Impact of state law: MCCSC to distribute larger TAG stipends, but to fewer teachers

This school year, 99 teachers with the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) are set to receive extra stipends of at least $3,500. The funding for the stipends is coming through the Indiana Department of Education’s (IDOE) Teacher Appreciation Grant (TAG), which has funded such awards for about a decade.

Of the district’s roughly 750 full-time teachers, 193 applied for the grant.

According to MCCSC communications director Sarah DeWeese 736 MCCSC teachers received a TAG award last year. That’s seven times as many as this year—but the grants were much smaller. Last year’s distribution worked out to a stipend of around $500 for 92% of the district’s full-time equivalent teachers.

Over the last decade, the stipends have ranged in amount from around $320 to $500 per teacher per year, according to Jenny Noble-Kuchera, president of Monroe County Education Association (MCEA), the teachers union.

The fundamental change in philosophy for the distribution of the TAG awards—fewer teachers but bigger awards—stems from Indiana House Enrolled Act 1001, which passed in 2025. Instead of allowing districts to distribute grant money to all eligible teachers, the bill allows only up to 20% of a district’s teachers to receive a stipend. The bill also sets specific amounts for each teacher—$3,500, $5,000, and $7,500, all with different criteria.

If MCCSC wanted to spread the grant money as wide as possible, by giving the maximum 20% of its teachers the lowest award tier of $3,500, that would require about $560,000. But that is more than the $373,644 the state has allocated for MCCSC.

The district and the teachers union agreed to award stipends of $3,500 and $5,000, leaving out the biggest awards of $7,500, which meant that 13% of MCCSC teachers were able to receive awards. The funds are to be distributed proportionally to each MCCSC building, so that 13% of teachers at each school receive stipends. Last month, the district submitted to the IDOE 99 teacher names—80 who will receive $3,500 and 19 who will receive $5,000.

TAG award process

On Dec. 12, 2025, MCCSC sent an email to teachers with an application to apply for the grant. “TAG will no longer be awarded automatically,” the email said. The application asked teachers to provide “evidence of significantly impacting student outcomes as well as a narrative explanation.” An FAQ document attached to the email details how teachers can fulfill those application requirements.

More than 13% of teachers applied for the grant. After each applicant was confirmed eligible according to state requirements, a committee of three MCCSC administrators and three teacher representatives used a kind of lottery to determine which of the applicants would receive the grant. Union president Noble-Kuchera, who served as one of the three teachers on the committee, told The B Square that the process was “randomized and transparent.”

According to an IDOE memo, all TAG funds will be distributed to school corporations by April 15. Corporations then have 60 business days to distribute stipends to teachers.

Sharing the windfall

Noble-Kuchera has criticized the legislative change to the TAG program as being “divisive.” In October, when MCCSC was still in the early stages of the TAG process, she told The B Square, “There is not a single school corporation in the state” and “there is not a single teacher’s union in the state” that is enjoying the new TAG process. “And if I am pointing fingers, which I obviously am here, I am pointing them straight at legislators in the state house who are using this strategy to create more problems, more division, more frustration for public schools.”

At least one teacher set to receive a stipend is planning to share her award. Kirstin Milks, a science teacher at Bloomington High School South, said in response to a B Square question that she plans to give all of her $5,000 stipend to student organizations and other causes.

Milks said she had mixed feelings about applying for the grant. “That hesitation is that some of the people who are doing the most for kids’ academic success were not eligible,” she said in a phone interview last week. Part-time teachers, counselors, and support staff are among the school employees who aren’t eligible for the award. “There are people in this building who are doing extraordinary, high-leverage, high-impact work with kids who are excluded because of the state mandate on the money,” she said.

Additionally, Milks was eligible for the higher, $5,000 stipend due to her work serving on a district committee. She framed this as another unfair aspect of the system: “There are also a lot of my colleagues who ... don’t have the child care flexibility that I have to be able to serve on that committee after school hours.”

“The only reason that I felt comfortable applying for it,” Milks said, “is that I had a really clear sense of how I might be able to use that money in a way that felt ethical to me.” She realized that distributing her share of the money to every MCCSC teacher wasn’t realistic: “Imagine a world in which I gave everybody a four dollar Starbucks card,” she quipped. “That did not feel like it was doable for me.”

Milks eventually landed on finding other ways to directly support MCCSC teachers and students. She wants to donate it to the BHSS Science Olympiad, a competitive student organization. “I’m going to use the bulk of the money towards buying equipment and supplies to help keep our school’s Science Olympiad free and very high-access for every single interested student,” she said. She also plans to donate some of her stipend to the Foundation of Monroe County Community Schools (FMCCS) to support its teacher grant program that supports teacher-led initiatives, and another part to the MCEA.

Milks thinks teachers who receive TAG awards should use them however they wish. “To some people, this money is really, really important.” She said in previous years, when she’s received the $320 to $500 stipends, she’s used that money herself. “Even that small amount of money, when I first started teaching and our family was really young, it was a huge deal for our family,” she said.