A Community-Engaged Study of Washington Community Schools

Abstract

As part of the IU Center for Rural Engagement’s Sustaining Hoosier Communities initiative, students in the Senior Seminar in Sociology conducted a community-engaged capstone project in collaboration with Washington Community Schools (WCS), Daviess County, IN, to identify potential avenues for increasing voters’ support for a possible future referendum to allow WSC to address the additional need for space. With a classmate, I analyzed news and social media coverage of WCS’s 2019 $38M construction referendum, which was opposed by 61.3% of voters. This poster highlights findings from our analysis and reflection on my experience working on an allocative community identified project.