https://progressiveindiana.net
SUMMARY:
Rev. Alexander and Pastor Greene use central Indiana’s school bus driver shortage as a jumping-off point for a wider critique of the “school choice” system in Indianapolis. Their core argument: choice is meaningless if a family can’t get their child to school in the first place, and the shift away from stable, neighborhood-based community schools — toward a shifting landscape of charter operators, vouchers and district transfers — has placed an unreasonable research and logistics burden on parents, particularly those already stretched thin by low wages, housing instability and childcare. A WISH-TV news package on the regional bus driver shortage kicks off the discussion, followed by two callers — Mayhem and Imhotep — who argue the instability is by design: charter schools chase money while public schools lose local control, operators like Forest Manor get “flipped” repeatedly with little accountability, and the recent elimination of Enroll Indy leaves parents who were sold on it stranded. Imhotep also connects the current moment to the history of court-ordered busing in Indianapolis and argues that earlier generations fought harder for labor and civil rights than today’s generation fights for neighborhood schools. The hosts close by tying the bus driver shortage directly to a parallel teacher shortage — arguing that neither problem is being seriously addressed, and that both add up to kids simply not getting the education they’re entitled to.
WHAT’S INSIDE
00:00:01 — Show open: no FM broadcast tonight, new call-in number
- Different call-in number for tonight only, since Praise Indy’s stations are occupied with Circle City Classic prep
- Show still streaming live on Facebook and YouTube; replay posted to the Progressive Indiana Network Substack
- Preview of tonight’s topics: the central Indiana bus driver shortage, IMPD’s use of Flock camera technology, and new data showing families earning over $100,000/year benefiting most from Indiana school vouchers
- Greene: “So much is happening in our community. We can’t stop.”
00:04:32 — WISH-TV report: central Indiana school bus driver shortage
- WISH-TV’s Tre Drexelius reports Washington Township Schools is short about 20 drivers, leaving 9 routes without permanent assignments; office staff and mechanics have had to step in
- Indianapolis Public Schools is down about 20 bus drivers; MSD Wayne Township also reports a shortage
- Districts cite Indiana’s commercial licensing/CDL requirements as a barrier; Washington Township is offering free CDL training and hosting a “Drive the Bus” recruitment event
- Brownsburg Community Schools is exploring a new bus schedule to improve efficiency
00:06:41 — Transportation costs and staffing strain across districts
- Alexander: the report reflects issues playing out district-wide, including at IPS
- Greene: transportation costs are volatile and largely outside districts’ control — gas prices, staffing costs — and cuts to other programs often follow
- Greene: every township and county system around Marion County, from Zionsville to Lawrence Township, faces the same financial squeeze
- Frames it as one more strain layered on top of already-thin school budgets
00:09:38 — “We can’t even find bus drivers” — the practical stakes
- Alexander: no amount of debate over whether charter schools are “good or bad” matters if a district can’t physically get kids to the building
- Notes the historic shift from neighborhood walking/community schools to today’s sprawling, district-spanning bus routes
- Greene: the erosion of community schools has made families “much more dependent on transportation,” and that dependency has grown more costly over time
- Greene connects the transportation strain to the ongoing IPS/IPEC referendum conversation
00:13:03 — No school choice growing up vs. today’s “restaurant” model
- Alexander: earlier generations had no “school choice” — your school was simply assigned by where you lived, start to finish
- Alexander: today, families are expected to shop for schools “like a restaurant or a gas station,” with no guarantee a given school will exist a semester from now
- Greene: real accountability came from schools being locally answerable to the community; “choice” replaced that accountability rather than adding to it
- Greene raises the core question: are parents actually being given good choices, or just choices?
00:18:24 — Charter money vs. public-school control
- Alexander reads a Facebook comment from Imhotep arguing that “school choice” doesn’t actually give parents many real options — schools end up choosing students, not the reverse
- Alexander: charter schools are largely driven by money, while traditional public schools like IPS are largely about control of assets and enrollment
- Greene agrees, describing a pattern of allowing community schools to decline rather than investing in fixes, then launching charter alternatives that may not survive
00:21:01 — Charter turnover and “who owns it when it fails?”
