By Kimba Rund, M.S. with additional thoughts from J. Eric Davis
Indiana’s new high school diploma was designed with a clear goal: ensure every student graduates with a meaningful plan for what comes next, whether that is enrollment, employment, or enlistment. To support early adoption of this diploma, the Indiana Department of Education is now aligning K–12 funding to directly incentivize schools whose students earn Honors and Honors Plus readiness seals across the state’s three pathways.
For schools, this represents a significant shift. Student outcomes tied to real-world readiness now carry direct financial incentives. For students, these seals provide clarity, structure, and recognition for the work they are already doing to prepare for life after high school. At Career+ Pathways™, our work is intentionally designed to help schools and students succeed in this new landscape.
Incentive Funding as a Catalyst for a Virtuous Cycle of Access and Attainment
Indiana’s new incentive funding tied to Honors and Honors Plus readiness seals is more than a reimbursement mechanism—it is a lever schools can use to intentionally reduce long-standing barriers to work-based learning (WBL) and credential attainment. When deployed strategically, these dollars can help schools move from ad-hoc, compliance-driven WBL toward a sustainable ecosystem that expands access, improves outcomes, and reinvests in future cohorts of students.
The Funding Incentive Behind Honors & Honors Plus Seals
Beginning with the graduating classes of 2026–2029, Indiana will provide schools with up to $2,495 per student who earns an Enrollment or Employment Honors Plus seal, with additional funding available for credential completion and academic performance incentives that can stack on top of that amount.
These incentives were created to encourage schools to offer the most rigorous, future-focused pathways under the new diploma. While exact funding amounts may evolve based on legislative sessions and fiscal forecasts, the direction is clear: schools that help students complete credentials and meaningful work-based learning will be rewarded.
Where Career+ Pathways™ Fits In
Career+ Pathways™ supports schools not just by explaining the seals, but by building the systems and support structures that make them achievable.
1. Early, Intentional Career Coaching
Our certified career coaches meet with students as early as their 8th-grade year, as well as in their sophomore and junior years, to help them understand:
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What each readiness seal requires
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Which seal aligns best with their postsecondary goals
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How credentials, coursework, and work-based learning fit together
We are also actively expanding our reach to include middle school students, so that rather than approaching seals as a last-minute checklist, Career+ Pathways™ helps students plan ahead, making success more likely and stress significantly lower.
2. Tracking What Matters
One of the most challenging components of the Honors & Honors Plus seals is work-based learning documentation. Career+ Pathways™’s tracking system allows schools to:
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Log and verify student work-based learning hours through email-based approvals (no employer accounts required)
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Maintain clear records for compliance and reporting through convenient data exports aligned to Indiana state requirements and compatible with a variety of diploma tracking platforms
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Document Supervisor and Student Feedback, and verify skill development in communication, collaboration, and work ethic to meet WBL documentation, diploma seal, LCP, and graduation readiness requirements.
This infrastructure ensures schools can confidently document one of the most critical seal requirements.
3. Supporting the Employment Honors Seal
Career+ Pathways™ supports the Employment Honors seal through an approved Locally Created Pathway (LCP) to graduation. The seal requires 150 hours of work-based learning, with 75 of those hours embedded directly into the LCP, allowing students to make meaningful progress through a structured, state-approved pathway.
Designing Pathways That Pay Off…
Historically, the biggest barriers to WBL and credential completion have not been student interest, but capacity constraints: limited staff time, inconsistent employer engagement, transportation challenges, uneven access to credentials, and the administrative burden of tracking and documenting experiences. Incentive funding creates an opportunity to directly address these constraints. For example, schools can use funds to support shared career coaching capacity, subsidize credential costs, offset transportation for off-site WBL, or coordinate employer onboarding and supervision across multiple schools.
When schools reinvest incentive dollars into these enabling supports, they begin to build a virtuous cycle. More students can access high-quality WBL and credentials; more students earn Honors and Honors Plus seals; schools receive additional incentive funding; and those funds can then be reinvested to further expand and improve programming. Over time, this cycle shifts WBL from a limited opportunity for a small subset of students into a normalized, scalable component of the high school experience.
Critically, this work does not need to happen school-by-school. In fact, the incentive model is most powerful when schools collaborate regionally. By working with neighboring districts, career centers, and postsecondary partners, schools can share employer relationships, align pathways, and create consistent expectations for WBL quality and documentation. A regional approach allows employers to engage once and serve many schools, reduces duplication of effort, and ensures students—regardless of zip code—have access to comparable opportunities.
Career+ Pathways™ helps operationalize this ecosystem approach by supporting shared career coaching models, standardized WBL tracking, and alignment to state seal requirements across schools. Rather than each school building its own isolated system, Career+ enables regions to coordinate pathways, pool resources, and scale what works—making it easier for incentive funding to translate into real student outcomes.
In this way, Indiana’s incentive funding does more than reward success after the fact. When paired with intentional regional collaboration and the right support infrastructure, it becomes a forward-looking investment—one that lowers barriers, expands access, and helps schools build durable systems that continuously drive WBL participation, credential attainment, and readiness for what comes next
A Win for Students and Schools
Honors and Honors Plus seals are more than a graduation distinction. They represent a new way of thinking about readiness, access, and outcomes. When students are supported early, tracked effectively, and funded appropriately, schools are positioned to:
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Improve postsecondary readiness outcomes
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Increase completion of credentials and work-based learning
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Access new state incentive funding tied directly to student success
Career+ Pathways™ exists to make that process clearer, more manageable, and more accessible for both schools and students.
As Indiana continues to implement its new diploma and funding model, partnerships that combine career coaching, tracking systems, and funding access will be essential. Career+ Pathways™ is proud to be part of that work.
Bio
Kimba Rund is a workforce training and career development specialist with a background in psychology and a focus on helping students connect education to real career opportunities. She holds a master’s in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, which informs her work designing programs that support student growth, skill development, and long-term success. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga, reading, and spending time with her family, husband, and two dogs.
