in Your Inbox
The atmosphere inside the Gary Area Career Center was thick with anticipation that evening.
Nearly 100 residents, parents, and educators filled the room on Oct. 24, eyes fixed on Emergency Manager Mike Raisor of MGT Consulting, the contractor Indiana chose to run Gary’s public school system when the state took it over in 2017.
The room buzzed as everyone waited for news about the fate of Gary and Bailly middle schools. Less than three minutes into Raisor’s presentation, he called the meeting “a group effort.” Attendees would discuss among themselves and provide input through surveys rather than a public comment period.
“This evening’s format is not a public forum. There’s no three-minute comment section,” he said.
That didn’t go so well. The room erupted.
“I object!” a voice rang out with unmistakable frustration.
“We all object!” another echoed.
“How can they do that?” someone shouted. “This is ridiculous!” added another.
Raisor tried to regain control, assuring the crowd that the process would be collaborative. Murmurs persisted, reaching a boiling point as he delved into the possibility of closing both middle schools and moving the students to other buildings in the district. Citing under-utilization, poor building conditions, and declining enrollment, he suggested various alternatives and financial targets. Yet, skepticism filled the room.
“Who’s proposing this?” asked a voice muffled by a mask.
“Respect our rights!” another shouted.
“We have no say in our schools?” a third questioned.
This moment underscored long-standing frustrations in a Black community that often feels sidelined when it comes to the management of one of Gary’s most important institutions: its public school system.
As the meeting unfolded, multifaceted concerns arose. Residents questioned the decision-making process, expressed worries about relocating middle school kids into buildings with older students, and feared that school closures could erode trust in education.
Keshay Tucker, a mother of two, said, “They need to ask the parents how we feel because we’ll witness the consequences.” But for her and many in the room, it was about more than just the potential school closings.
She questioned the takeover’s worth, asking, “What’s been done in the last six years? We’re going in circles.”
“When does the experiment stop?” another parent asked.
The Indiana Distressed Unit Appeal Board (DUAB) has overseen the district since its state takeover in 2017, and MGT Consulting, a Florida-based firm, manages it. The firm boasts it has strengthened the school district’s bottom line, with surpluses the past couple of years after years of deficits. But enrollment has continued to dwindle — and academic improvement has been limited.
Initially driven by promises of financial recovery, the state’s takeover of the Gary Community School Corporation now casts a long shadow. The community still grapples with warnings about the long-term solvency of its finances and dwindling student enrollment.
But the ongoing struggles of Gary’s education system raise questions about the takeover’s effectiveness while exposing the systemic disempowerment of communities that is inherent in how takeovers work. The community has lost agency and representation in an already fragile K-12 public education system, impacted further by pro-charter and school choice policies that make it harder for public schools to compete for students. Gary is part of a national trend of Black and low-income districts that are disproportionately affected by takeovers.
“The state takeover was heavy-handed. It was disrespectful of the parents and the population, and I understand the emotion that it generated and it caused.”
Ben Clement
As evident at the recent meeting and throughout the takeover, there are problematic racial and political optics at play: a predominantly Black district in a Democratic stronghold, now governed for six years by mostly white Republican state officials through out-of-town consultants and advisory boards.
Raisor, like the two previous emergency managers, is white. He exclusively led Tuesday’s meeting, presenting to a predominantly Black audience alongside the newly appointed five-member board, all Black and from Gary.
The board said little.
DUAB Executive Director Peter Miller acknowledged in an interview that “we’re aware of the optics, and we’re conscious of not wanting to make decisions for other people.” But he asserted that “all the folks involved … regardless of the color they are,” are motivated to improve the district for the students enrolled there.
But Domingo Morel, a New York University professor who has researched school takeovers, emphasizes that state school takeovers often do not yield academic benefits and frequently have racial and political undertones. The takeovers disproportionately impact majority-Black communities and are driven more by issues of race, political power, and economics rather than just academic or financial concerns, according to Morel.
A lot of the country’s more than 13,000 school districts struggle financially and academically, but just over 100 have experienced takeovers, and they tend to happen more in specific places.
