When students are recorded as leaving to home-school in Indiana, they’re left out of a school’s graduation calculations, as though they never attended at all.

Out of all high schools in the state, Muncie Central recorded the highest number of students in the class of 2018 leaving to home-school.

More than 3,700 Indiana students who were expected to graduate last year left without diplomas. Most were clustered in just 61 schools.

The anger was palpable when more than 50 teachers gathered for their monthly union meeting on the northeast side of Indianapolis. The crowd was about twice as large as usual, with many newcomers packed into the conference room.

Five years ago, a young superintendent months into his first job running a school district walked into the Indiana Statehouse to ask for an unprecedented change. Lewis Ferebee felt Indianapolis Public Schools should run more like its steepest competitors: charter schools.

All it takes to know that Purdue Polytechnic High School is doing something different is a walk through the campus in the basement of a technology office building. Instead of sitting in classrooms, students are spread across an open room, talking with teachers on a sofa or working on quadratic equations at a table.

When Deonah Doyle first heard the elementary school her two children attend could be overhauled with a new principal and new teachers, she was afraid.

It’s first period on a Wednesday, and Alejandra is chewing gum, bouncing her foot and goofing with friends in a reading class for students learning English. The teacher — a substitute for the morning — writes vocabulary words on the whiteboard: “improves,” “silence,” “activists.” When she gets to “dangerous,” Alejandra springs to life. “Not safe!” she bursts out.

Cold Spring School and School 79 were standouts on the recent ISTEP test. At both schools, more kids passed the state exam than the average for Indianapolis Public Schools, and their students made solid gains over last year. So why did Cold Spring earn an A from the state while School 79 received a C?