MICHIGAN CITY - To address concerns about outdated information influencing real estate searches, the Workforce Development and Education Task Force of Economic Development Corp. Michigan City decided on Tuesday to put together a committee to ensure the public has the correct information.
Subscription services like GreatSchools.org, Trulia and Zillow provide information to brokers.
EDCMC Executive Director Clarence Hulse said he has seen 10-year-old data on crime. All of these incorrect data cause people who want to come into the area, especially if they are looking at the schools for their children, to be discouraged. Home prices also go down incorrectly.
Barbara Eason-Watkins, superintendent of the Michigan City Area Schools, said the school administration has tried to persuade these services to update their information, but they will not update, even after numerous conversations.
Ann Dahm, president of the Michigan City Area Chamber of Commerce, said she likes the idea of a committee from the task force to pressure them to update.
"Put together a group and let them focus on it and just harass them," she said.
Workforce and sales consultant Rene Ray encouraged people to use the option to write reviews of the schools to try to counter the outdated information as long as it is there.
In addition, encouraging the sites to post links to other sources of more recent information may make the change easier, Tammy Stump, senior workforce associate of the Center of Workforce Innovations, said.
The local schools have improved immensely in the last five years, Eason-Watkins said. The preliminary figures for the graduation rate at Michigan City High School indicates an improvement from last year, she reported. The rate was 89.9 percent, according to preliminary data, whereas the previous year's was 85.8 percent and the state rate was 90.0 percent that year.
The amount of graduates who go on to further education or training is probably more than 70 percent, she said.
Students who take career and technical education had a graduation rate of 94.9 percent, La Porte County Director of Career and Technical Education Audra Peterson reported.
Of the 93 seniors in the county's career and technical education in the past year, 33 will be going on to a four-year college program, 23 will go to a two-year college program, eight will enter the military and seven will become apprentices, she said.
Five of these seniors graduated with academic honors and 21 graduated with technical honors, she said. The students earned a total of 205 certifications.
All seniors and all juniors in the first year of the NIPSCO Energy Academy, or 23 students, received the certifications they were pursuing.
Career and technical education has gone from being thought of, when he was in high school, as indicating a poor career to indicating a good one, Tony Thomas of Ivy Tech Community College said. He has a doctorate, but some of these students make more than he does, he joked.
The college's recent commercial driver's license program had a passing rate of 100 percent, he added. The certified production assistant students had a placement rate of 80 percent.
The unemployment rate for Michigan City has been adjusted to 6.5 percent for June, according to Stefan Barkow, workforce associate for research and development at the Center for Workforce Innovations. This adjustment came after the center and Purdue University-North Central scrutinized the data from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, which showed a rate of above 10 percent for June. Some information had been put in wrong places in the model, he thinks.
This rate is not good news on its own, but this information also shows that the Michigan City labor force is holding steady, not declining as it had in the past, he said.