Pastor Edward Dyson had just finished preaching at a church event when one of his former school classmates who was there came up and told him she was graduating from school.
He thought she meant college. But she explained that she was graduating from the Excel Center.
That encounter inspired him to look into the Excel Center himself. He called for information the next day and quickly became an Excel Center student.
Baltimore will have the newest Excel Center in the nation when it opens this September downtown. Baltimore residents 21 years of age and older will be able to earn a free high school diploma, while having access to on-site child care and transportation assistance.
An estimated 80,000 Baltimore area adults don’t have a high school diploma. Not having a diploma severely limits a person’s income potential, job opportunities and the ability to build a better life. The Excel Center is an attempt by Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake to change that.
The Excel Center provides a flexible and accelerated high school education. But the actual length of the experience varies for each student, based on how many high school credits they had already earned before beginning the program.
- A student starting with no credits, but taking Excel Center classes full-time, could obtain their high school diploma in two years.
- However, data from the other Excel Centers shows that it takes a student, on average, three years to obtain all of the credits needed for their high school diploma.
Edward especially liked that Excel Center classes had both younger and older students, with different generations learning together.
Edward had dropped out of high school as a teenager because he experienced a lot of bullying, was getting into a lot of fights, and then got involved in street life and taking drugs.
“I was trying to find myself,” said Edward, “because I went through a lot of issues growing up.”
Now, all these years after turning his life around, he describes the Excel Center as “God sent,” because of how the program is structured as a condensed high school education. He said the real difference in the learning experience for him was “how they broke it down in that time to make you feel like you can do this, you got this.”
Life threatened to interrupt his education yet again when Edward was diagnosed with cancer shortly after starting his Excel Center classes. He had to go back and forth for treatments but appreciated that his Excel Center teachers were so understanding.
“One of my greatest experiences was when I announced that I had to start chemo,” said Edward. “The doctor said it was a life sentence. But when I talked with my classmates about it, they immediately got up and started hugging me and embracing me, and that is one moment that I will never forget. Even my teachers came in and they were crying. But I’m here to say, I beat it.”
Edward feels he got more than just an education — he got vital emotional support at a very difficult time in his life. He said words like “wow, amazing, and great” cannot really express the love and support he felt from everyone at the Excel Center.
When he graduated with his diploma from the Excel Center in Washington, D.C., he expressed his gratitude to all the teachers and staff. Most of all, he said, he was grateful for the compassion they showed “for us that dropped out and had to come back almost 30 years later to complete [high school]. You all did not give up on us.”
Listen to Edward share his Excel Center story on YouTube.
Learn more about the Baltimore Excel Center today.
