INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs today announced the relaunch of Beat the Heat, a program focused on community health and resilience in heat emergencies. The program is in partnership with the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and the  Environmental Resilience Institute, and is now open for applications. 

The Beat the Heat program will support two Hoosier communities by building capacity to adapt to heat emergencies and addressing public health impacts associated with heat.

“Summer should be a time when neighbors gather, kids play outside and families slow down to enjoy the sunshine,” Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith said. “Beat the Heat supports local leaders with the resources they need to protect our communities when temperatures climb, helping ensure extreme heat does not become a serious concern.”

Selected communities will receive heat-specific data and heat mapping tools to turn their heat resilience strategies into actionable projects. This includes building cooling shelters, increasing tree canopies, developing heat alert systems and more to adapt to extreme heat emergency risks. Selected applicants are required to provide a local match toward at least one heat resiliency project implementation through fundraising or local contribution. Non-entitlement cities or communities with a population under 50,000 are eligible to apply for the program.

“Having heat-resilient communities is vital for the health and safety of Hoosiers during extreme heat situations,” OCRA Executive Director Fred Glynn said. “The Beat the Heat program supports community-driven solutions, empowering local leaders through data analysis, community engagement and capacity building.”

In addition to heat-specific data, the selected communities will receive guidance from the Indiana Resilience Funding Hub and ERI experts to identify relevant funding opportunities and write grant applications.

Communities that implement high-impact heat resilience strategies will earn bonus points on future OCRA Community Development Block Grant applications. A designated heat fellow, affiliated with Indiana University, will support each community throughout the program cycle in implementing program activities and workshops as well as the implementation of heat resilience projects.

“Extreme heat is responsible for more annual fatalities in the US than all other natural disasters combined,” Dana Habeeb, assistant professor at IU’s Luddy SICE said. “With temperatures increasing across Indiana, we are excited to work with local government leaders to create strategies designed to protect at-risk residents. The communities selected will be prepared and empowered to respond to the challenges of extreme heat by pioneering a model that could guide heat mitigation strategies for other communities in the state.” 

A pre-recorded informational webinar is available to furth explain the program opportunities and application process. Interested applicants can view the webinar here: bit.ly/BtH-Webinar.

Local governments must submit a Letter of Intent through the application portal here: bit.ly/BtH-Application2025.

Communities must submit a Letter of Intent through the application portal no later than 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 19, 2026. Selected communities will be announced in February 2026. 

Indiana University will host office hours on Wednesday, Dec. 10, from 1-2 p.m. ET, to provide assistance and answer questions for interested applicants. Register for the office hours here: bit.ly/Register-BtH-OfficeHours.

BY: TOM DAVIES AND LESLIE BONILLA MUÑIZ, INDIANA CAPITAL CHRONICLE

Indiana House Republicans voted Friday to go along with President Donald Trump’s demand for redrawing the state’s congressional maps.

The House action sends the congressional redistricting issue to the state Senate, where its future is in real doubt. The Senate’s Republican leader has said for months that too few senators are in support for it to pass. 

House members voted 57-41 in favor of the new maps crafted to produce a 9-0 Republican delegation by carving up the districts currently held by Democratic Reps. André Carson in Indianapolis and Frank Mrvan in the area along Lake Michigan near Chicago.

Twelve Republicans joined all Democrats present in opposing the bill.

Friday’s House debate occurred while a couple hundred people attended a pro-redistricting rally inside the Statehouse, where a Turning Point Action leader vowed major spending by the group to defeat Republican senators who vote against new maps.

At least 14 of the 40 Republican senators have publicly indicated opposition to redistricting, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle’s tracking. Combined with the 10 Democratic senators, that total is just short of a majority in the 50-member Senate.

About 10 GOP senators have not made their position known.

Gov. Mike Braun maintained Friday he believed the Senate would approve the new maps, with opponents being “out of sync with most Republicans and conservatives in the state.”

Braun stood by threats that he and Trump have made to support Republican primary challengers against recalcitrant senators — and to keep up the pressure campaign if the Senate were to reject the new maps next week.

“Hopefully we won’t have to drag them through this more than what we’ve done so far,” Braun told reporters. “But it’s not over if they don’t do it.”

David McIntosh, president of the Washington-based Club for Growth and a former Indiana congressman, posted what he called a “FINAL WARNING” on social media to Republican Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray.

