is required to take specific steps to terminate the agreement, which was originally enacted in 1995, by Jan. 1, 2026. By July 1, 2025, a majority of Gary's appointed representatives to the airport authority must adopt a resolution endorsing the termination, and the Gary Common Council must pass an ordinance to make it official. The law also directs the dissolution of a separate airport authority board previously established by Gary. This marks a significant shift in regional transportation planning and governance, raising questions about the future of the Gary/Chicago International Airport and its role in cross-state economic development. The Common Council created a new committee to exclusively address state legislation that Council President Lori Latham recognized as a persistent roadblock for Gary's progress. 'It's not lost on us that every time we try to either build, establish or maintain an economic development driver in our community that the state has something to say or do about it,' Latham said, addressing the prescribed changes. Councilman Darren Washington, who will chair the committee, questioned the legality of the bill, stating the council would be conferring with its legal counsel as well as the administration's. ''To arbitrarily, at the last minute — it was literally the night before [the] session ended that language was stuck in House Bill 1001 to put the onus of the Gary Common Council to end the compact,' he said. 'I don't know if that is legal.' Local state legislators like state Rep. Vernon Smith expressed concern over the bill's impact on Gary schools. 'I fail to see how this budget invests in our communities and our families,' Smith said in a statement provided to Capital B Gary. 'Our schools will have just enough to stay afloat, but they won't have the funding they need to thrive. Like always with the state legislature, Gary will get little.' 'The funding for urban schools in this budget is insufficient,' Smith continued. 'It puts Gary Community School Corporation in a difficult position. The state takeover of our school board due to financial distress just ended in 2024. GCSC has to stay in the black, and the state isn't doing anything to help.' If the city of Gary or the Gary Community School Corporation wants to raise property taxes through a referendum, they now have stricter rules to follow. These ballot questions — where voters are asked to approve extra funding for things like school improvements or city projects — can appear only during general elections in November. Local officials also have a firm deadline: They must submit the request by noon on Aug. 1 to get it on the ballot. And for school districts in Lake County, including Gary, any referendum passed after May 10, 2023, could require some of that new tax money to be shared with nearby charter schools — even if the vote was intended to support traditional public schools. Gary's last referendum vote was during the 2020 general election, when voters approved a $71.2 million property tax measure to support the Gary Community School Corporation. By Jan. 1, 2026, the state will launch an online portal designed to make property taxes easier to understand. For Gary residents and taxpayers across the state, this tool will let residents see how their current property tax bill compares to what it would be if proposed tax rates change in the future. The website will also break down what deductions and credits they might be eligible for and give them a chance to share feedback directly with state and local officials. State Rep. Earl Harris Jr., who voted against both bills, said he didn't see any benefit for Lake County. 'Along with the impact of House Bill 1001, Lake County is set to lose hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Senate Bill 2,' he said. 'This budget will do nothing to help Lake County residents, who will pay much more in local income taxes while getting minimal property tax relief. No one wins under this budget.' The post From Schools to Taxes: How Recent Indiana Laws Impact Gary appeared first on Capital B Gary.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bill named for murdered Oklahoma teens signed into law
From staff reports OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — While a 25-year quest for the remains of two Northeast Oklahoma teenage girls remains unsolved, state Rep. Steve Bashore, R-Miami, on Tuesday thanked Gov. Kevin Stitt for signing into a law a bill name in honor of those two girls. It requires those convicted of being accessories to murder to serve 85% of their prison sentence before being eligible for consideration for parole. House Bill 1001, called 'Lauria and Ashley's Law,' was enacted in reaction to the early release of an inmate convicted as an accessory to murder. The 16-year-old girls, Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman, were presumed kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed on New Year's Eve 1999, and law officers think their bodies may have been dumped in a Picher mine pit. Danny and Kathy Freeman, Ashley's parents, were shot to death, and their bodies were found in their mobile home, which had been set on fire. Ronnie Busick was arrested in 2018 as an accessory to murder in the 1999 deaths of Danny and Kathy Freeman. Busick implicated two other men, Warren 'Phil' Welch and David Pennington, but they died before their possible involvement in the case was known. Girlfriends of Welch and Pennington told investigators the men kidnapped the girls from the Freeman home and took the girls to a house in Picher, where they were tortured and killed. Busick, after his arrest, told investigators that he had seen Welch, who lived in Picher, with lime and concrete in the back of his truck around the time the girls went missing. Welch told him he was filling a root cellar. When Busick did plead guilty, it was to a charge of being an accessory because he knew of Pennington's and Welch's involvement and kept quiet about it for more than 20 years. Busick was sentenced Aug. 31, 2020, as an accessory. At that time, Oklahoma officials said he would serve 10 years in prison followed by five years of probation with the first year supervised. However, he was released after serving about three years. When his release came, prison officials said it was because he was credited with time served in county jail and with time for good behavior, a policy that was based on state law. 'This has been such an incredibly long journey for these family members,' Bashore said in a statement Tuesday. 'I made a promise I would seek to strengthen the law so all perpetrators of such horrible crimes would see stricter punishment and would never get a lessened sentence simply because they've shown some kind of good behavior while behind bars. It's gratifying to know going forward this will be the case.' Bashore worked with Lorene Bible, the mother of Lauria Bible, and her cousin, Lisa Broderick, in drafting the law and seeking its passage over the last several years. 'This has been a lot of hard work by Representative Bashore and those in the Senate who worked on this,' Lorene Bible said in a statement. 'We know it won't help in Lauria and Ashley's case, but for future families in the same position, they'll have something they can use.'
