We’re soon getting a new high school in Columbus — one that is both nontraditional and very much needed.
The Excel Center – Bartholomew County will be located at the Roviar Building at 1235 Jackson St. and will provide tuition-free public high school education for adults. It will provide students a chance to earn their Indiana Core 40 high school diploma, which then will open further opportunities for educational, employment and personal growth and advancement.
As The Republic’s Brad Davis reported last week, the Columbus Board of Zoning Appeals approved a conditional use request that will permit the Excel Center to open in the building that also houses the Factory 12 Event Loft.
Sanctioned by Goodwill Education Initiatives, Inc. (GEI), a nonprofit organization formed by Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana, some 20 Excel Centers around the state have helped more than 8,000 people graduate since the first opened in 2010.
But those efforts are only now reaching local populations, and not a moment too soon.
“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 earlier this year.
“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.”
According to GEI, the average age of Excel’s students is 32, and about two-thirds of enrollees are women, the majority of whom have school-aged children.
Clearly, there is pronounced a need for an Excel Center adult high school in Columbus.
Officials told the BZA that the local facility should be able to accommodate up to 200 students and GEI has indicated it hopes to enroll students for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year.
The importance of a high school diploma simply cannot be overstated. Without one, people may be barred from everything from getting a driver’s license to obtaining shelter, employment, education or skill-enhancing training.
These facts are not lost on GEI, whose representatives said the Excel Center “really dials in nicely to the city’s homelessness initiative … one of the facets of a solution to homelessness would be education.”
It’s not going too far to say that the Excel Center holds life-changing promise for people of any age who, for whatever reason, never graduated from high school.
Now that opportunity will be within reach.
We look forward to the arrival of the Excel Center, and we commend this effort to help people achieve the goal of obtaining their high school diploma. Doing so is more than just personally empowering, it also will directly benefit their children, their families and our community.
