HANCOCK COUNTY – Residents of the central-western and northwestern parts of the county will have two candidates to choose from for who they want to speak for them in the Indiana House of Representatives.
Along with that part of the county, House District 88 also includes parts of Hamilton, Madison and Marion counties. It’s currently represented by Republican Chris Jeter, a Fishers resident and lawyer seeking his second term. Looking to replace him is Democrat Donna Griffin, a Hancock County resident who has worked as a journalist and teacher.
Donna Griffin
Griffin was a journalist for 18 years, part of which she spent covering Zionsville and Marion County. She also worked for the New Palestine Press and formerly owned the Pendleton Times. She has 25 years of experience teaching, including in El Paso, Texas and for Indianapolis Public Schools. Griffin has published several children’s books and runs a nonprofit organization called Dani’s Dreams Innovation in Education, named after her oldest daughter killed by a reckless driver in 2006.
She’s running for office to address what she calls inequities and a lack of innovation in education policy in Indiana and to represent District 88’s citizens of diverse ages, races and perspectives. Her careers led her to care about certain parts of society and notice problems within them, she said, but left her unable to make a significant impact on any of those deficiencies.
“I can’t do it as a journalist and I can’t do it as a teacher,” Griffin said. “So I decided it was time for me to just step up and see if I could do it in the way that I wanted to do it.”
Her agenda includes restructuring the state’s education funding formula to address current inequities, particularly in terms of preschool and before- and after-school care programs.
“Probably the biggest discrepancy and dissonance that I see is between what teachers are saying and what is happening in the classrooms, and what the state is dealing with,” she said. “It’s like they’re in two alternate realities.”
There’s too much focus on aspects that don’t matter that much, she continued, and not enough on aspects that do.
“They want kids to come up to a set of standards that are irrelevant to what they need to be successful in life,” Griffin said. “..They want things to be right in the numbers. They want test scores. It’s about the test scores and the evaluations.”
The source for solutions is clear, according to Griffin.
“No one has asked the teachers,” she said. “…I don’t want to say what needs to be done necessarily, but I do know where we need to go to find the answers.”
If elected, she’d convene a summit of teacher representatives from throughout the state that would work on solutions to improve teacher pay and working conditions. Griffin said she would also work to provide more citizen input in local community development and provide more innovative affordable housing and childcare options with a public-private task force of city, nonprofit and business leaders.
Streamlining and providing accessible health care services to families in cities and rural towns throughout the state are also among her goals.
“We need to remove health care from a political situation,” she said. “Health care should not be political, but it’s become the most political of issues.”
Chris Jeter
Jeter is a U.S. Navy veteran and Navy Reserve officer. He’s also a partner at Massillamany Jeter & Carson LLP, a law firm in Fishers. After his longtime House predecessor, Brian Bosma, announced he’d be stepping down from the state legislature in 2020, Jeter won the primary and then a Republican caucus in August of that year before winning the general election.
“I think we’ve done a lot,” he said of his time in the Indiana General Assembly so far. “We’ve touched on a lot of the things I wanted to do when I ran – tax reform, obviously we passed a lot of strong Second Amendment laws, abortion laws – but I think there’s a lot still to be done, and so I’m going to run for another term and see if we can knock out even some more good stuff.”
Jeter added he was proud to have been part of the biggest tax cut in the state’s history earlier this year.
“I just really enjoy trying to get in and solve problems,” he said.
He also pointed to his involvement in creating a gun crimes task force that he said has resulted in taking hundreds of illegal guns off streets and resulting in hundreds of arrests.
“I think my first two sessions, my first term has been really strong,” he said. “I was a part of a lot more than I thought I would be.”
But there’s plenty more to do, he continued. If re-elected, one of his goals is to focus on administrative agency reform.
“I think our administrative agencies could do better in their dealings with the public, so I want to try to do some additional revisions to the administrative agency code,” Jeter said. “…This is not true of all of them by any means, or even any of the folks that work there, I just think that over time it’s easier to maybe focus more on enforcing rules than it is trying to help people. I think the goal of an agency should be customer service-focused to help people solve problems and get them what they need, to do the right thing instead of just imposing penalties.”
Jeter added he maintains an interest in tax policy, particularly as it relates to home assessments, which saw sharp rises in Hancock County and throughout the state this year. He wants to explore capping how much they can grow by.
“I think we really saw people getting hurt by – in one year the assessment on their property tax was going up 300% in some cases,” he said. “I think everybody understands assessments will move as the economy moves, but I think having these triple-digit increases on folks, particularly on folks on fixed incomes, is just really not fair.”
