By Adam Tobin

This past Tuesday marked the first-ever College Media Day hosted by Lieutenant Governor Becky Skillman’s (Republican) office, where students were able to interact with Skillman and explore a part of Indiana’s government.

Although 20 reporters were supposed to attend the event, the severe winter weather had its way and only seven were in attendance. Student reporters represented Indiana University (IU) Bloomington, Butler University, and Franklin College.

Rachel Sorvig, Skillman’s communications specialist and a recent graduate of IU, said, “We had never done an event like this before and so we said to ourselves ‘hey, let’s make a date of this.’” Sorvig was responsible for coordinating the event, setting up an interview with Skillman and allowing the reporters to tour the Capitol building.

From the outset Skillman emphasized the amount of duties for which she is responsible, which cover nearly fifty different sectors of government.

“I have the most constitutional and statutory responsibilities out of any Lt. Governor in the United States,” Skillman said.

These duties cover a plethora of tasks, including overseeing the state Department of Agriculture, community and rural affairs, defense and energy development, tourism office, state housing authority, counterterrorism unit and responsibilities as the president of the Indiana Senate.
Skillman has served in the Indiana government for nearly 30 years. She stresses that what she loves the most about her job is “driving on the road, visiting with Hoosiers and understanding economic needs.”

Skillman is from Bedford, in the south-central part of the state, and wants to energize local communities to bolster their economies. This led to the first question regarding the recently presided-upon Township Bill, which allows local governments to keep or do away with trustees, or refer these emergency issues to county level government.

Later the group of reporters delved into a question-and-answer session regarding the economy and what Indiana has done with its stimulus money since it was allotted back in early 2009. Skillman implied that the state was already on track to have a balanced budget and was ahead of the curve by already implementing infrastructure projects.

“We already had invested in projects around our infrastructure; we were creative in that sense. We didn’t criticize the stimulus or the president, we merely said we’ll do what’s best for Indiana,” she said.

In addition to highway projects, Skillman mentioned that the legislature approved to increase a cigarette tax to help pay for better health care coverage. The Indiana legislature also used some Medicaid funds to enact the Healthy Indiana Plan.

The focal point of the interview came with the mention of education.
“K-12 education and higher education comprise 55 percent of the state budget,” said Skillman. She continued, “The stimulus definitely helped pay for our education, which was an area we needed to plug holes in.”

Skillman ensures that many programs are helping to improve statewide education initiatives on par with United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s plan.

“We have our Fast Forward program and Race to the Top grants that are federal funds we have used,” Skillman said. “We’re really measuring teacher quality and we even changed a law last summer to look at student achievement to measure teachers.”

When asked about the recent “tea party” movement in American politics, she said, “With the tea parties, you can’t get more grassroots than that! How can it be a bad thing? It’s democracy at its finest when like-minded individuals come together, although it might detract from Republican candidates if it breaks off into a third party movement.”

An IU reporter then asked whether she still considered the movement to be grassroots despite the corporate sponsors and celebrity endorsements, to which she said that “the people are moving on their own.”

Finally, she was asked by a Butler reporter if she would consider running for governor, to which she responded, “I never said I’m not going to run,” yet she immediately stated she is leaning towards running. If elected she would succeed current governor Mitch Daniels.

College Media Day allowed students the opportunity to stroll through the antiquated hallways, passing previous politicians’ plaques and the acclaimed library, and casually glance in at committee hearings. With this experience, the students were able to get a small sense of how Indiana’s government functions.