Two major developments within the Town of Plainfield are springing up near the place where Township Line Road becomes Perry Road. Hobbs Station is a major mix of commercial and housing space, while across Smith Road (900 East), Bo-Mar Towns & Flats will provide a variety of housing types. They triggered the usual panicked responses on social media chatter sites.
One of the biggest issues in the uproar involved where the future residents’ children would attend school. Even though most of this land was in what used to be considered Avon, the Town of Plainfield annexed it some years back. (I’ll use Town when talking about the government town.) Because those children live within the Town of Plainfield, surely they will attend Plainfield Schools, am I right?
Nope, that’s incorrect. The student’s families will pay Town of Plainfield taxes, true. But the school portion of their property taxes will go to Avon Schools, because their property is in Washington Township. Under Indiana law, students living in Washington Township of Hendricks County attend Avon Schools. Even when another community annexes property within a township, the school district remains unchanged. A similar situation exists in part of Plainfield’s Saratoga development, a sliver of which falls into Liberty Township (Plainfield is in Guilford). The parents in that sliver own homes in Plainfield but are expected to send their kids to Mill Creek.
Is that really confusing? It can be, and the alleged explanations tossed around on social channels only make it more so, because most of them are dead wrong. School boundaries in Indiana date back directly to the school consolidation efforts of the 1960s, and just as directly to the establishment of township government in Indiana’s second constitution, adopted in 1851.
Initially, township trustees simply were the local government. They handled everything from making sure drainage ditches remained clear to running the schools. Each township was its own school district. Smaller townships built remarkable masonry buildings to house kids from first grade through senior year. Larger townships built separate buildings for youngsters and teens.
As the 1950s neared an end and the nation became focused on winning the space race, state leaders became concerned about the disparity between rural schools and those with larger student populations. The result was a school consolidation measure that upended education throughout much of Indiana. Unlike more recent efforts focused on saving money, this round of consolidation was based upon educational effectiveness and the recognition that tiny rural districts lacked the resources urban districts had, particularly in areas like science and math.
That’s when today’s boundaries were established. In some cases, they didn’t change. All of Washington Township remained Avon Schools. But in Clay, Franklin, and Liberty Townships, the township school districts were replaced by Mill Creek. Center and Marion Townships became Danville Schools, Brown and Lincoln became Brownsburg, and Eel River, Middle, and Union became Northwest Hendricks.