“It’s not just that it’s majority African American communities,” Morel said. “It’s communities that are also led by African American political leadership, whether it’s at the school board level or city council level, at the mayoral level … these are the factors that increase the likelihood of a takeover.”
Morel said state takeovers are also an act of political disempowerment. Gary’s previous elected school board was dissolved by the state when it took over the district.
“When you take away the ability of communities to have their own school board, it takes the foundation from that community’s representation. That’s a foundation of representation, but then also all these other aspects of political voice and political power,” Morel said. “The most important institutions in a community are its schools and its children.”
He added, “Schools usually represent the largest portion of city budgets. And so when you take away the ability of people to determine how to spend their own money, then that is also politically and economically disempowering to communities.”
Adding to these concerns in Gary is the uncertainty of whether Gary is genuinely better off post-takeover. A newly appointed advisory board is taking steps toward local control, but most members are state-appointed, raising questions about the community’s influence in future decisions and if an elected school board will ever return.
And this big lingering question remains: Was the takeover really worth it?
The road to takeover is paved with inequity
In Gary, Indiana, the story of education is deeply entwined with the struggle for racial equity.
As Gary’s population grew along with its booming steel industry in the early 20th century, and as the Black population increased, Black students were often forced into overcrowded schools or portable classrooms separate from whites, or segregated within majority-white schools.
In 1927, when officials transferred some Black students to Emerson High School, hundreds of white students stormed out in protest. That led the school board to establish Theodore Roosevelt High School as an all-Black K-12 school a few years later.
In 1946, even before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, the school board in Gary passed a policy declaring that children would not be discriminated against “in the school district in which they live, or within the schools which they attend, because of race, color or religion,” according to a 1986 Indiana Magazine of History article about the school district’s early days by Ron Cohen, a notable former Indiana University professor and historian.
But de facto segregation of schools continued and led to unequal resources, overcrowding, and limited academic opportunities for black students despite protests, lawsuits, and other advocacy by the Black community. By 1961, Gary schools were nearly 90% Black even as its population of about 180,000 people was 61% white. All of this happened amid a backdrop of white flight over the next several decades as white families and businesses fled Gary, quickened by the election of a Black mayor in Richard G. Hatcher.
The collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and the economic decline that followed also contributed to population loss, which led to dwindling enrollment and tax revenue for the Gary Community School Corporation as workers left for greener pastures and took their children with them. Today, Gary’s population is just under 70,000 people and about 80% Black, like the vast majority of public school students there.
The financial strain and population loss have severely weakened the tax base and budget for schools, where dollars follow the number of students. There was also increased competition within Gary from charter and voucher schools, trends enabled by Indiana state policies.
This set Gary on a path that gained the attention of lawmakers, eventually leading to a state takeover of the entire school system.
Indiana first used school takeover as a strategy in 2012 under Tony Bennett, former Indiana superintendent of public instruction, who believed that the state should use the takeover option under Public Law 221. Passed by the Indiana General Assembly in 1999, the law allowed the state to take over a school if it received an F grade for six consecutive years.
In 2012, the state took the reins of five schools: four in Indianapolis and one in Gary, Roosevelt High School. All five schools served mostly Black students.
Roosevelt was placed under the control of EdisonLearning, a Florida-based for-profit organization. The school’s name was then changed to Roosevelt College and Career Academy. EdisonLearning contracted the services of Mediaflex, an organization led by Ben Clement, to help improve the school.
Clement agrees that “there needed to be some sort of intervention,” but contends “a state takeover was not something I would have prescribed.”
“The state takeover was heavy-handed,” he said. “It was disrespectful of the parents and the population, and I understand the emotion that it generated and it caused.”
EdisonLearning’s management of Roosevelt was questioned by citizens, especially when the high school made national headlines in 2019 due to poor building quality that caused pipes to burst in winter, keeping students from school for weeks. In 2020, Gary Community School Corporation opted to close the school, leaving one high school, West Side Leadership Academy.
By that time, the individual takeover of schools in Indiana had already triggered a domino effect.