“Pass the new congressional map supported by President Trump and Hoosiers,” the post said. “Failure to get this done means you and any other opposition will be defeated and removed from office in your next election. Let’s get it done!”

The Senate is set to begin consideration of the redistricting plan on Monday, when the Senate Elections Committee will hold a public hearing lasting a maximum of four hours, according to Bray’s office.

A spokeswoman for Bray did not respond Friday to a request for comment from him about the House-approved maps. Bray has previously said he did “not feel that redrawing our Congressional districts mid-cycle is the best way to achieve that goal” of maintaining a Republican majority in the U.S. House.

The Senate is expected to take a final vote Thursday on the redistricting plan.

House debate one sided

Democratic House lawmakers denounced the proposed redistricting as a racial gerrymander for dividing Carson’s 7th District in Indianapolis — the state’s most urban and racially diverse — among four new districts. Those extend far into rural heavily Republican counties, with two of the proposed districts stretching to the Ohio River and another nearly reaching Lake Michigan.

Republican Rep. Ben Smaltz, author of the redistricting plan in House Bill 1032, repeated his stance that the new districts were drawn “purely for political performance” of GOP candidates and didn’t consider racial or other demographics.

House Speaker Todd Huston told reporters that the proposed map “is aligned” with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this weekallowing Texas to use its new Republican-friendly map. 

Justice Samuel Alito wrote that it was “indisputable” that Texas’ motivation for redistricting was “pure and simple” partisan advantage, which the court has previously ruled is permissible. 

The Indiana House debate lasted for more than three hours, with 25 of the 30 Democratic members speaking against the bill and only two Republicans — Smaltz and Huston — speaking in favor of it.

Rep. Carolyn Jackson, D-Hammond, mocked Republicans as being largely unwilling to say anything positive about the redrawing.

“You may have said it at home, in your closet, in your basement, in the backroom where only you heard it,” Jackson said. “But you have not said it here. You have not said it to your neighbors. You’ve not said it to any of us.”

House Republicans divided as well

Trump started the national redistricting fight by pushing Texas Republicans to redraw its congressional map this summer and it has spread to other states including California, Missouri and North Carolina. The pressure on Indiana Republicans has included trips in August and October by Vice President JD Vance to Indianapolis.

Huston said while he supported the current Indiana congressional districts drawn by Republicans in 2021, he argued the national political landscape had changed since then.

“We don’t operate in a vacuum and states are doing this all across the country, red and blue states,” Huston told reporters. “We felt like it was important for us to be a part of that, and to make sure that we used every tool we could to support a strong Republican majority.”

Huston did not predict success in the Senate for the redistricting plan and declined to say what the next step would be if it was defeated in that chamber.

“It’s been a long week,” he said. “We’ll deal with whatever happens.”

Friday’s House vote showed a divide among the chamber’s Republican leadership on the issue.

The 12 GOP members voting against the bill included House Majority Floor Leader Matt Lehman of Berne, Speaker Pro Tem Mike Karickhoff of Kokomo and Majority Caucus Chair Greg Steuerwald of Avon, who was the lead sponsor of the 2021 redistricting bill.

Democrats on Friday lambasted Republicans for the map proposal that lacks compactness and divides several cities. 

Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, said the new maps indicate the Republicans believe that Democrats “really shouldn’t exist.” He argued that having an all-Republican delegation would hurt Indiana if Democrats regain control of the U.S. House.

“Now the state of Indiana has no one within, potentially, the majority party to talk about things like appropriations, to work together on getting specific things done for the state,” Pierce said. “You lose that.”

After Friday’s debate, Huston was asked by a reporter whether he was “proud” of the redistricting plan. He responded by saying “I am very blessed to lead the Indiana House of Representatives. I support this, and I support what we’re doing.”

By Robbie Sequeira, Indiana Capital Chronicle

Northeast of the capital city of Des Moines in central Iowa, the 400-student Collins-Maxwell Community School District is one of many across the state shifting to a four-day school week.

Like many rural K-12 schools, the district has struggled to find teachers, and it sees the four-day week as a useful recruiting tool. It also wants to curb student absences, which tend to spike on Mondays and Fridays.

The district maintained its traditional five-day calendar in August and September. But from now on, with scattered exceptions, the middle school and high school in the Collins-Maxwell district will be closed on Mondays. To meet Iowa’s minimum number of instructional hours, the district will lengthen the other days during four-day weeks.

