Some Thoughts on the Upcoming CCS Referendum

Thanks to the Indiana General Assembly gutting funding for public schools in the 2025 legislative session, it’s a referendum year for a lot of school corporations. Carmel’s one of them.

It was already time to renew the CCS Safety Referendum, but with the shortfalls created by SEA1, the district has decided to pursue combining the existing Safety and Operating referenda into one new, larger Operating referendum.

We’re not alone. This is a common story for school districts in Hamilton County and across the state.

And, of course, we’re already seeing misinformation and wildly incorrect or made-up numbers put out by anonymous anti-public-education accounts. Those are frequently so ridiculous that they aren’t really worth addressing at this point.

That said, I do think it’s worth talking about some actual numbers that demonstrate the current state of funding at CCS. I’ve heard and seen three types of comments that seem to reveal a lack of understanding about our schools’ current finances.

"School costs have gotten out of control."

A favorite of the old we’re-not-called-moms-for-liberty-anymore gang, quite a few versions of this seem to get echoed by regular people who haven’t really looked at the data.

First, generally, school costs should be higher today. Utilities, technology, insurance and school safety are all major costs with growth that’s outpaced inflation over the last decade or two. On the flip side, the rest of the core costs of education that existed 20 years ago still exist today and have generally increased with inflation. So education should cost more, even after factoring in inflation. It doesn’t. At least not in Carmel.

Here’s a chart showing per-student spending for CCS for all the years that I could find publicly available budget and enrollment information. Each year’s been adjusted for inflation and normalized to 2026 dollars.

So out of 21 years that data’s available, we’re currently in the bottom quartile in terms of spending. In no way are costs today “out of control.” If anything, they’re lower than one would expect, arguably significantly so.

Note: The state doesn’t publish data going back prior to 2008, so it was luck that I found an old state report that had the numbers from 1999-2000 and 2005-06. I could find no data for the years that aren’t shown.

"We need to get rid of overpaid admins."

This one really gets me. With ~2,400 employees, CCS is either the largest or one of the largest workforces in our city. It serves ~16,000 students and their families. That obviously includes education, but also transportation services, meals, IT infrastructure and security, physical security of buildings, and all the other services required by such a large organization, like accounting, finance and human resources.

Name any respected company of similar size, scope, and responsibility that has fewer ‘admin’ positions and/or pays them less than our school system. The teachers and admins working in our schools aren’t doing it for the money. We underpay them, just like we underpay all of our public servants in this state. They could make more money taking corporate jobs.

Not to mention, admin salaries are basically a drop in the bucket of the overall budget..

"My kids graduated ___ years ago. Why am I still paying for the schools?"

The assumption here is that individuals are paying for their own kids’ education. That’s wrong on multiple levels.

First, those of us paying taxes are paying for the benefits of a well-educated public, whether we personally have kids who benefit or not.

Second, the vast majority of us paying taxes pay nowhere near enough if we were actually paying for our own kids’ education.

If you average the known per-student spend of CCS for all the years we can calculate it, it comes to $17,215.

For a kid going through K-12, that comes to $223,797 for the total cost of their primary and secondary education.

Now let’s say you’re a Carmel homeowner with a $500,000 property value, which is just about the median. Your annual property taxes would be $5,705.

At that rate, it would take ~39.2 years of paying that level of property taxes to have covered one kid’s education. Double it or triple it for two or three kids having benefited from going through our amazing schools.

Again, the system isn’t ‘taxpayers pay for their own kids to get an education’. As a society, we pay for the benefits of a well-educated populace. As Carmel residents specifically, we pay for the benefits of having a world-class school system.

But if people want to view their taxes as paying directly for their own kids’ educations, very few of them should be bringing up the amount they pay, even if their kids graduated decades ago. For those who are feeling the pinch over rising property taxes, your anger and frustration shouldn’t be directed at the schools. Point it at the legislators who passed SEA1 and thereby shifted a greater portion of the cost of our education away from businesses and onto your shoulders.