- Greene: over half of charter schools that open eventually close, while the funding that could have gone to sustaining community schools goes elsewhere
- Raises unresolved questions about property ownership and accountability once a charter shuts down
- Greene: real “choice” only helps if what’s being chosen from is actually good — otherwise “choice ain’t buying you nothing”
- References Butler Lab School as an example of a strong option only available to families in a specific catchment area — not a citywide choice
00:23:59 — Education as “a Friday night date” / break
- Alexander: the current system reduces choosing a school to picking a restaurant for date night — improvised, unstable, marketing-driven
- Notes a school can be open in the fall and closed by the following semester with little warning to families
00:26:09 — Back from break; introducing Mayhem’s call
- Alexander recaps the transportation/choice discussion and notes another Facebook comment from Imhotep about teaching his son local history
00:27:45 — Caller Mayhem: Forest Manor and “historic amnesia”
- Mayhem argues the community has “historic amnesia” about how often Forest Manor’s building has changed hands as a so-called charter school, with little transparency about where the money went
- Describes a pattern of operators taking over, extracting funding, and closing within months
- Argues charter operators across “Naptown” exploit hopeful parents, using children as “scapegoats or guinea pigs” for financial gain
- [Note: Mayhem does not name specific operators or dollar amounts on air, so these claims are not independently verified here]
00:30:51 — Alexander pushes back gently on “ignorant” framing
- Alexander says he’s hesitant to call parents “ignorant,” noting most young parents never had access to information comparing school districts or outcomes
- Frames the confusion as a structural failure, not a parental one
00:31:41 — Caller Imhotep: Project 2025, vouchers, and busing history
- Imhotep connects Indiana’s current voucher expansion to arguments dating to Project 2025-style policy proposals, and cites a recent report that over 17,000 Indiana households earning above roughly $100,000/year now use vouchers — a shift from vouchers’ original framing as support for low-income urban families
- Recalls being told, after moving to Indianapolis, about historic long-distance busing of Black students to Decatur Township-area schools, and references Judge S. Hugh Dillin’s role in that history
- Argues his own generation (Gen X) and the boomers before it didn’t do enough to prepare younger generations for this fight, contrasting past labor and civil-rights organizing (citing the National Guard’s response to auto and steel workers in Flint) with today’s more “performative” activism
- Criticizes local elected officials — naming Maggie Lewis and Carlos Perkins — as complicit for not using legislation to force change
00:35:39 — Enroll Indy shuts down; Forest Manor as a “prime example”
- Greene notes Enroll Indy, the centralized enrollment system that helped drive the charter-school boom, is being eliminated
- Calls the Forest Manor situation a “prime example” of the broader pattern: a school closes, ownership and its money trail become murky, and no one tracks what happened to the students afterward
- Greene: this isn’t parents’ failure to do their own research — it’s poor choices “sold” to them by gatekeepers as if they were good ones
00:38:16 — “Gatekeepers” sell Enroll Indy, then pull it away
- Greene: Enroll Indy was marketed to parents as transformative (”the greatest thing since sliced bread”) and is now being shut down with little public notice
- Warns parents who relied on it won’t find out it’s gone until they try to log in
- Greene: the resulting confusion and chaos serves the interests of the “gatekeepers” who built and are now dismantling the system, while anyone who pushes back is painted as “anti-education”
00:40:52 — Frustration: education quality shouldn’t depend on ZIP code
- Alexander says all children — whether in Washington Township, Pike Township, Lawrence Township or IPS — should receive comparable quality education without parents having to “figure out” which is best
- Notes quality can swing year to year at the same school depending on funding and enrollment, not just district to district
- Both hosts agree an average 20-something parent, already managing housing, work and childcare, cannot reasonably be expected to also become an expert on comparative school performance
00:44:46 — Politics, gatekeeping, and intentional decline
- Greene: the erosion isn’t accidental — school board members who once prioritized education over money have been replaced by people focused on other interests, including gentrification
- Describes a strategy of letting a neighborhood’s schools (and property values) decline to make redevelopment cheaper, calling it a decade-long, intentional process
- Alexander and Greene agree the people benefiting financially from this pattern don’t want it named publicly
00:49:06 — Convenience over quality; the parent’s real calculus
- Alexander: parents’ school decisions are driven far more by logistics — housing, work commute, availability of vouchers — than by actual measures of educational quality
- Greene adds that children with special needs face an even steeper version of this burden
- Both agree that under the old, community-school model, families didn’t have to navigate this alone or constantly re-evaluate; that stability has been deliberately dismantled
00:52:40 — Teachers caught in the same system
- Alexander and Greene close out the education discussion by noting the same dynamics are pushing teachers out of the profession — most just want to teach, not navigate constant policy upheaval
- Greene cites third-grade retention/testing policy as an example of a rule teachers themselves would not have chosen
- Frames declining teacher retention as another downstream effect of the same “gatekeeper”-driven instability discussed earlier in the show
00:55:34 — Closing: bus drivers, teachers, and the throughline of the night
- Alexander ties the episode together: the show opened with a shortage of bus drivers and is closing on a shortage of teachers — meaning families face barriers just getting kids to school, and barriers to quality instruction once they arrive
- Both hosts commit to continuing the conversation regardless of district (IPS or township), citing transportation, unions and charter schools as ongoing threats to student learning
