The Columbus Board of Zoning Appeals has unanimously approved a conditional use request to allow a school that is planning to provide tuition-free public high school for adults 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.
“Goodwill has a school that they have created and that they sponsor, that allows people who have not attained their high school diploma, to pursue their high school diploma on Goodwill’s dime.” Attorney Jeff Rocker, who is representing the applicants in the matter, told the board.
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 of nearly 20 Excel Centers in Indiana opened in 2010, according to GEI officials.
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.
In-person classes would be taught by licensed teachers, Monday through Friday from 7 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.
The proposed school would be located on the Roviar building’s 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 space on the bottom left is what you might commonly understand to have been the Factory 12 Event Loft,” Rocker said Tuesday night. “So that space has gone — originally, many, many moons ago from 20,000 square feet up and down, to the second floor, to finally finding that, with the growing options in the community, that wasn’t the best use for that space anymore, this was better anyway.”
GEI’s Lakia Osborne said most Excel Center students come directly from social service programs.
“We will be seeking to partner with different entities here to identify those who are in need,” Osborne told the board, adding they plan on collaborating with local schools too.
“This really dials in nicely to the city’s homelessness initiative as well,” Rocker said. “… One of the facets of a solution to homelessness would be education.”
In terms of the market that GEI serves at Excel Center locations, Rocker rattled off the following statistics:
- Average age: 32 years old
- Women outnumber men two to one
- Two-thirds of school attendees have school-aged children
- 83 percent of student body is not married
GEI has a companion request for the school to address parking that has been submitted to the planning department that’s scheduled for the July 10 meeting of the Columbus Plan Commission, Associate Planner Andres Nieto said.
GEI will seek a a site development plan major modification to reduce the amount of required parking outlined by the zoning ordinance. GEI officials said that about 30 percent of their students use public transportation to get to and from class.
Rocker said they will also look to have signage approved by the plan commission later for the 12th Street and Washington Street side of the building.
