City officials are providing Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. a $1 million grant to help fund three BCSC workforce development initiatives for the 2024-25 school year.
The grant from the Columbus Redevelopment Commission will come out of the central tax-increment-financing (TIF) district and is the ninth year the commission has funded it.
Columbus City Council members are required to sign-off on any city expenditure greater that $500,000.
The grant includes $330,500 for iGrad, $267,397 for transitional programs for students with disabilities and $402,103 for STEM initiatives. The amounts have remained the same since 2022.
The commission had given BCSC $750,000 in TIF dollars each school year from 2016-17 up until 2021-22, when school officials requested and were granted a $250,000 increase to help convert elementary school STEM labs into full specials rotations and add two more iGrad coaches.
BCSC Superintendent Chad Phillips called the relationship between the commission, city council and BCSC a “unique partnership” and gave an overview of how the continued investment is impacting the district’s students.
iGrad, which is a partnership with Ivy Tech Community College – Columbus, provides students in grades 8-12 who are identified as at-risk with academic support and mentoring. The program has impacted 2,434 students since 2017, according to a presentation shown to the commission.
For the first time ever last year, Phillips said, all students who started 12th grade in iGrad graduated from high school in May. The $330,500 will primarily go towards paying iGrad coaches, according to Phillips. The program served 589 students last year, down slightly from 623 students in 2023.
“That number’s a little bit down because the Ivy Tech Foundation has had to increase pay to keep up with the demand to keep good coaches employed in our schools and so it’s been tougher to keep up with the number of coaches needed to serve all those students,” Phillips said.
Commissioner Kyle Hendricks noted the 100% graduation figure and asked if iGrad implemented anything new last year that contributed to its success.
“I think there’s a multiplier effect,” Phillips said, pointing towards BCSC’s new team cohort structure.
“We recently implemented, just last school year for the first time, a very similar model to iGrad, but basically scaled-up and created cohort teams (for each graduating year) at both high schools,” Phillips said. “An assistant principal, counselor, and academic coach stays with that cohort as they move from their freshman year to their sophomore year, onto their junior year and senior year. Last year was the first year for that, and so it was the first year that we combined that look with iGrad’s investment in working with individual kids.”
BCSC’s transition programs have the goal of helping students with disabilities transition into the either the workforce or post-secondary opportunities.
Phillips discussed the work Transition Coordinator Mary Hamlin does to make sure that students with disabilities “who are really entering that secondary career have opportunities to engage in real life work experiences and internships.” He also noted the Empower Program, a collaboration between BCSC, Ivy Tech and IU Columbus where students aged 18-22 take part in a 1 to 2 year transition program on the Air Park Campus. It’s the third year Empower has been at the location and nine students were enrolled in the program during the 2023-24 school year, according to Phillips.
The transition planning money will also go towards the Empower Program, a collaboration between BCSC, Ivy Tech and IU Columbus to provide students aged 18-22 working on a certificate of achievement the ability to take part in the 1 to 2 year transition program on the Air Park campus. The program had 9 students enrolled in the 2023-24 school year and 780 students have been impacted since 2017, according to BCSC.
“It really has been an impactful program,” Phillips told the commission. “If you’re ever up in the Learning Center, even walk by during the week and see those students engaged in some work experiences, as well as learning come college skills and life skills to really thrive.”
According to BCSC, 10,250 BCSC students have engaged in STEM activities since the redevelopment commission provided their first workforce grant to BCSC in 2017. Phillips called the STEM initiatives the “most visible on a day-to-day basis.”
BCSC students in grade K-6 go to a hands-on STEM lab taught by a certified teacher one day for week, just like they would do for art, music and PE.
“We don’t know another district that has this in place,” Phillips said. “… If you ask kids in elementary school, particularly the younger ages what they favorite part of the day is, as long as they’re not saying recess or lunch, they’re probably talking about STEM.”
BCSC also hold various STEM events like a camp hosted by C4 for fifth and sixth-graders and another night event for the district’s girls, also hosted by C4.
One of the more notable areas where the funding has paid dividends was through BCSC’s robotics programs, which will have more than 40 BCSC teams this year, according to Phillips. The Smith Elementary School’s Sonic Cyborgs have earned trips to the VEX Robotics World Championship in consecutive years. Indiana leads the United States in the amount of kids to participate in VEX Robotics competitions, per the Indiana Department of Education.
