Its City Was Hurting. The Schools Were Strapped. So This University Took Charge.

Yaron Ayalon, a historian, was thrilled when Ball State University offered him a tenure-track job in 2013. Though it wasn’t a wealthy institution, the college provided a supportive culture and the chance to teach students of modest means.

He was less thrilled about moving to Muncie, Ind. Ayalon, who later became chair of the faculty council, had always imagined a job where he could bike to his office in a few minutes. Instead, he and his wife chose to live an hour’s drive from campus in Carmel, an affluent suburb north of Indianapolis with highly ranked schools.

Muncie’s schools, meanwhile, were shedding money and students. In 2017, in the face of immense financial strain, the state put the school district under emergency management. In May 2018, it passed a controversial and unusual law that handed control over to Ball State. The university replaced the five-member elected school board with seven of its own appointees, who took charge on July 1.

What has followed is a town-gown experiment of grand scale. Ball State hopes that boosting Muncie’s schools can both help fulfill its public mission and shore up a city whose reputation, fairly or not, keeps some employees and students away.

As public colleges face mounting skepticism and wavering enrollments, they’ve sought to please many constituencies at once: Serve their communities. Lure more students. Keep professors happy with prestigious research opportunities. Many, including Ball State, have ramped up their community projects at lawmakers’ behest. Colleges, in other words, are encountering heightened expectations for what they do, says Geoffrey S. Mearns, Ball State’s president, but falling confidence that they can meet them.

Muncie Community Schools offered a 5,000-student proving ground for Ball State to reverse that narrative — along with not a few parents, teachers, and local officials leery of their city’s largest employer sweeping in with new state power.

Almost a year into the effort, and two years into his term, Mearns has won over many of the skeptics. Sue Errington, Muncie’s Democratic representative to the Indiana House, who voted against the law, is now “happy to see that it’s working out as it is,” she says. “Some of the things that I know I was concerned about have not happened.”

Ayalon, who will soon leave Ball State to direct a program at the College of Charleston, says he was neutral on the plan at first, and now sees it as a “brilliant move” to attract residents to the city and students to Ball State — even if “it may take 10 years.”

A lot can happen in a decade. The long-term fiscal plan and “academically innovative strategies” that the law requires the new school board to design aren’t due until June 2020; data measuring the results aren’t due until 2021. Can Ball State serve all its communities while handling the hot coal of local education?

Muncie, a city of about 69,000 people, is used to the gloomy plot lines that have attached themselves to postindustrial Midwestern towns. Its school enrollments peaked at around 19,000 in 1967; the city’s population peaked in the 1970s and began falling soon after. The 2008 recession only accelerated the decline, according to Ball State researchers. In coverage of the 2016 presidential election, a Guardian photo essay made the city’s deserted steel-wire, auto-transmission, and glass plants the emblem of a desolate “Middletown,” U.S.A.

The school district from 2007 to 2017 ran up deficits totaling $36 million. Buildings were converted or shuttered. Nudged by state laws encouraging student mobility, parents pulled their kids out for more-reliable districts nearby, taking state dollars with them. Teachers — fed up with financial uncertainty, the union said — left in droves.

By 2017, the legislature had had enough. State officials were frustrated that the district had spent millions of dollars in bonds, meant for repairs, on operating expenses.

Republican state legislators passed the law putting Ball State in charge, along party lines, in the spring of 2018. Ball State appointed a new board that serves at the university’s pleasure. The board will submit the district’s new financial and academic plans in 2020 and report on their progress the year after. Budget and personnel decisions are left up to the new school board, and the university remains financially and legally separate, immune from any civil lawsuits that may arise. Controversially, the law also exempts the district from recognizing the collective-bargaining rights of its teachers’ union.

During debate over the legislation, with few points of comparison, news outlets mentioned Boston University’s takeover of the Chelsea Public Schools, a high-poverty district in financial and academic distress. A team from the private university directly managed the district from 1989 to 2008, improving buildings and curricular offerings but finding some entrenched social and academic problems tough to crack. Unlike in Muncie, as Inside Higher Ed noted last year, in Chelsea, officials voted to hand over control, and retained power to override certain policy decisions the university made.

Ball State’s arrangement — a public university taking over its city’s school district — is, as far as most are aware, unique. But the principle is not. More and more, when crises arise, city and state officials look to colleges to leave the bounds of their normal charter and help, says Joshua J. Yates, research director of the University of Virginia’s Thriving Cities Lab. Colleges themselves have expanded their town-gown projects since the 1980s, according to a recent report by the lab.

For example: the University of Utah offers $20,000 community-based research grants, larger than typical commitments of $1,500 to $5,000, according to the report. Arizona State University measures the “social embeddedness” of its many colleges every year. And down the road from Muncie, Butler University, another private institution, has worked community service into its core curriculum, requiring all undergraduates to take at least one course that engages with Indianapolis.

