(This week’s civic education and engagement column from Danville’s The Republican newspaper.)
People who move into Indiana from other parts of the U.S. are often startled at the size of local high schools. When compared to their counterparts in other states – including the four that surround us – Indiana’s tend to be considerably larger. Part of that was driven by the 1959 school consolidation law that cut the number of school districts from 966 to 402 and replaced small local schools with larger consolidated ones.
Out of Indiana’s 406 public and private high schools, Carmel comes in as the largest by far, with a total enrollment of 5,200, and Ben Davis is second, at 4,567. (I’m using the Indiana High School Athletic Association’s numbers.) Interestingly, both of those schools serve more students than Pittsboro has residents (4,288). Avon High School ranks seventh in the state, with 3,476, while Brownsburg is tenth, at 3,297.
At 1,773, Plainfield ranks 47th; Danville is 123rd, with 820; Tri-West ranks 166th, with 606; Cascade’s 546 students make it #178, and Bethesda Christian rounds out the county’s schools at #392, with 136 students.
I became aware of the disparity between Indiana’s high schools and those of our neighbors back in 2010, when I was asked to create a white paper about how the cost of building schools here compared to that of other states. (Short answer: we’re about average on a dollars-per-square-foot basis, despite what some state politicians have claimed.)
It’s impossible to get anything close to a perfect apples-to-apples comparison because of how different states classify and collect data about schools. So I established tables with similar factors. The first showed that roughly 17 percent of Indiana high schools had enrollments of more than 1,500 students. That compared to 13 percent in Michigan, just 9 percent in Ohio, and 8 percent in Kentucky. The average enrollment for Indiana was 876.
The other measure was reached by dividing the state’s total population by the number of high schools. I recently asked ChatGPT to update my numbers to the most recent, and it found that Indiana had 6.9 million residents. Divide that by 406 schools, and you arrive at 17,054 residents per school. Compare that to 13,144 residents per school for Illinois, 12,682 for Ohio, 10,524 for Kentucky, and 10,130 for Michigan. The bigger the population served by each school, the bigger the school.
Why is that distinction important? Generally, bigger schools cost much more to build. Start with having more classrooms, then factor in bigger cafeterias and wider hallways. Larger schools also tend to compete with other schools of similar size, so the need for spectator seating makes their athletic facilities considerably larger – and therefore more costly.
One of the priorities for the 2026 General Assembly session appears to be another look at school consolidation. Adopting plans to consolidate more of the state’s smaller high schools will be complex in many ways, and it would likely increase the average size of schools again.
The 1959 consolidations were driven primarily by a desire to improve the quality of instruction, by adding classes tiny local schools were unable to offer, like physics and calculus. More recent discussions have focused instead on lowering taxes. In other words, the 1959 effort was about making schools better. The current round of conversations is about making them cheaper. Fascinating how our state leaders’ priorities have changed.