Looks Ahead
~ story and photos by Chrissy Alspaugh
Rehearsing for her first high school commencement as Brown County Schools’ superintendent, Dr. Laura Hammack casually asked each soon-to-be graduate about their next step. She was met with shrugging shoulders. Blank stares. Uncertainty. Upon accepting the job in 2016, Hammack knew she would need to summon a great deal of creativity to provide students with world-class opportunities despite the small, rural district’ s daunting poverty statistics, declining enrollment, and budget deficit. But what flew to the top of her priority list was ensuring that every graduate who walked across her stage had an actionable plan for their future.
Hammack beamed,“ Because we are small, things can happen pretty fast.”
Walk through the halls of any Brown County school, and it’ s evident that the students and staff are like her family. That was never more true than when Hammack, then a sixth-grade teacher at Nashville Elementary, lost her mother when she was fresh out of DePauw University.“ I’ m forever thankful, and a lot of what I’ ve worked for since then has been my way of trying to give back,” she said. The district gave Hammack her first job as principal and later as assistant superintendent. After a short stint as assistant superintendent in the vast Beech Grove City Schools, Hammack said she“ jumped at the chance to come back home” to Brown County as superintendent. Challenges awaited. Brown County Schools serves nearly 1,700 students. That’ s down about 1,000 students from a decade ago, before the state allowed families to take their tuition dollars to the public, charter, or even online school of their choice. The county’ s ability to draw or retain young families is plagued by the lack of affordable housing; shortage of high-quality, affordable child care; and barriers to infrastructure including Internet, water, and building permits, Hammack said. Regardless, that equation meant less funding but the same number of schools to run, she said.
In her time with the district, BCS shaved $ 2.5 million from a $ 30 million budget without eliminating teachers but rather by not filling retirees’ positions when possible. Further, the community approved a tax referendum that helped the district give its educators raises and avoid increases to their insurance premiums. A $ 500,000 Ready Schools grant from the Regional Opportunity Initiatives group in Bloomington allowed BCS to upgrade curriculum, transform classrooms into hightech innovation centers, visit other small school corporations in search of best practices, and expand high school pathways that allow students to earn educational and industry certifications and training in fields including technology, manufacturing, graphic design, and more.
One such pathway that’ s garnering BCS state and national attention is the high school’ s recently expanded Eagle Manufacturing Lab, named after the school’ s mascot. It’ s a student-run business where sophomores through seniors are in charge of everything from sales and billing to producing precise parts on a CNC machine and printing
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