Internship
This is the second time I've had to make this, but this is a collection of all of my stories I have written for my internship. I have written, contacted each and every source and interviewed them. Not all of these are published yet. So, I will have to post some of the actual articles on here.
8. Ball State researchers publish article that saves Indiana $88 million because of school choice
Dagney Faulk, Ball State director of research in the Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER), and Michael Hicks, George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of economics and CBER director, recently published a study about school choice leading to $88 million in savings for the State of Indiana in the 2019-20 school year, about 1 percent of the state’s annual general fund spending on education.
School choice allows students to attend school away from their assigned district.
“There's a lot of school choice in Indiana — probably the most school choice of any state in the U.S.,” Faulk said. “What we focused on is the fiscal impact of school choice. We did some basic calculations to see how school choice affects overall state funding for education. What we found is that, as a result of school choice, the state spends about $88 million less in the presence of the school choice options than [it] would have spent if students had gone to the school in their [assigned] district.”
School choice has been available in Indiana since the 2011-12 school year and it gives the option for parents and students to choose to attend whichever school they want, including private and charter schools. Faulk and Hicks’ study found more students were transferring out of the schools with the highest per-student funding than into them.
“The biggest winners in terms of receiving transfers are local public schools,” Hicks said. “So, the number one group of people in the state who have moved from one school to another are those who have moved from one local public school to another local public school nearby. And then, number two is from a local public school to a charter school. And number three is from a local public school to a private school with a voucher.”
The State of Indiana started offering vouchers to low-income families to help them afford private schools the same year school choice went into effect. These vouchers are financial support from the state that cover up to 90 percent of children’s private school tuition.
“If families meet the income and other guidelines, they can potentially use a voucher to send their kids to private schools,” Faulk said.
Despite the option to make private schools more affordable, Hicks said the state only pays for about 6.2 percent of school-aged children to attend charter and private schools in an Indiana Economic Digest op-ed.
Hicks said most of the expenses associated with school maintenance involve the cost of salaries and benefits. When schools experience a decrease in state funding, it’s usually reflected in changes to employee income.
“The cost of schools is almost exclusively a labor cost, which includes not just salaries, but benefits, healthcare costs and retirement pay,” Hicks said. “So the deep cuts that were made between 2010 and last year meant that most of the cost of most of the reduction in [state spending per student] was borne by workers — from lunchroom and school bus drivers to superintendents across the board.”
Schools that see students transferring out of their districts will have decreased funding from the state, but can offset that by accepting transfer students. This will offset the decreased funding because the state gives the school money for each transfer student. Public schools are required to accept every student who wants to attend their schools, unless certain students have significant behavioral records. If schools have more applications than available spaces, they must accept students randomly via a lottery drawing, according to the Education Commission of the States.
“I think most people realize that it's here to stay,” Faulk said. “It's pretty much ingrained in the Republican Party, which is the party in power, and the state is very supportive of school choice programs.”
While Hicks said school choice has its fiscal benefits, the decreased spending on education under inflation-adjusted budgets across the last 10 years outweighed the recent restoration of K-12 budget cuts.
“As Indiana’s economy grew, funding for schools declined,” Hicks said in the op-ed. “Indiana wasn’t the only state to do so, but educational attainment in Indiana lags the nation. Even with the benefits of school choice, Indiana’s cuts to education and growing educational gap clearly have slowed our economic growth.”
“I think most people realize that it's here to stay,” Faulk said. “It's pretty much ingrained in the Republican Party, which is the party in power, and the state is very supportive of school choice programs.”
Contact Lauren Clark with comments at lnclark2@bsu.edu.
9. Kokomo woman who has therapy dogs publishes children's book
Cindie Hudson, Kokomo, Indiana resident and owner of two therapy dogs — Harlee and Seger — has recently published a book called “Yellow Dog.” “Yellow Dog” is about Hudson’s family trip that she took to Sanibel Island on the southwest coast of Florida.
“We were on the beach and Harlee and Seger are very, very in tune with their surroundings, and they were looking in the trees, looking up in the sky, looking in the water, looking at the coconuts, the fish — things like that, and [I was] just watching them on the beach, and watching other people and how they were attracted to them,” Hudson said. “I think people in general are attracted to golden retrievers because they're just happy-go-lucky, smiley dogs [and] very friendly.”
This is Hudson’s first book, and it has already sold out twice on Amazon.
“The writing process was not difficult. I went back to the house that we had rented and kind of started writing it, making notes, putting thoughts together — that kind of thing. Then, I kind of sat on it for a little bit, to be honest,” Hudson said. “What I did was I sent it to three publishers [and] two of them got back to me. I selected the publisher that I'm currently with — Dorrance Publishing — and it kind of took off from there.”
Hudson has scheduled book signings with Harlee and hopes to see her book sold at bookstores in the near future.
The title of the book was inspired by someone at St. Vincent Hospital that Hudson visited with Seger in 2018.
“A child was in the hospital and wanted a visit from the yellow dog,” Hudson said.
Seger regularly goes to Ascension St. Vincent Hospital and Community Howard Hospital in Kokomo to comfort sick patients. Harlee does work at the Paws to Read program at the Kokomo-Howard County Public Library, and is the therapy dog at Western Primary School. Both dogs were trained and certified at Therapy Dogs International by Bonnie Krupa, who is one of two therapy dog certifiers located in Indiana.
