Two national school-system leaders told the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance on Tuesday that Indianapolis should prioritize a single, citywide definition of school performance, a student-based funding formula and coordinated transportation to improve educational equity across neighborhood, district and charter schools.

Alyssa Whitehead Bost, a former Denver Public Schools chief academic officer who now runs Attuned, and Paul Kine, deputy mayor for education for Washington, D.C., described different governance arrangements but emphasized the same practical tools: a common performance framework, shared rules for access to facilities and funding that follows students.

Bost said Denver’s approach grew from a decade of aligned strategy and three agreed “equities” — opportunity, responsibility and accountability — that all schools accepted under a district-charter compact. “The why was very simple: improve outcomes for all kids,” she said, adding that Denver used a school performance framework to set quality bars, drive supports and inform renewal or exit decisions.

She described systems Denver used to translate those principles into practice: a collaborative council with equal charter and district representation to negotiate details, a student-based budgeting formula that allocated funds (including mill-levy dollars) to schools using a common distribution, pre-negotiated performance thresholds in charter contracts and a strategic regional analysis that combined enrollment and performance data to determine where new seats were needed.

Those processes, Bost said, were designed to create “mutually reinforcing” policies and to balance site-level autonomy with systemwide equity. She cautioned that the original policies were crafted during a period of rapid enrollment growth and that the fiscal context has changed: “As a resource pie shrinks, tensions and controversies can increase,” she said.

Kine described Washington, D.C.’s long-standing governance model — mayoral control of the traditional district, a mayor-appointed charter authorizer (the DC Public Charter School Board) and an elected state board with limited operational authority — and the infrastructure his office credits for recent gains: a unified, weighted per-student funding formula, a centralized admissions system (My School DC), and use of public transit and targeted special-education transportation.

“The money is about $28,000 per student,” Kine said when asked about scale, and he stressed that the funding follows students through a weighted formula that accounts for disadvantage, multilingual status and special-education tiers. He said D.C.’s model pairs that funding with centralized admissions and an external authorizer that has opened and closed many schools over three decades.

Both presenters noted trade-offs. Bost said Denver struggled with community engagement and pacing of change — “we did too much at once” — and that building trust and relationships across sectors was as important as policy design. Kine said D.C.’s centralized governance enabled strong cross-agency coordination — for example, placing mental-health clinicians and nurses in schools — but that that coherence had been built over decades.

In audience questions, Indianapolis Alliance members asked how the Denver and D.C. policies would map to Indianapolis’s more fragmented authorizing landscape. Bost suggested a collaborative North Star and shared business rules created by the city’s alliance or a similar entity. Kine said alignment could be achieved without consolidating authorizers if those bodies agreed on shared definitions, measures and business rules, and he underscored the time needed to build genuine cross-sector collaboration.

The presenters also addressed transportation: Kine explained D.C. uses a mix of public transit (students ride rail and buses free), limited yellow-bus service for elementary students who meet distance thresholds, and special shuttles for enrollment zones; Bost described Denver’s shared transportation for charters located in district facilities and zone-based shuttle systems for multiple assigned middle schools.

Both visitors urged Indianapolis leaders to front-load clarity on measures, business rules and engagement before moving quickly on facility or governance changes. They described the practical levers — common school performance metrics, student-based budgeting, transparent regional analyses and pre-agreed contract thresholds — that structured choices about openings, placements and closures in their cities.

Ending: The speakers did not offer a single template for Indianapolis, but together their presentations highlighted a consistent set of operational tools (shared performance measures, funding formulas and transportation strategies) and repeated cautions about pacing, sustained engagement and protecting equity as enrollment and fiscal conditions change.