“Nobody knew who these people were.”
In 2017, the state extended its reach over the entire Gary school district, citing a $110 million debt and a $21.5 million annual operating deficit, according to a report from the state’s Distressed Unit Appeals Board that year. Gary schools were not only struggling to pay vendors but even their own employees and health insurance premiums.
The district tried to cope by shutting down schools, but that was not enough. The school district, given its financial challenges, was also struggling to maintain school buildings, many of which were in dismal shape, according to state reports. The DUAB awarded a nearly $8 million contract to MGT Consulting to manage the school district.
Miller, the DUAB’s executive director, stressed that “no one’s saying that finances are more important than academics because clearly they’re not.”
But he acknowledged that when the takeover began, “the focus was on finances” rather than academics because “if they weren’t able to figure out how to balance the books, the school district would have ceased to exist.”
“You can’t have a class if you can’t pay the bills,” he said.
Within the first few years of the takeover, the district had a million dollar surplus, Miller said.
There were tough decisions, Miller said, like closing several underused school buildings to right-size capacity and reduce costs of operating the facilities. One-time federal pandemic relief distributed to the state education department and shared with Gary’s school district allowed officials to pay for various infrastructure upgrades and deferred maintenance. A 2020 referendum approving an increased property tax levy was also pivotal, generating $8 million annually — thanks to voters in Gary and the surrounding Lake County who pushed it through.
Miller also touted stronger accounting practices, financial reporting, and internal controls, which he said have also helped in better managing district operations and spending.
Gary resident Danielle Thomas said it’s hard for her to take issue with the takeover, noting the poor condition of many public schools by the time MGT stepped in.
“The schools been in bad shape … falling apart for years,” she said.
But Marion Williams, owner and CEO of Northstar Broadcasting and a former principal in Gary, minced no words about his stance on the takeover. “The state takeover was the worst thing to ever happen to Gary schools. It wasn’t about the academics; it was all about the money,” he said.
Williams’ critique is aimed squarely at Bennett, the controversial Indiana superintendent of instruction from 2009 to 2013. After his role in Indiana, Bennett served as Florida’s education commissioner for less than a year before resigning amid allegations that he changed the grade of an Indiana charter school founded by a GOP donor, a charge he labeled as “unfounded.” Although cleared of ethics violations related to the grade change by the Indiana State Ethics Commission in 2014, he was found guilty of using state resources for political campaigns and agreed to a $5,000 fine.
Bennett later became an education consultant and was considered for Secretary of Education under President Donald Trump; he is also registered as a lobbyist in Indiana and Florida.
“Tony Bennett took advantage of this urban community through privatization,” Williams asserted. “He sold Black people on the idea that charter schools were more secure than public schools.”
Bennett’s role is particularly controversial given his stake in MGT Consulting. In 2018, the Chicago Tribune reported that Bennett sits on MGT’s board of directors, a detail not initially disclosed by the company or state officials before the company was chosen to manage the district.
In Gary, the state takeover did not come without warning signs, according to GlenEva Dunham, who has spent 45 years in Gary education and nearly a decade as teachers union president. There were rumors swirling about the possibility of the district not being able to make payroll, though Dunham argues folks were “making it worse than it was.” While paydays were secured through emergency loans, budget issues loomed large.
Dunham described the takeover as “racially motivated” given Gary’s Black leadership. The predominantly white emergency managers and outsiders who swooped in seemed to confirm her worst fears.
“Nobody knew who these people were,” she said.
At the school level, the impacts hit hard. Dunham said mass layoffs devastated teacher morale, as a number of teachers retired early or left the district, worried about rumors that their retirement packages would be taken away.
“We lost 75 teachers in the first year alone,” Dunham said.
The ripple effect was immediate: ballooning class sizes and a dwindling support staff, including essential roles like counselors. Lovetta Tindal, a Roosevelt graduate from the class of 1966, has been very active in attending DUAB meetings. She pointed out the glaring issues.
