This story continues our series on Girls in Stem Academy’s quest to rezone an old church building in Washington Township in advance of the school’s opening in fall 2024. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 at those links.

March 20 marked the next step in Girls in Stem Academy’s ongoing saga. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Development Commission approved their request to rezone a former church property on the northwest side of Indianapolis within the boundaries of Washington Township.

The Commission approved the request in a 5-1 vote. Next stop: the full City-County Council, which can take up the request as soon as April. The councilor for District 6 (where the rezoning is located) can also request an additional public hearing prior to the final vote by the full council. That’s Carlos Perkins, who was elected last November and is the senior pastor of Bethel Cathedral AME Church. From all appearances, it’s unlikely that Perkins will call for another public hearing.

There isn’t much else to say about the meeting as it mirrored the previous one in arguments, counterarguments, and ultimate outcome. Don’t worry, the next 500 words are not a retread of ground we’ve walked together before.

But there is one comment from the hearing that deserves to be unpacked, in part because local news coverage ignored key context. So without further ado, may I introduce today’s man of the hour, Dan Boots, Councilor for District 3. WFYI’s coverage of the meeting quoted Boots as saying: “Washington Township, Pike Township are excellent school townships. If a Black or brown young lady wants a STEM education they can get it. It’s there.”

WFYI’s story (which got reprinted in Chalkbeat and Mirror Indy) offered a brief rebuttal from Girls in Stem Academy’s Principal Chrystal Westerhaus. They paraphrased her saying, 1) “test scores at Washington Township are far lower for economically disadvantaged and Black students compared to their white classmates” and 2) “Scores for similar students are higher at the local schools operated by Paramount [Schools of Excellence]” (which is Girls in Stem Academy’s operator).

That may seem balanced and fair enough. Yet by leaving out the data behind each party’s assertion, the piece makes it seem like there’s a bit of “he said, she said” going on when in reality there’s a very clear picture about the efficacy with which each school network serves students. We covered a full demographic and ILEARN data breakdown in our original piece. Today, it’s worth elevating the specific data points that both disprove Councilor Boots and back up Principal Westerhaus. See Table 1 to start, which features 2023 ILEARN passing rates on math for both Washington Township as a whole and the three Indianapolis schools in the Paramount network.

	Black	Hispanic	Female	FRL
MSD Washington Township	14.5%	18.9%	27.2%	17.6%
Paramount Brookside	49.6%	59.2%	55.2%	75.8%
Paramount Cottage Home	76.5%	87.5%	81%	55.6%
Paramount Englewood	46%	36.2%	43.2%	46.3%

Academically, the following are true across the board in every case of direct comparison between Washington Township and any of the Paramount schools:

• Female students do better academically at Paramount compared to Washington Township
• Black students do better academically at Paramount compared to Washington Township
• Hispanic students do better academically at Paramount compared to Washington Township
• Low-income students do better academically at Paramount compared to Washington Township

Yes, I know I could have combo-ed the groups into a single bullet point. But I don’t want this to get lost. Across every category, Paramount students experience better academic outcomes than Washington Township students. If you are low-income, Black, Hispanic, female (or any combination thereof) and attend a Paramount school, you will achieve better academic outcomes than if you attend a Washington Township school.

This isn’t splitting hairs. This isn’t marginal. In some cases, outcomes are four times better for students who attend Paramount! We can even get laser focused here. Just take the “Female” outcomes column in the table (a pretty important category seeing as how Girls in Stem Academy will be an all-girls school). In Washington Township, 27.2% of female students passed the math portion of ILEARN in 2023. Paramount Englewood outpaced that by 16 percentage points, Paramount Brookside by 25 percentage points, and Paramount Cottage Home by a whopping 53.8 percentage points.

So, no, with all due respect Councilor Boots, the Black and Brown girls in Washington Township cannot get an excellent STEM education. But by all accounts they could once Girls in Stem Academy opens its doors.

If we’re going to litigate the zoning fight on academic grounds (and we should, at least to a large extent), then Paramount wins every time.