Original Research by School Decision on Excel Center - Kokomo
Excel Center – Kokomo is a public charter high school serving students in ninth through twelfth grade, but its enrollment profile tells a story that is far from a typical high school. The school enrolls a substantial number of students, overwhelmingly concentrated in the twelfth grade, with only a handful in tenth and eleventh grades and none at all in ninth. This distribution, paired with the fact that the school is described as an adult high school in public records, signals a mission that is fundamentally different from the usual four-year path. This is a school designed for students who need to finish high school later than the traditional timeline, often while managing work, family, or other adult responsibilities. A parent or guardian considering this school should understand that their child will be in an environment built around credit recovery and diploma completion for older students, not the conventional ninth-to-twelfth-grade progression.
The student body reflects the diversity of Kokomo. A majority of students are white, with a notable number identifying as two or more races and smaller shares of Black and Hispanic students. More than half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a marker that the school serves a low-income population. The school is housed at an address on West Superior Street in downtown Kokomo, a city whose economy is dominated by manufacturing, healthcare, and retail, with Stellantis as a major employer. Kokomo is a mid-sized, auto-oriented industrial city with a stable population and a modestly appreciating housing market. The downtown location places the school near civic anchors like the Howard County courthouse and the Kokomo Civic Center, but away from the campuses of Indiana University Kokomo and Ivy Tech Community College, which sit on separate sites south of downtown.
The Excel Center – Kokomo is its own school district, a single-school charter district in the state of Indiana. This means there is no larger district office above it making decisions about budget, curriculum, or operations. The school is directly accountable to the Indiana Charter School Board. In 2022, Goodwill Education Initiatives, the entity that operates the school, submitted a full charter renewal application for a new term beginning in the 2023-24 school year. Charter renewal is a high-stakes process that determines whether the school is authorized to continue operating. That this renewal was pursued and, as the school remains open, presumably granted, is the most consequential recent event for anyone considering the school.
No state assessment data was available for this school, and the comparison fact-set that places it among the other districts in Howard County could not generate a proficiency index, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism rate because the school’s own data was missing on those measures. This gap is not unusual for a school of this type. Adult high schools and alternative diploma programs often operate outside the standard state testing and accountability framework, or their students may not be tested in the same way as a traditional high school. A parent should not necessarily read a missing test score as a weak one, but they should be aware that the standard metrics used to evaluate most public schools do not apply here. The school’s primary performance measure is whether its students complete their diploma requirements, and that is a metric not captured in the available data.
For a student who is over the typical age for high school and needs a setting that is not the traditional comprehensive high school, the Excel Center – Kokomo offers a targeted pathway. It is a charter school with a clear adult-education mission, located in a downtown Kokomo building that is a short drive from most points in the city. The school is not a choice for a ninth-grader beginning a four-year sequence. It is a finish line for those who have not yet crossed it. The most important thing a family can do is talk directly with the school to understand the exact steps to enrollment, the expected pace of credit completion, and what support the school provides for the non-academic challenges that often brought students to this path in the first place.
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