Goodwill's one-of-a-kind, tuition-free adult high school opens new Phoenix campus

At 39, Edwond Villegas is preparing to attend high school at the same time as his daughter.

“She thinks it’s going to be hard,” he said of his daughter, who will be starting her freshman year of high school this August. “And I told her, ‘Don’t worry, daddy’s gonna be here going to school on the journey with you.’”

Villegas is entering his second year at the Excel Center, Arizona’s only in-person school for adults that grants accredited high school diplomas.

The Excel Center is a tuition-free public charter school open to anyone 18 and older regardless of the number of credits they need to earn their high school diploma. Its classes — algebra, geometry, pre-calculus, English language arts, history, biology, physical science, earth and space science — meet Arizona’s K-12 academic standards.

“They are full Arizona-standards-based classes that you would receive in a public high school, which adult students no longer have access to once they leave high school,” said Georgia Harris, the Excel Center’s vice president and superintendent.

“We make sure the content is relevant to adults, and that we're offering it in an accelerated fashion” through 10-week terms, she said.

The Excel Center also funds college credits and industry-recognized certifications for students and offers free on-site child care and transportation assistance, including bus passes and gas cards.

This year, classes will start on Aug. 14 in a new location just west of Papago Park.

The center was launched last year by Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona with $12 million in COVID-19 relief money from the state. For its first year, through a partnership with the Cartwright School District, it operated out of a temporary space while its permanent space was constructed.

The Excel Center receives perpetual funding on a per-pupil basis through legislation passed in 2022, which set aside a bucket of money “to provide adult learners with alternative study services that lead to the issuance of a high school diploma and industry-recognized credentials/certificates.” It’s separate from the Legislature’s K-12 budget, which is only available to students up to age 21. Additional funding for the school comes from Goodwill.

In its first year, the Excel Center served over 200 students with an average age of 29. The school operates during the day, and 70% of the students are part-time, according to Harris. Students can enroll year-round.

The model for the Excel Center is not new. Goodwill opened its first Excel Center in Indiana over a decade ago. It’s since expanded the program to Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Arkansas and has yielded over 11,000 graduates.

In Arizona, Goodwill hopes to address the barriers to career advancement for the approximately 700,000 adults who do not have a high school diploma. In 2022, U.S. workers 25 and older whose highest level of education was a high school diploma earned 25% more per week than those who didn’t finish high school, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Excel Center aims to remove barriers to completing high school

There are many adult education programs in the state that offer online and in-person preparation classes for the GED test, which certifies students with a high school equivalency diploma. The Excel Center is unique in being the state's only in-person school for adults that grants an accredited high school diploma, not a GED diploma.

Harris, who used to teach GED preparation classes, said that GED programs are “really effective” for people who know how to study, are self-starters, and want to receive their high school equivalency diploma quickly.

But she said the rate of GED recipients going on to pursue postsecondary education is "not quite as high" because a GED program may not impart all of the skills that come with attending school and experiencing the learning process of high school classes.

"We're building in the additional supports that you need in order to take away the barriers," Harris said. These supports include a college and career readiness specialist who works with students. Forty percent of Excel Center graduates nationwide have gone on to pursue postsecondary education, according to Goodwill.

Harris said she has found that most people who come to the Excel Center need the additional support it offers.

Since 2002, the year Villegas was “supposed to graduate,” he made two attempts to get his GED diploma, he said. The first attempt, an online GED preparation course he took through a community college, didn’t offer enough guidance for his needs, he said.

“When I did an orientation and started doing the pre-test, I didn't even understand what I was looking at,” he said. “I just didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t have the support. I need a teacher, someone one-on-one mentoring me, guiding me. ... So I just gave up.”

A couple of years later, he took GED preparation courses while he was incarcerated, and he passed all of the GED pre-tests. But he was released before he had the opportunity to take the GED test.

“You get out, you got to work, you got to find a place to live and get yourself together,” he said. “And I just let it slide under the rug again.”

He found that he wasn’t able to apply for some of the jobs he wanted — like being a ranger in the Arizona Game and Fish Department — without a high school diploma, and he worked in restaurants, carpet cleaning, construction and power washing.

He began working for Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona in 2013, where he’s now the supervisor for environmental services. He works overnight shifts and takes part-time classes at the Excel Center in the afternoon — a schedule he said was “a little overwhelming, a little bit more than I expected” at first.

Retention, especially with an adult population, can be challenging, Harris said. The Excel Center sees relationship-building with students as a way to keep them engaged. Students are given life coaches, who call them when they miss class and offer assistance.

“They will make consistent phone calls until we have contact with that person and see if there’s any way we can help them remove barriers,” Harris said.

Villegas said that any time he missed a day of school, his life coach called him: “‘Hey Edwond, where you at? What can we do to make the situation better? Are you OK? Do you need anything?’”

“Not giving up on you. Always motivating,” Villegas said. “Always pushing me to my limits.”

“I preach to my kids all the time about school,” he said. “It motivated me enough to say, ‘Hey, look, even though dad’s 39 years old and I didn’t get it, I'm trying now and I'm showing you how important it is that you need your education.’” He said he hopes to graduate by the end of next year, and he wants to remain at Goodwill and serve as a life coach at the center.

Maggie Ramsey, 26, enrolled at the Excel Center last year with just a few credits left to complete her diploma.

“I was very, very close to graduating back in 2015,” she said. She was relocating to Phoenix from Camp Verde at the time, and though she completed her senior year and attended her graduation, she didn’t receive her diploma, she said.

Between working full time and moving, completing the remaining credits "just wasn’t something that I was able to do at the time.” She said that getting her GED certificate would have felt like giving up. “I was so close,” she said. “I did my 12 years."

When she started at the Excel Center, her children were 2 months old and 3 years old, and they attended the on-site child care, allowing her to breastfeed her daughter in between classes and have lunch with them each day.

“Everything that I saw being a potential barrier, the Excel Center had an answer for,” she said.

Ramsey received her high school diploma in June, making her the Arizona Excel Center's first graduate. Now, she’s planning to become a registered intensive care unit nurse.

"I have something that my kids are gonna be proud of, and my kids got to be there for," she said. "For a long time, I didn't feel like I was ever going to get to that point."

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Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter at @maddieparrish61.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Goodwill's free adult high school opens new Phoenix campus