If you haven't already heard of an Excel Center, you probably will soon— it's one of the most novel ideas in Monroe County's arsenal for fighting both the employment and job training gaps and the poverty rate in the Rochester region.
An Excel Center is an adult high school and job training program rolled into one, designed to help those who dropped out of high school to accelerate their secondary education and either find employment or head to college after graduation.
The program, where typical students are in their 20s and 30s and graduate in just over a year, offers amenities like childcare and transportation in an attempt to eliminate barriers to education. After eight years in operation in other states, the program has proven to be a reliable pipeline to funnel working age adults to local employers, colleges and universities. And local stakeholders want to bring it to Rochester.
“This is another excellent tool that we can bring here to Monroe County to help our residents become very successful in not only the education process, but in their opportunity to earn a living,” said Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo, who traveled to Indianapolis last week to see the Excel Center concept in action.
The county is looking to partner with Goodwill of the Finger Lakes and its affiliate, the Associationfor the Blind and Visually Impaired, to bring a center to Goodwill’s South Clinton Avenue location within the next few years.
The Great Recession left a torrent of unemployed adults across the country, and, in Indiana, the Excel Center idea arose as a possible solution, said Kim Reier of Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana, the agency that first tested the idea.
“Those people who had once had lucrative jobs even though they didn’t have a high school diploma were finding themselves unemployed because those who were more educated were starting to take those jobs,” said Reier.
The Excel Center concept took off with a vengeance after the first center opened in 2010. Reier’s Goodwill location now specifically runs 12 centerswith two others operating in Indiana, plus centers in Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas and Washington D.C.
Each center has about 300 students each, which creates an intimate environment to help students thrive, said Reier, whose current job is to help Goodwill agencies across the country move forward with their own Excel Centers.
“We know that students are leaving us not with just that high school diploma, but with something that makes them more desirable to employers,” she said. “Also, we know that when educational attainment goes up, poverty decreases.”
From 2010 to January 2017, over 2,300 students graduated from the 11 Indiana centers that were open when a 2017 report was published by several independent agencies, including the Indiana Departments of Education and Workforce Development. Of those students, 80 percent had a job or were enrolled in post-secondary education within ayear after graduation.
The positive ramifications of parents continuing their own education have a ripple effect on families —now parents can read to their children or help them with homework, she said. About 73 percent of parents who graduated from Excel Centers reported an improvement in their children’s academic performance.
Unlike a typical high school equivalency diploma program, which relies more on tests and less on face-to-face education, the Excel Center model offers each student accelerated classroom education, wraparound services like child care, job training options specific to businesses in the area and a life coach who acts as a “guidance counselor, meets social worker, meets a really good friend,” said Reier.
These coaches often help the students find housing, get access to food pantries, navigate mental health programs and tackle other processes that would normally overshadow the individual’s drive to finish his or her own education, said Reier.
“That may bethe biggest differentiator (about Excel Center programs,)” she said. “What we’re trying to do is provide an academic foundation and a school culture that provides them with a network of support and meets them where they are.”
The academic curriculum will look different in each state, said Dr. Gidget Hopf, Ed.D, president and CEO of Goodwill of the Finger Lakes. Since this would be the first Excel Center in New York, Hopf's team is working with education law experts to nail down how state education requirements would apply.
“We’re building the airplane as we’re flying it,” said Hopf, adding that it’s likely the Rochester Excel Center would first exist as a 150-student demonstration project, meaning it would technically be a Goodwill program, rather than its own nonprofit.
To fund the project, Goodwill of the Finger Lakes plans to raise $3.5 million through a private donation campaign to renovate a space, buy equipment and hire teachers. About $750,000 has been raised so far, said Hopf. They’d like to see the nearly $13,000 needed per adult student per year come from the public sector —for comparison, itcost about $22,820 to educate a student in the Rochester City School District forthe 2016-2017 school year, including costs for district-wide administration and transportation, according to state data.
As graduates maintain jobs and require less public assistance, they save the state money, said Reier. The state of Indiana saved an annual average of$1.9 milliondue to eligibility changes of all Indiana Excel Center graduates per year.
The hope is that community partners, and especially businesses, would be eager to see the project come to fruition, as it will help them fill job openings, said Hopf. Business representatives could weigh in on curriculum and training to ensure that graduates have the right credentials to continue advanced training or start working on the spot, she said. Examples of Excel Center training categories include healthcare, childcare and technology.
“These are people who are lost but who could be filling a real economic need,” said Hopf. As a leader at Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, Hopf has watched poverty and unemployment eat away at Rochester’s population and, at one time, felt unsure about workable solutions.
Now, she feels there’s a way for Goodwill to make a measurable dent in these issues, with the help of local government and community partners.
“This is something we can do and should do,” she said.
STADDEO@Gannett.com