“You’ve got a failing school system and you got one teacher for every 38 students? That’s unacceptable. You have low math scores in the school system. What are we doing about that? Did MGT come in with the children’s best interest at heart? They are a for-profit organization and they came to enhance their profits at the expense of our children,” she said.
Rachel Wilbourn, a concerned parent and West Side High graduate, also emphasized what she sees as a lack of focus on academics. For her and many Gary residents, the district’s stagnate academics is a glaring indicator of systemic failure.
“They talk about the budget and finances a lot, but the concern is the education of these kids. I was looking at their curriculum and how things were being run. A lot of these people at MGT don’t even have an education background. I’m just concerned about how things are being run,” she said.
The school district’s graduation rate is down from 90% in 2017 to 72.1% last school year, according to state data.
In 2016, a year before the takeover, Indiana’s standardized test was I-STEP+. Only 36.5% of Gary’s grades 3-8 students passed the English/Language Arts test (E/LA). Just 23.2% passed math, and only 19.5% passed both E/LA and math.
Currently, Indiana’s standardized test is ILEARN. Gary’s students are not faring as well on the test. During the spring 2023 administration of the exam, only 9% of Gary students were proficient on the E/LA portion of ILEARN, 3.9% in math, and only 2.2% passed both E/LA and math.
Miller said direct comparisons of test scores pre-and post-takeover are challenging given changes in assessments and scoring standards used to measure student achievement. Miller noted that “the test now is more rigorous.”
Miller provided several other explanations for why academics have been hard to improve. He cited the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on assessments and attendance. More deeply, he pointed to long-standing challenges like high rates of students reading significantly below grade level. Overcoming such entrenched academic difficulties requires a multifaceted, long-term approach, he said.
He touted several strategies Gary schools are employing under MGT to boost academics, such as high-impact tutoring, improved reading programs focused on science-based methods, and individualizing instruction for each student’s needs. He also pointed to efforts to enhance attendance and early literacy to get more third-graders reading proficiently.
Gary residents have rallied to advocate for their schools in various ways. Some have been so concerned that they’ve regularly made the nearly three-hour drive to Indianapolis to attend DUAB meetings. Former correctional officer Nikki Byrd noted at a meeting this summer, “We traveled three hours only to get to speak for three minutes about our schools,” according to a story by Indykids Winning.
Capital B Gary reviewed the past year’s worth of DUAB meeting minutes for a sense of the community’s concerns, which range from dismal academics to the physical conditions of school buildings. Many have called for an independent audit to scrutinize how MGT spent district funds.
Democratic state Sen. Eddie D. Melton, the city’s presumptive next mayor, supported calls for an external audit of MGT’s financial management at a July meeting.
Paul Joyce, a DUAB member, responded to these calls, saying, “I can guarantee you there has been an audit performed. … If you have questionable costs, bring me those claims and I will look at them specifically.”
The state takeover is set to end on June 20, 2024. However, the future remains uncertain. As of now, the district has nine schools plus the Gary Area Career Center, down from 12 in 2017. Raisor, the emergency manager, recently proposed further closures, which, if implemented, would shrink GCSC yet again.
“We don’t have it all figured out right now.”
The tense Oct. 24 meeting at the Gary Career Center merely added another layer to the ongoing saga of the district’s tumultuous takeover, serving as a stark reminder of the community’s growing impatience and dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.
Gary schools currently operate under an elementary, middle, and high school model. MGT proposed closing Gary’s two middle schools, moving sixth-graders to the district’s elementary schools, and housing seventh- and eighth-graders in Gary’s sole remaining high school to create a junior/senior high school model. The goal is to close underused middle schools and better utilize existing space and resources, officials said.
Raison’s proposal to close the community’s two remaining middle schools was met with resistance from residents. Raisor mentioned officials had also considered potentially closing Bethune Early Childhood Development Center and adding early childhood education at all elementary schools. Another option was making the district’s elementary schools K-12, or combining Gary Middle and Bailly into a single middle school. Raisor stressed that “something” had to happen to address underutilization of district schools, whether it be the proposal suggested by MGT or one of the alternatives.
