An Indianapolis Star article I caught in the Muncie Star Press discusses Beech Grove’s consideration of discontinuing school busing if a property tax referendum doesn’t pass. The article states that transporting children to school is not required of school districts and that might be one of the places where the hatchet falls if the deep cuts have to be made.

“The . . . only place we can really cut when this (property tax cap) is fully implemented is . . . transportation,” said Beech Grove Superintendent Paul Kaiser, “and then I’ve got to eliminate a big part of capital projects” if the district’s Nov. 3 referendum fails.

Several school districts are turning to public referendums to stave off drastic cutbacks, and even more districts are expected to follow suit in the coming months.

A major factor squeezing the schools is the state’s 1 percent property tax cap, which was offered as a solution to homeowners facing skyrocketing taxes after a court-ordered overhaul of property-assessment rules.

One of the problems with this is that a lot of our urban and school district planning decisions have been made with school buses as an assumption. The districts are too big, often, for kids to walk to school. The roads leading to and from school frequently are not pedestrian friendly. In my case, we would just drive our kids to school — but this isn’t necessarily an option for every family. For a child to walk from my house to the elementary school would require 2.5 miles of walking, most of which is through narrow, heavily traveled two lane road with no shoulder and no sidewalk.

Is busing really one of the first targets of budget cuts? Or is this the most visible, most painful cut a school administrator could publicize in order to encourage a voter to vote in favor of a property tax increase? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Obama is taking a smarter approach to the health care debate now. Over the past few weeks, it seems that the discussion was of the proposed system in a vacuum — in other words, there was no real discussion of how it would compare to what we have now. Obama is trying to shift things by comparing the proposed system to the present system. When critics complain of a health care bureaucracy, they should have to explain why the proposed bureaucracy is worse than the present one — why employees of for-profit insurers are easier or better to deal with than government employees; why a tax to pay for health care is intrinsically worse than an insurance premium; etc.

As an aside, I was a little amused by the headline in the linked article: Obama criticizes ‘scare tactics’ in health debate. For some reason, it amused me that “scare tactics” was in “scare quotes.” I’m easily entertained.

The 2009 Blog Indiana “BLINDY”s were awarded and, while Masson’s Blog was nominated, it was Hoosier Access that took home the coveted prize. So, congratulations to Josh Gillespie and the boys. Shawn Plew and Noah Wesley really deserve a lot of credit for organizing Blog Indiana. Once again, it was a good time and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Indiana oriented blogging and technology.

Going there did remind me how much of an online ghetto I occupy. For me, the political blogosphere is pretty central to how I experience the Internet, but it’s such a minor part of what’s out there overall. It’s good to mix and mingle with the rest of the world. Indiana has a pretty good technology scene, and I’m glad for the opportunity to experience some of it.

I just learned that former Rep. Heeke has passed away. The write up from WAMW/DLC Media:

Former Indiana State Representative Dennis Heeke has died…he was 81.

The poultry farmer from Dubois, Indiana was first elected to the Indiana House of Representataives in District 73 in 1965 representing Dubois and Warrick Counties. Later that district also covered portions of Crawford, Perry, Spencer, Harrison, Scott and Washington Counties. He served 17 consecutive terms through 1998.

He served as caucus chairman for 22 years and as a member of the Legislative Council. He was instrumental in development of the Patoka Reservoir and organizing the Wabash Valley Association and later served as president of the association. He also helped organize the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District. He served on the Wabash Valley Interstate Commission between Indiana and Illinois as an appointee of Gov. Roger Brannigan and Gov. Ed. Whitcomb. He was named the outstanding young farmer of Dubois County in 1959. He was an organizer of the Dubois Volunteer Fire Department and served as its president. He was a past advisory board member of Memorial Hospital and Health Care Center in Jasper. He also was a member of the Dubois Development Corp.

The funeral will be at 10 a.m. Monday in St. Raphael Catholic Church in Dubois. Burial will be in the church cemetery. Friends may call from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday at Becher-Kluesner Downtown Chapel in Jasper.