“They were friendly with all the volunteers that I had helping me with the test and they were just really compassionate and basically kind of sat there and just wanted to be petted,” Krupa said. “You knew they were made for therapy work.”
Krupa was previously a graduate adviser for the Department of Special Education at Ball State, and she helped put Hudson in contact with a group from the Teachers College in April 2019.
”A lot of elementary [education] professors and different staff members in other departments knew that I was a dog trainer and had therapy dogs myself or evaluated therapy dogs,” Krupa said. “Teachers just reached out to me if they needed to find some therapy dogs to come in for a program they were having.”
Hudson talked with the Teachers College group about the benefits of having therapy dogs in the classroom. She got the idea for this presentation from noticing the different types of people that would come into the library — she noticed a lot of them struggled to read.
Hudson discovered the United States’ literacy rate is at a fifth-grade level for U.S. adults, which was one of the reasons she decided to write “Yellow Dog.”
“I noticed that there was a huge gap there, and I thought, ‘Well, I'm going to publish this book and I'm hoping that it'll get kiddos interested in reading, and it'll encourage them to read my book and maybe, they'll pick up another book, and then they'll pick up another book,’” Hudson said. “I just really want to encourage kids to read and to love to read.”
Contact Lauren Clark with comments at lnclark2@bsu.edu.
Infobox: link to amazon listing for book
10. escape muncie opens second location
Escape Muncie is celebrating its fifth anniversary by opening a second located at 808 W White River Blvd in the Blue Heron Plaza. The Adventures of Gilbert and Maude — the building name and theme of the courses — is a series of rooms where two aristocratic socialites are searching for their latest adventure.
“People had played all four of our games, and they were begging for more,” owner Jennifer Everetts said. “It takes two or three months to really work out a game to make sure that it actually works. So, instead of changing out our rooms, we [Bruce Everetts and I] decided to purchase another building.”
Everetts never planned to own an escape room, but when she went on a family trip to Cincinnati in 2016, she surprised her kids with an escape room adventure, something new for the family.
“The kids kept talking about it and were saying ‘Muncie needs an escape room, we need an escape room in Muncie,’ and I said, ‘Yeah that would be a fun thing for somebody else to do but not for us, not for me, I’m not doing that,’” Everetts said.
A couple months later, she had the idea to start an escape room to help fund the nonprofit she and her husband, Bruce Everetts, own — Journey Home Jamaica. This is a ministry that serves foster and orphaned children and women in distress in Jamaica. Since 2016, the two of them have not only been able to support their nonprofit, but they have also supported local and international charity events.
The Everetts are also involved with Ball State students, inviting immersive learning classes to the escape room close to the beginning of the semester to have an icebreaker opportunity.
“It’s so much fun,” Jennifer Everetts said. “What we see is that they don’t know each other at first, and then, after 20 minutes, they are learning to know each other and they start working together because their end goal is — in 60 minutes — to get out of this escape room.”
“The Adventures of Gilbert and Maude” course currently has two rooms open— “On Safari” and “The Pirates of the Carribean.” “On Safari” features Gilbert and Maude visiting their friends — Dorothy and John — but John goes missing while trying to find elephants. The players have 60 minutes to follow clues and try to discover John's location. The Everetts said this puzzle has a completion rate of 5 percent and is recommended for an expert level player.
“We like for people who have played all our other games to come into our new games and have a different experience,” Bruce Everetts said. “The biggest challenge really is in just the creative approach to create an experience that's different from everything else.”
“Pirates of the Carribean” is rated at a moderate difficulty level with a completion rate of 60 percent. Gilbert and Maude are on a cruise when their ship has been attacked by pirates. They sacrifice themselves to save the passengers and later find a map in the captain’s quarters, which inspires them to investigate the possibility of hidden treasure. The difficulty of the games, which the Everretts create themselves, is decided by the completion rate.
“In the original Escape Muncie, we had four different rooms that were all very different in the experience, and all of the box games are very different in their experience as well,” Bruce Everetts said. “In ‘Gilbert and Maude,’ there’s at least a common theme so that when you’ve played one of the games, you can go to the next one to get a consistency in the experience.”
The original location’s rooms include the theater, mansion, classroom and grandma’s living room, four box games — portable games that can be set up on a table — as well as two circus-themed games in a box truck outside of the building.
“You can play those either out in the parking lot or we can bring them to your events,” Jennifer Everetts said. “The games are enclosed in our truck, so it’s just like a room.”
Jennifer Everetts said the latest room in “The Adventures of Gilbert and Maude,” — the castle — should be open by the end of this year.
Bruce Everetts said his favorite part about running Escape Muncie is connecting with people and building friendships.
“Talking with people after the game and building friendships has been very rewarding,” Bruce Everetts said. “We can see the benefit of the service we’re providing, but we’ve also made a lot of good friends, and that’s been fantastic.”
Contact Lauren Clark with comments at lnclark2@bsu.edu.
Infobox:
It costs $25 to book a session at either location, and it can be done online. She recommends having a group with four to six people for most of the puzzles, but accommodations can always be made.
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