INDIANA FISCAL POLICY INSTITUTE |
| In 2025, Indiana lawmakers made significant changes to property and local income taxes as well as funding to traditional and charter schools and eligibility for the private school Choice Scholarship Program. To understand the future impact of these significant alterations to school finances, it is important to have a baseline understanding of current school funding levels, particularly on a per pupil basis. This report dives into school funding by county, with a focus on state and local revenues. It does not evaluate school-level or district-level data. The report also provides a brief guide to school funding in Indiana and compares this analysis to prior school funding reports using similar data. The report contains information on relative per pupil revenues compiled by county, as well as median, average, and measurements of variation around the mean for state and local funding for both traditional school districts and charter schools, in addition to information about Choice Scholarship Program funding by county. The 2025 reforms seem to indicate a willingness by lawmakers to maintain a system where the State of Indiana retains the majority of the responsibility for funding schools by putting further limits on localities’ ability to raise local revenue, both through value growth and through referendum. If Indiana does not prioritize school funding in the next several years, education funding levels across the state could continue to stagnate or even fall, with a lesser ability for localities to decide whether to tax themselves to provide additional school funding. |
About the Author: Sarah Wetmore is a 20-year veteran of state and local government finance research based in Chicago, Illinois. She spent much of her career with the Civic Federation, an independent, non-partisan public policy research organization in Illinois. There she analyzed budgets, finance, and tax policy of the State of Illinois, City of Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, and other large local governments in the Chicago region. She is a past President and Trustee of the Governmental Research Association, the national association of people and organizations engaged in public policy and government research, and runs Wetmore Research and Strategy, LLC, which provides fractional research director and research consulting services.