Superintendent Marc Snavely said he watched nearby schools transition to shorter weeks and was intrigued by the reports he got from his counterparts in other districts. Snavely hopes the shorter week will boost teacher morale, reduce burnout, and make the rural district more competitive with nearby districts that are larger and can offer teachers better pay.

“Ultimately, the ‘why’ behind the four-day school week came down to staff recruitment and retention,” Snavely said in an interview. “We felt being a small school district, the four-day week would allow us to better compete.”

He added that surrounding schools with four-day weeks said they experienced fewer discipline problems and improved attendance. And rural school districts across the country tout the four-day work week as a way to stretch tight school budgets amid K-12 funding uncertainties at the federal and state levels.

But despite the reports of higher attendance and calmer classrooms, education researchers say the evidence tells a more complicated story.

Emily Morton, lead researcher for the Northwest Evaluation Association, which creates standardized testing for K-12 schools, cautioned that the promised benefits have not shown up in the data. Moreover, longer school days can harm academic performance, Morton said.

But such concerns might not matter as four-day school weeks become more popular nationwide.

“One thing that does show up clearly is that there is an extremely high approval rating for these policies,” Morton said. “Parents and students overwhelmingly want to stay on a four-day week once they have it.”

A rural trend

There are more than 2,100 schools in 26 states using four-day weeks, according to researchers at Oregon State University. In Iowa, the number of districts on a four-day schedule has grown from six in 2023-24 to more than two dozen in 2025. In Colorado, two-thirds of districts are on the altered schedule.

But so far, it’s almost entirely a rural phenomenon.

“To my knowledge, there’s not a single urban district using a four-day week,” Morton said. “What a four-day week looks like in a rural community is very different from what people in suburban or urban areas imagine.”

Dr. Shanon Taylor, an education professor at the University of Nevada, Reno who studies school scheduling, said districts typically adopt the model for economic and staffing reasons, not academic ones. Rural districts often save money on transportation, utilities and building operations, she said, and the promise of permanent three-day weekends helps recruitment efforts.

However, the burden of accommodating this transition may fall heavily on parents who work five days a week, and especially on the parents of younger students who must find a child care alternative on the selected day off.

“The research is still mixed,” Taylor said. “We don’t yet have decisive evidence showing academic benefits or drawbacks.”

In June, researchers at the University of Oregon published a review of 11 studies on four-day school weeks, which included data on academic achievement, attendance, discipline and criminal activity. The impact of a four-day week varied based on grade level and on location, the Oregon researchers found, but overall “there was no evidence of large positive effects.”

They also noted that “maintaining activities that foster healthy youth development on the fifth day is important for minimizing other negative impacts.”

State vs. local clashes

In some states, the policy has sparked conflict between state and local officials.

“There’s a lot of tension between state leaders and rural districts over whether the four-day week is something the state should allow,” said Morton. “In Oklahoma, when the state tried to take it away, districts simply shifted to ‘virtual Fridays’ — and instruction mostly didn’t happen.”

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank, found through a public records request that more than 100 Oklahoma districts had at least one school where students had at least two full weeks’ worth of “virtual days” in the 2022-23 school year. More than 60 districts had at least one school that went online for three weeks or more. During many of those days, there was minimal live instruction.

In response, Oklahoma this year enacted a law that restricts public schools’ ability to shift to virtual learning. The measure limits districts to two days of virtual instruction each school year, and only allows them under certain circumstances, such as a state of emergency declared by the governor.

Missouri enacted a law in 2024 requiring that certain big city, charter and county districts obtain voter approval before adopting or continuing a four-day week. The Independence School District, a 14,000-student suburban system on the edge of Kansas City that switched to the shorter week in 2023-24, has since sued the state, alleging the law unconstitutionally targets certain districts based on arbitrary criteria such as county size.

Last year, a New Mexico mandate for districts to adopt calendars with more school days was halted in court. And Arkansas legislators considered a bill that would allow for range of instructional times from 160 to 190 days, which would be contingent on a school’s rating. A large number of rural districts there have moved to four-day schedules.

Meanwhile, uncertainty over the costs and benefits of the approach are likely to persist.

Morton, the education assessment researcher, said that small rural districts might not be equipped to determine whether a four-day week produces benefits until further studies are conducted across the country.

“Even if your test scores stay flat, nearby districts might be rising, so your ‘flat’ could actually be a negative effect,” she said. “States need to equip districts with what national research shows, because local data will never be able to answer these questions alone.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.