Chicago Tribune
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: Indiana legislature launches stealth attack against Indiana University
Universities have been huddling, trying to figure out ways to collectively withstand salvos from the White House. Recent events in Indiana suggest they will need to arm themselves against some statehouses, too. Public universities are used to legislatures setting funding levels, and Indiana University just got handed a 5% cut in state funding. So it goes. But what happened last weekend in the final hours of a four-month legislative session went way beyond budgets. Infuriated critics of the measure have lambasted what occurred as a stealthy power grab. One emeritus professor at Indiana University told the Indianapolis Star that the state had just witnessed a 'complete takeover of universities by the governor and state legislature.' Certainly, Republican legislators exerted new and draconian levels of control over Indiana University by quietly inserting language into a roughly 220-page bill that imposed major changes on the flagship Bloomington campus. The bill, which also affects several other Indiana schools and campuses, first emerged from committee on the evening of April 23 and was the subject of no previous bipartisan discussion. Within 48 hours, it had been passed by the House and Senate. The language in House Bill 1001 gives the governor total control over the IU board of trustees by repealing the current rights of IU alumni to elect three of its members. Outside of a student member with a shortened term, Republican Gov. Mike Braun will now appoint everyone. But the language hardly confines itself to the Board of Trustees. It also demands that IU secure state approval for any university degree program that falls below a certain threshold in terms of student enrollment; downgrades faculty governance into a purely advisory role; requires regular reviews of tenured faculty, undermining the notion of tenure; and jettisons emeritus faculty from any meaningful role. The level of detail is such as to require faculty at IU to post their syllabi on the internet, presumably allowing legislators to scrutinize the content of classes. Indiana lawmakers have the right to ensure that taxpayer money is being spent wisely, and not all of these ideas are terrible. Most Hoosiers outside of academe would not oppose tenured faculty still being subject to basic performance reviews, as occurs in most other professions. And those with a vested interest in small, costly degree programs should be able to justify their continued existence. We're also on board with the idea that some aspects of campus life, such as the absurd proliferation of administrators at the expense of those who actually teach students, need reform. We've consistently complained about tuition increases. And we support students being taught by a faculty that has ideological diversity, was hired on the basis of merit and does not squelch free speech in service of politically correct conformity. But we don't support a board of trustees entirely made up of the governor's political patsies (at the University of Michigan, by contrast, voters choose the Board of Regents via biennial elections). Nor burdening academics with endless reports back to a state legislature wherein most members know little about best practices in higher education. Nor a wholesale attack on faculty governance. Nor the expunging of emeritus faculty and alumni from a significant role in how universities like IU decide what to teach and research. And we worry that some of these Republican legislators are not so much interested in ideological diversity as swapping out one set of political leanings for another. It's reasonable to require competence from tenured faculty but not to make them fear for their jobs if they take a position with which the legislature disagrees. A more nuanced approach to reform would have recognized that the student experience and learning outcomes at a state's flagship school are driven, first and foremost, by that university's faculty. To freeze them out in this way and replace them with politicized bureaucrats, ill-qualified to measure research or teaching productivity in arcane fields, is absurd. Plus it may incentivize the school to increase numbers at the expense of quality. And no one in the governor's office or state legislature should be policing who has or has not adequately 'posted' their syllabus and certainly not what it contains, assuming a robust peer and administrative review process is in place. Guardrails to ensure accountability are fine. But instead of taking over the school in this Orwellian fashion, legislators should have emphasized that they value their leading university's intellectual independence. There's another issue. Big Ten schools like IU compete for faculty talent. Faced with these kinds of restrictions, lots of professors would prefer to work in a friendlier environment. This might be good for the University of Illinois, but this state sends too many kids to IU for this not to be an issue for us. The most egregious aspect of this whole affair is how major changes were introduced without any kind of meaningful, bipartisan debate or advance exposure to Indiana voters, not to mention parents, current students and potential applicants. Indiana University matters greatly to Indiana. The school hardly has been a font of left-wing radicalism. Rather than merely signing the bill, as expected, Braun should listen first to stakeholders and the public and temper these excesses. One test we have for sleazy legislation is how it applies when present parties are no longer in charge. The change regarding gubernatorial control of the Board of Trustees is scheduled to sunset on Jan. 1, 2028, exactly when Braun's current term would come to an end.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Law on stiffer penalties for accessory to murder heads to governor's desk
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – Oklahoma Senators voted Wednesday to send Lauria and Ashley's Law to the governor's desk. House Bill 1001 was authored by Rep. Steve Bashore (R-Miami) and passed through the House easily in March. It would require anyone convicted of accessory to murder to serve at least 85% of their sentence before they are considered for parole. The law was named after Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman. The two teenage girls were kidnapped and murdered in Welch in 1999. Their bodies were never found. 'Lauria and Ashley Law' adds harsher penalty for 'accessory' to murder Lorene Bible, Lauria's mother, was at the Capitol on Wednesday. She has been working with lawmakers on the legislation for three years. 'It's what we've been striving for all along,' said Lorene. Lisa Bible Brodrick is Lorene's niece and has been an advocate for the family. 'We didn't really get the victory that we'd hoped for in the girls' case, but it does feel like a small victory for families in the future,' said Bible Brodrick. 'That's a really great feeling.' Ronnie Busick was convicted of 'accessory' in the case of the missing girls. He was there the night they went missing and spent only three years in prison. He was released for good behavior.'It was an insult to the girls. It was an insult to the community. It was an insult to the parents,' said Sen. Micheal Bergstrom (R-Adair). Bergstrom shared his personal attachment to the piece of legislation before the vote on the Senate floor.'Lauria Bible was my student,' said Bergstrom. 'I had her in my class as an English teacher. She was a wonderful kid who laughed and had a great deal of joy.' The law might not be able to help in Bible and Freeman's case, but it will make a difference, in their honor, for years to come.'We're still fighting on their behalf so it doesn't happen to somebody else,' said Lorene. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
