Photo provided This graphic shows the proposed location for a new Excel Center from Goodwill Education Initiatives in the Roviar Building.
Tuition-free public high school for adults may be coming to Columbus in time to open for next school year.
The Columbus Board of Zoning appeals on Tuesday will hear a request for use variance approval to allow the school in an area zoned Commercial: Neighborhood (CN).
The request was made by Goodwill Education Initiatives, Inc. (GEI), a non-profit organization formed by Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana, which provides education opportunities for adults and youth, according to their website.
The school would be known as The Excel Center – Bartholomew County and would be located at the Roviar Building at 1235 Jackson St., according to city documents.
The building is already home to a range of businesses, but the proposed school would particularly be located on the second floor, GEI representatives wrote to the planning department.
“An additional approximately 2,560 square feet is being proposed which will then ultimately be assigned a new address upon completion of any needed improvements. The space is identified as Units 20 and 22 on the attached Exhibit B.”
The Excel Center would provide students a chance to earn their Indiana Core 40 high school diploma — more than 8,000 have graduated since the first Excel Center opened in 2010, according to GEI officials.
There are already 16 Excel Centers statewide and those nearest to Columbus are locations in Shelbyville, Bloomington and in Indianapolis.
In-person classes would be taught by licensed teachers, Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and there’s expected to be a max enrollment of 200, city documents show. The proposed school would include a maximum seven classrooms and be a total of 12,440 square feet.
The school would offer wraparound supports as well, including free on-site childcare and free transportation assistance. Each student also gets a life coach focused on graduate planning, barrier removal and soft skill building.
In spring of 2017, the Indiana Charter School Board (ICSB) awarded GEI, through The Excel Centers, LLC, four additional charters. Back then, GEI had already identified Bartholomew County as a community of need — the Columbus location would be the final of those four charters.
“Columbus and the Bartholomew County community need The Excel Center as a means to reconnect the 6% of the population over age 18 without a diploma to their educational goals,” GEI officials wrote in an application for charter activation in March. “Additionally, nearly 9.5% of the collective population in the surrounding four counties without an Excel Center does not have a high school diploma. The data for those aged 18-24 is bleak at almost 20% of the population living without a diploma in Brown, Jennings, Decatur, and Jackson counties.”
The application indicated that the 2024-25 school year is intended to be the school’s opening.
Katie Bustamante, VP of Education at GEI, said during a public meeting at the Bartholomew County Public Library (BCPL) in May that there are 5,000 adults over the age of 18 in Bartholomew County without a high school diploma and adding in the surrounding counties, that number jumps up to more than 20,000.
Officials said 70 percent of Excel Center students start out below a sixth grade level in math and 45 percent have below a sixth grade reading level, according to Bustamante.
She said at that time that Excel Center locations have a focus on students earning industry recognized certification and dual credits, adding that 99 percent of graduates last year earned one or both of those.
The city Board of Zoning Appeals agenda initially included an item asking for a similar request for a school to be located at 2154 State St., but that was withdrawn.
“At the time of the application, the applicant had not finalized a location,” a GEI representative wrote in revised submission to planning staff. “The State Street location request is being withdrawn.”
Nearly 20 locations had been reviewed as a potential site for the school, including a former medical center at 940 N. Marr Road, a storefront within a shopping center at 3136 N. National Road and a former furniture warehouse at 1720 17th St., according to the application for charter activation.
The board will meet on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. in the Columbus City Hall council chambers.