He framed the decisions as an existential matter for the school district, citing a projected surplus of $2.7 million for next year that could plummet to just $500,000 over a decade due to loan repayments and the end of federal COVID-19 relief fund. Raisor suggests a $6 million surplus as a target and as insulation against the unexpected, and said the district needed to financially “future-proof” itself.
“We have been financially solvent for two years in a row, this will be the third year of financial solvency,” he said. “However, the long-term forecast … shows our surplus getting very, very thin. And as I talked about last time, one oops, one unexpected thing, and the district goes in the red. And if the district goes in the red, that could be no more district.”
He insisted the plan centered “around what is best for kids, given the current situation we have.”
But the crowd wasn’t buying it.
His admission that “we don’t have it all figured out right now” fanned the flames of discontent. Attorney Shelice Tolbert, seated beside Raisor, tried to restore order.
“If I have to interrupt one more time … to ask you not to disrupt the meeting, I’m going to ask security to speak with you,” she warned one attendee.
“If they’re going to speak with one person, they’re going to speak with all of us,” a voice shouted back defiantly.
It was another tipping point.
A man stood up and declared, “Community, if this is not what we want, let’s go.”
His rallying cry prompted nearly a dozen people to exit the room in protest.
Though the meeting resumed, the air was thick with skepticism.
“We need a superintendent and an active, positively focused administration who is pro-Gary, pro-Gary students,” said Lovetta Tindal, capturing the sentiment of many.
State Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, summed it up: “The only way we’re going to survive is to get more student population.”
He also questioned the role of MGT, suggesting that major decisions should be left to a new board and superintendent.
Looking forward
In February, Morel, the NYU professor, was a guest for a webinar through the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence at Indiana University Northwest.
During this webinar, he said, “When a state takes over a local school district, the school board is treated in one of three ways: One, the city, the community gets to keep the locally elected school board. Another option is that the school board is abolished and replaced with a state appointed board. There’s a third option. The school board is abolished and not replaced at all.”
In his research, he found that Black school districts rarely kept their boards while white districts did. Gary, with an appointed advisory board, seems to represent a version of that second option he mentioned.
As Gary’s schools prepare for a transition from state control to a semblance of local governance, the community finds itself at a crossroads. A Senate act signed into law this year establishes an appointed five-member board to take over the GCSC from DUAB in 2024.
The board, expected to serve in an advisory capacity until July, will hire a superintendent to help lead the school district.
While all five appointed members are Black and have ties to Gary or northwest Indiana, they were not elected by the community. Three were appointed by the Indiana secretary of education, raising questions about the extent of local control, while the mayor and city council were allowed to choose one member each.
But some in the community see the transition as a positive step. Tindal encapsulates the cautious optimism some in the community are feeling.
“I’m prayerful,” she said. “My hope is that the general public will get the attention of these people who hold these positions. I hope we will use our voices to continue fighting for these children.”
Tindal’s words echo a sentiment that many in the community share: a sense of urgency to hold those in power accountable.
However, Byrd, another Roosevelt graduate, is less optimistic.
“I don’t feel good about the future of this district,” she said. “The school board is going to be a rubber stamp with people they can control.”
It would take more legislation to bring back an elected school board. The law that established the appointed board requires the board to report back to the state legislature in 2026 about how things are going at the district, especially regarding governance, Miller said. “I could potentially see the legislature changing [the makeup of the board] in the 2027 session, but you know, that’s way down the line,” he said.
Dunham, the teachers union president, remains cautiously optimistic but questions whether the superintendent selection process will truly involve community input.
As the community grapples with these questions, one thing is clear: The path to genuine local control is fraught with challenges. The new board may be a step in the right direction, but it also serves as a reminder of the work that lies ahead, whether it is appointed or elected.
Wilbourn, the parent with two children in the district, emphasized the need for a solid plan.
“If Gary manages to regain local control of the school district, they have to make sure that they have a plan in place so we won’t go through this again,” she said. “We all know if you don’t have a plan in place, someone will have a plan for you.”
Capital B staff writer Maddy Franklin and Erick Johnson contributed to this report.
This story has been updated.