Abdul posted a question for discussion: “when schools fail, whose fault is it?” My comment in response was, as usual, mostly glib and only partially informed. Which, of course, makes it perfect for a blog post.

It’s a cascading failure.

There is a chicken & egg dynamic, but let’s say it starts with a chaotic, unstructured home life.

There isn’t a parent to stay home with the child either because both parents are working, unwed mother, divorce or some combination thereof. Often, I suspect, the time the parent is able to spend with the child lacks disciplinary and educational value because of lack of time, lack of energy, lack of inclination, or some combination thereof.

This leads to kids arriving at school unruly and uneducated. Throw in a smattering of kids who maybe don’t understand English too well in the first place for good measure. The more of these kids you have, the smaller the class sizes need to be for teachers to deal with them. But resources tend to be lowest in areas where these problems are the worst. And, these areas are probably where you need the most talented teachers, but the most talented teachers are likely to go where the pay is better and the work is easier.

Layer the whole thing with stubborn teachers unions who are dug in to resist ideological union busting (and therefore, not very responsive to legitimate needs for change); bureaucratic stagnation and maybe even a little corruption at the administrative level; tax payers with unrealistic expectations; and lawmakers who like to make education a political football, and you have something really special.

Eric Bradner, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, reports that Dick Lugar is concerned that health care is too costly at a time when we already have huge deficits.

Major health care reform is too costly an undertaking with federal deficit spending already ballooned, Sen. Richard Lugar told crowds at several stops on the first day of a two-day visit to Evansville.
. . .
“This is not an appropriate time for our government to adopt a comprehensive, whole-scale change in the health care system of the country,” Lugar said late Tuesday afternoon.

Let’s not kid ourselves. If it doesn’t happen now, it’s not going to happen. This country has been talking about health care reform for 50 years. The Clinton attempts were throttled in their cradle. Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, didn’t make any efforts that I’m aware of. The current system has only gotten worse. Part of the problem is some sort of fundamental cognitive dissonance in our citizenry. The other day, I was trying to collect a medical debt from an individual who hadn’t paid his bill off in 5 years of me pushing. He was talking about how tough times were, how he couldn’t get insurance because of his pre-existing conditions, and then got off on a tangent about how the country was veering toward socialism and started channeling Fox News on health care. Then he said something like “but I’m paying, and I’m not relying on the State!” My jaw may have dropped a bit — he’s paying small portions of his bills in dribs and drabs, meanwhile the hospital has, in effect, given him an involuntary loan — and he’s proud of his self-reliance? He didn’t recognize the fact that –having to talk to me in court was a pretty strong indicator that he had failed to live up to his responsibilities.

But, I digress. Senator Lugar is now concerned about deficits. I am too. In fact, from about 1988 – 2002, it was by far my number one concern. Since then, the country has taken such a detour that it has gone down the priority list a few notches for me. But, the fact is, we would be in a pretty strong position to address health care if the Clinton tax structure had remained in place through the Bush II years and had we not voluntarily and for no good reason elected to go piss away money and lives in Iraq. Using those colossal mistakes — which opponents of health care reform generally favored — to bolster the argument against changing the status quo in health care seems to be rewarding bad behavior. All too many of the born-again fiscal conservatives didn’t raise any serious questions about the cost of the Iraq adventure (I’m looking at you, Blue Dogs.) The message I’m getting is that billions for discretionary military activities are o.k. but if the money might make poor or middle class people’s lives a little better, we’d better pinch pennies until Lincoln cries.

And, frankly, I’m not entirely convinced on the expense argument. We spend more per capita on health care than other industrialized nations and get worse results. We’re Americans – we should be able to do better. The money is already being spent, we’re just not getting the results.

Michael Zennie, of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reports that Indiana DCS is launching a public relations campaign to spread the word that sleeping with an infant isn’t recommended and can lead to the death of the infant.