Ball State, like many of those colleges, has helped coax to life a tangle of new town-gown committees, councils, and boards. Some meet demands imposed by the state; all aim to elicit input and earn buy-in from across the city.

The university has appointed an Academic Innovation Council, led by the provost, to audit instruction and explore new teaching strategies for elementary and secondary schools. An education summit planned for this fall will spin off a panel of national K-12 experts. The old elected school board became a new advisory board, with no formal power. And Mearns drew from the pool of runner-up school-board candidates to create a Community Engagement Council, which helps the board with advocacy, fund raising, and volunteering in the schools.

Many community projects can suffer from an “obvious tension” between the pageantry of committees and the long-term “messy work of real community engagement,” Yates says. And colleges, at their worst, have a long history of “strip-mining their communities” through teaching and research. Low-income neighborhoods in college towns can often tire of seeing armies of researchers with clipboards, measuring problems with little apparent change. With any partnership, he says, “the real question is, is it reciprocal?”

Ideally, Yates says, colleges build up resources and trust over time, so that when a crisis emerges, they aren’t scrambling to win over the community, organize, and act all at once. “I think we’re in this moment where institutions are waking up to the need, but they haven’t institutionally invested to do that.”

Ball State believes it has a head start. For decades, the university has run immersive-learning projects, service-and-research programs that connect students, under a faculty sponsor, to a community need. Students join those projects more than 4,000 times a year, says Jennifer Blackmer, a theater professor and the director of immersive learning.

Many connect students to local health-care providers, arts organizations, and businesses. Some of the most established programs are run out of the Teachers College, which has long planted students in Muncie classrooms to learn by doing.

Ball State now sees an opportunity to unify those projects. The university has installed a faculty liaison in each public school, connected to representatives of each of the university’s colleges. That network is meant to bridge what schoolteachers and officials need with what faculty members and the Academic Innovation Council can provide. Recent projects have had Ball State students study school safety, design elementary-school libraries, and help create a high-school debate team and philosophy club.

Everybody wins, the thinking goes: Professors research questions that buoy their community, college students gain valuable real-world experience, and elementary- and secondary-school students enjoy the pedagogical fruits of research-driven programming and teaching.

The Muncie partnership has developed in tandem with other big changes at Ball State. In the past two years, the university gained a new president, a new provost, and a clutch of new deans. As the bill allowing the takeover wound its way through the legislature, Mearns and administrators were designing a new, decades-long strategic plan, “Destination 2040.” By that year, the university hopes to be “internationally recognized” for its partnerships with the city and region. Improving town-gown relations, the university said, was a matter of both “institutional self-interest” and “moral obligation.” The Muncie schools deal became an explicit plank of that platform.

The university didn’t have to convince only the teachers and parents of Muncie, says Blackmer, who was on the strategic-planning committee. It also had to reassure faculty members that deep engagement with the community would be worth it, professionally.

While more faculty members are interested in becoming involved with the community, Blackmer says, many worry that that involvement lacks the prestige of teaching and research. (Even though Ball State has since 2014 granted greater consideration to service in its tenure and promotion guidelines, and in its new strategic plan.) “There’s a disconnect in the faculty world that this work is not rigorous,” Blackmer says.

She hopes some immersive-learning projects can prove that notion wrong. One last fall connected the speech-pathology and physics departments with the local hospital to give clinicians more-reliable data about the viscosity of thickening agents, used by people with swallowing disorders.

“It feels like more traditional research,” Blackmer said, “but it’s very in line with immersive learning, because they’re partnering with area hospitals and nursing providers.”

A unified network of research and service, and an improved reputation for Muncie, could help attract students, too. Ball State points to recent years of record applications and enrollments, and to more-diverse cohorts. But growth remains tepid, and a lesser share of those enrollments are on-campus, full-time students. Moody’s, the bond ratings agency, warns of “challenging in-state demographics” and “immense competition” in and out of the state.

“Our hope is always to be able to provide a clear pathway for students to be able to move seamlessly from public school into higher education,” says Susana Rivera-Mills, provost and head of the Academic Innovation Council. “As universities, we have learned that the earlier we can reach our students,” the better they can see themselves on a path to college.

While the university stresses that student recruitment is not a priority for its Muncie partnership, Mearns acknowledges the need to focus on “experiential” education to keep on-campus undergraduate life alive. Projects like these are part of that effort.

“All of this really ties together well,” says Rivera-Mills. “The timing of our partnership with the schools, the timing of our strategic plan, and how we’re defining what we expect to be research and scholarship moving forward.”

Mearns is slim and measured, with neatly brushed hair, rimless glasses, and a technocratic manner.

A federal prosecutor before he entered academe, he is quick to convey that he is not prosecuting anyone today.

“I’m not going to comment on what all of the causes may or may not be with respect to the predicament that we are all in,” he told reporters when the Muncie-schools proposal became public. “The future of Muncie is dependent on the future of Muncie schools, and the future of Muncie will positively or negatively affect the future of Ball State.”

