"At some point in life, when it was time to receive that education, we didn't get it," says Dejanae Ryan, who's expecting to earn her high school diploma in February after dropping out eleven years ago. "But now we're given a second chance. Now as an adult, you're more mindful about what you're doing, and your mind is more open to soaking up more knowledge."
Ryan, a Denver native who dropped out of Montbello High School to focus on work, found out about the Excel Center at 15445 East Iliff Avenue in Aurora a few months ago. A social worker recommended the school, which opened in August and offers a free high school education to adults over the age of 21, while helping Ryan figure out which tax benefits she could receive for her daughter. Now Ryan is urging other adults who regret not finishing their education to try the Excel Center.
"Anybody that wants to come there, if, deep down in your heart, this is something that you wanted, this is the place to go," she says. "You have a lot more one-on-one opportunities, and you're not there competing with anybody. Everybody is there for the same thing."
Ryan's classmate, Roddrick Marshall, dropped out of high school in Georgia in the early ’90s after several incarcerated stints owing to "a bad habit of stealing cars," he says. Marshall had never heard of the Excel Center until his wife told him that she enrolled him just two weeks before the first classes started in August.
"She loves to look at the community stuff and what's going on. She actually saw it and enrolled me and told me after the fact," Marshall recalls. "I was like, 'There's no high school diploma opportunities.' She told me, 'Goodwill has this place, the Excel Center. They open up in August.' She signed me up. I went."
According to Goodwill of Colorado, more than 300,000 adults in the state don't have a high school diploma or a GED. Between 30,000 and 50,000 of those adults live in Aurora, and more than 3,000 of them live within two miles of the new adult high school.
Aurora's Excel Center is the first and only in the state;administrators hope to enroll 300 students by 2026 and open a second location in Colorado Springs. With sixty students enrolled this semester, the Excel Center will see eight students receive their diplomas at the first graduation on campus on Wednesday, December 4. In the works since 2019, the Aurora Excel Center opened this year after state law changed to allow adults to receive their high school diplomas through in-person programs. On top of the state go-ahead, the Colorado Department of Education delivered a $4.7 million grant to Goodwill of Colorado to help with its $2.8 million annual operating costs over the next three years.
Marshall says the classes were accelerated during each eight-week term, with five terms a year. "You've got to come in with your feet running, but they work with you," he says.
Marshall splits his time working in logistics and as a forklift operator at different warehouses and as a part-time custodian at Denver Public Schools. He also delivers for Uber Eats and Instacart for extra cash.
"I just want to tackle it and get a high school diploma," he says. "I feel like I could have done this when I was younger, if I just had the extra motivation at that time, I could have completed it then." For his current term, Marshall is taking four classes, with just two classes remaining next term before he graduates. The teachers "try to keep it all in the classroom," he says, so they don't assign homework.
The Colorado Excel Center in Aurora, 15445 East Iliff Avenue, opened this year with about sixty students enrolled. Goodwill of Colorado, which runs the school, hopes to enroll another 300 by 2026.
Courtesy of Goodwill of Colorado
"The GED was fine; I was thankful for that," Marshall says. "But the high school diploma was something I should have had. This should have been part of my passage through life, and I felt like it was empty. There was an emptiness because I didn't have it."
Upon receiving his diploma, Marshall hopes to enroll in the Lincoln College of Technology, a trade school in Denver, where he wants to study HVAC training to work with heating and air conditioning. After that, he wants to save up and pursue a Ph.D. in psychology.
Ryan just needs to pass U.S. history and senior seminar to get her diploma, so she's on track to graduate in a couple of months. A part-time driver delivering prescription medication for Capsule Pharmacy, she plans to use her high school diploma to begin training as an emergency medical technician. From there, Ryan wants to work toward accumulating hours and training to become a paramedic and follow her passion of helping others, she says.
Ryan tried several times to get her GED, but it was an expensive process for her and she failed the exam six times. Each attempt at the exam cost her money she barely had on her tight budget; a GED in Colorado can cost as much as $174. Ryan felt like a classroom setting was what she really needed, but she couldn't afford one.
"Of course, I really wanted a high school education, and after the sixth attempt, it felt like it was never going to happen," she says. "I began to think that to receive this education, I would need to surround myself with people who were going to make me feel comfortable going through this."
The free tuition at the Excel Center "plays a really, really big part for me as a single mom," but over time, she also "became grateful for the teachers" because of how committed they were to helping her. Ryan credits the staff with making the experience easier, describing educators as "very open, very wise people.
"They don't get upset very easily," she says, adding that they are "brave to teach adults."
But balancing adult life and high school classes hasn't worked out for everyone, according to both students.
"We have seen some students enroll, and then they get here and realize it may be a little too much for them to balance," Marshall notes. "You're going to have to find a nighttime job or a weekend job, because we're pretty much here from 9 a.m. to 3:40 p.m. By the time you get home, that's your whole day."
On top of that, he says, "there's a lot of intimidation if you've been away from the school and classroom environment for a while, years or decades. You may feel like 'I'm going to be a dummy.'"
The saving grace is the support of fellow students, he adds. Some of his classmates were in their sixties and others were still learning English. But Marshall promises that "you feed off of other people's energy" and that students help each other, which "takes away from some of the feeling of intimidation."
Anyone interested in enrolling in the Excel Center of Colorado can apply online and must provide proof of residency, fill out an education plan questionnaire, take a home language survey and turn in requests to use the on-site daycare or transportation assistance if needed. High school transcripts or a zero-credit disclosure form if you don't have high school credits are also required.