Medical experts, law enforcement officers and child advocates want to spread the word – sleeping with your baby can be deadly.

Suffocation or other asphyxiation from unsafe sleeping kills more babies in Allen County than any other preventable cause of death – more than car crashes, more than drowning.

I suspect that advocates of the co-sleeping movement won’t appreciate this. I’ve never been a fan of the whole sleeping with your baby thing — probably for selfish reasons. It interferes with my sleep. We went with the Ferber method (i.e. “cry it out”) to get Cole sleeping through the night at about 4 to 5 months. I can’t say it works for every kid — in Harper’s case, I’d say the results have been mixed — but for Cole, the results were dramatically positive. He went from a rarely-sleeping crank, to a champion sleeper and one of the sweetest kids around. (Not that I’m biased or anything).

As for the PR campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised if the DCS has their facts right on this one, but they also wouldn’t be the first government agency to jump into a hyperbolic ad campaign based on incomplete data.

Update The Indiana Law Blog noted a case that is on topic which is slated for oral argument before the Indiana Court of Appeals:

Alisha Harradon & William Kenneth Jones, Jr. vs. Kathy & Keith Schlamadinger – Alisha Harradon and William Jones, Jr. (collectively “the Parents”) filed a complaint in Starke Circuit Court against Keith and Kathy Schlamadinger (collectively “the Schlamadingers”) alleging that the Schlamadingers’ negligence proximately caused the death of the Parents child. The Parents were overnight guests in the Schlamadingers’home, and they allege that the Schlamadingers did not provide an adequate place for the Parents’ three-month-old child to sleep. The child suffocated during the night while sleeping on the couch with his mother. The Schlamadingers filed a motion for summary judgment, which the trial court granted. The Parents appeal and argue that the Schlamadingers owed a duty to the child, and there is a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the Schlamadingers breached that duty.

What a horrible situation.

(Via Blue Indiana and the Journal Gazette)

Howard Dean and Karl Rove are scheduled to debate at DePauw University in September.

Dean is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Rove is the former chief political adviser to President George W. Bush. The two political speakers are slated to debate Sept. 11 about America’s challenges and opportunities.

There is a pairing that should capture the interest of any political junkie.

The Urbanophile has an extensive write up on “Detroit: Urban Laboratory and the New American Frontier.” The piece has a lot of ideas, but one that particularly caught my eye was the notion that government there was so weak that innovative solutions to problems are possible. In Chicago, if you don’t have the proper permit to tie your shoe laces, you’ll probably have code enforcement on you every time you reach for your feet. But, in Detroit, apparently, that’s not going to happen.

In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not. It’s a sort of anarchy in a good way as well as a bad one. Perhaps that overstates the case. You can’t do anything, but it is certainly easier to make things happen there than in most places because of the hand of government weighs less heavily.

Go North, young man!

I generally stay away from Indianapolis-specific coverage because that beat is well covered by others, but the brouhaha in Indianapolis caught my eye. stAllio! provides some links and a general explanation of what happened last night at the Indianapolis City-County council meeting. (Abdul provided some extensive twittering from the event, incidentally.)

also at tonight’s meeting, the republican majority—who were swept into power in an anti-tax frenzy in 2007—swallowed their pride and obediently voted for a tax increase to fund the CIB. the democrats on the council were more than happy to sit back on this one and let the republicans, many of whom had signed no-tax-increase pledges, hang themselves on their own hypocrisy. one republican, christine scales, voted against. one democrat, jackie nytes, crossed over to ensure that the bill passed.

The anti-tax rabidity of the Ballard campaign against former mayor Peterson almost can’t be overstated. Then, as I recall, the public safety tax that was one of the outrage triggers somehow wasn’t ever rolled back. And now, this.

I’m sure I’m guilty of it too, but this highlights the fact that glib solutions are easy to pontificate about, but when it comes time to actually govern, the solutions get a little less easy.