Not everyone was reassured. When the takeover was proposed in January last year, the state teachers’ union was unnerved by a law drawn up “behind closed doors.”

Jason P. Donati, a member of the former elected school board (now the advisory board), and Errington, the state representative, worried that the new board would be twice removed from the people — appointed by out-of-town trustees who were themselves not elected but appointed.

Errington said the law’s drafters never approached her or other Muncie officials. She ultimately voted against it.

Donati, the most vocal critic on the former board and the only member nominated for the new one, felt that parents and teachers got left out of the university’s early talks at the Statehouse, he said. He testified to the legislature and organized a community forum with lawmakers and university officials.

Most controversially, the state legislature allowed the new board to determine what to do about teachers’ collective-bargaining rights. So far, they have not been recognized, and it’s not clear whether they will be, says Pat Kennedy, president of the Muncie teachers’ union. Teachers are working now with no union contract. The lack of a permanent superintendent has only confused things further, she said.

“At this point there is no actual plan,” Kennedy said. “It’s been almost a year now. And that’s a long time. Now that doesn’t mean that Ball State and the community haven’t come forward” — teachers see more volunteers, and more Ball State students coming in to work with the school system, she said. “But what part of the plan is that?”

Mearns has met these concerns with an elaborate display of fair process, putting in long hours on the project when it first started.

Early on, he took pains not to step on toes — and he has resisted any talk of a “takeover.” Ball State is the “lead agent in a community partnership,” he says. The university’s first step with the teachers was about messaging, he says, assuring them that the decline of Muncie schools was not their fault.

It shored up further support by extending to Muncie teachers the same benefits as university staff members, including tuition discounts and event tickets. The university set aside a small fraction, $50,000 of the $3.25 million raised in private funds, for K-12 teaching supplies. Philanthropy also funded a teacher-appreciation day. (The university has not dedicated any direct funds to the partnership, a spokeswoman says.)

Compared with past years, officials say, the teacher exodus appears to be over.

“Obviously, we cannot have a school system without teachers, and so it’s a high priority for us to have quality teachers and to treat them well,” says Keith O’Neal, vice president of the school board. The board is focusing on stabilizing enrollments first, he says, and “treating the teachers well enough where they won’t feel like they need a union to come in and save them, so to speak.”

Kennedy isn’t sure the outlook is so clear. While the “toxic” environment of years past is gone, she says, the district is still down many experienced teachers. Those who remain want to know more about what’s next.

“We just feel like we are on hold,” Kennedy says.

For now, Ball State’s controversies have largely abated. So has Mearns’s workload, with the new school board in place: He says he now spends just a couple of hours on the partnership each week.

“The task of finding the school-board members was very transparent,” says Errington, the state representative, and her fears about appointees swooping in from out of town were unfounded.

Then came the money. “I know some of the local lenders and philanthropists had really not been willing to trust the school over the last year, because there was so much turmoil,” Errington says. “But once Ball State and the new school board were in charge, they were much more generous.” So too was the state, extending to Muncie schools, no longer “distressed,” an interest-free $12-million loan.

The district’s improved finances allowed the board to grant a total of $331,100 in one-time bonuses to teachers and staff members, according to data provided by Ball State.

Importantly, last fall’s enrollment numbers were reassuring: dropping only by about 1 percent to 5,066 students, compared with the yearly 3- to 8-percent drops of hundreds of students that the district had grown used to. (The district has lost another 118 students since that count was taken in September, a 2.3-percent decrease, according to Ana Maria Pichardo, the school district’s spokeswoman. She attributes a little more than half of that drop to families moving out of the area entirely.)

The enrollment metric is “the only one we’ve had much time to show for,” says Marilyn Buck, Ball State’s former interim provost and liaison to the school district. “Performance takes longer to show than that. Others will come along.”

The project has earned more trust from parents, says Donati. “I want to remain optimistic.”

In the meantime, he has joined the Community Engagement Council. (He says the advisory board exists only on paper and has not met.)

Hopefully, Errington says, an improved reputation for the district can help make the partnership into a model. Most school districts aren’t as distressed as Muncie’s, but many are “headed that way.”

Maybe, she muses, “what Muncie and Ball State are doing can be helpful if it’s replicated somewhere else.”

Others in town have used much the same language. Where once Muncie was a city of companies, tied to brands like Chevrolet, it’s now set to be, more than ever, a university town — a living model of “cradle to career,” as James Williams, the new school-board president, puts it, in which a dense network of businesses, private donors, parents, teachers, researchers, and university officials charts the paths of children toward working adulthood. That model, not incidentally, helps prove the value of higher education to a wary public.

The vision — serving faculty members, staff, students, and parents all at once — is ambitious. Talk is cheap, the skeptics might say. But so far, the skeptics in Muncie are warily on board.

“Ball State’s a well-oiled machine,” Donati says. “They’re not going to let this fail.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steven.johnson@chronicle.com.