What good can come from a demolished football stadium? That’s the question Indianapolis twins Michael and Jessica Bricker asked themselves in 2008, when the city slated the RCA Dome, home to the Colts’ NFL team for a quarter-century, to be dismantled.
To their surprise, the Brickers found they were the only ones asking if materials could be reused, rather than dumped. “We are very much in this place in history where architecture feels as disposable as plastic or anything else. We have this sense that once a place is old, it’s used up and just turns to trash,” says Michael. “These huge stadiums, which were all built in the 1970s and ’80s, are not nearing the end of their lifespans but are being replaced anyway. That’s not going to change. We have the opportunity, as citizens, to expect and demand reuse of those buildings as part of the plan.”
After city officials agreed, the twins salvaged 13 acres of waterproof, Teflon-coated fiberglass fabric, which had once stretched across the stadium’s ceiling. With it, they fashioned a series of bags, ranging from zip-up weekenders to clutches, that generated $70,000, essentially building a social enterprise a year before Kickstarter became a household name.
The Brickers invested the proceeds into a new nonprofit, People for Urban Progress (PUP), whose goal would be to introduce upcycling to the city. Calling themselves a “do-tank,” they took on a series of projects, like refurbishing 9,000 bright orange seats left over from the demolition of the city’s Bush Stadium and installing them at bus stops around Indianapolis. They also used some of the leftover fabric from the RCA Dome and built standalone canopies that provide shade in area parks.
PUP’s mission, Michael says, has been to get people thinking about sustainability — a word rarely heard in Indiana a decade ago — from the very beginning of any public-work design. Even better, he adds, is when sustainability intersects with the adrenaline-fueled world of sports, whose big-business spectacles generate a lot of waste. “We’re trying to almost reengineer the whole process,” Michael says. “We’re thinking about these resources through their entire life-cycle and trying to be smarter about how everyone can use them every step of the way.”
Indianapolis, located in a vast, flat expanse of Midwestern lands, doesn’t necessarily have a strong sense of place — nothing like San Francisco’s hilly terrain or New York CIty’s rivers and bays. Growing up there, the Brickers never expected their home would be a hub for smart design initiatives or a thriving arts culture. But as people have moved back to the Hoosier State capital’s urban core in the wake of the Great Recession, there’s been a revival of local brands and some new upstarts like PUP who are making investments in the city. Connected by a cultural trail that loops through downtown and various PUP projects dotting neighborhoods, Indianapolis’s identity feels resurgent.
For other cities admiring how PUP’s creative projects have benefited Indianapolis, the Brickers suggest starting by looking at all architecture as an asset. That includes not just repurposing bricks, steel and wood, but also textiles like firehose fabric, and structures like parking meters and payphone booths. If you’re willing to take on the cause and find designers with a fresh perspective, the Brickers say, you’ll have no trouble figuring out what to do with them.
Homepage photo of PUP messenger bag courtesy of People for Urban Progress
What Army Wives Need to Understand About Female Soldiers, The Washington Post Much is said about bridging the military-civilian divide, but as writer (and wife of a veteran) Lily Burana realizes, there’s also a distance between the women who proudly sport the uniform and those who are married to someone wearing it. Knowing that the military is full of inspirational females — including those now serving in the Ranger division — Burana set out to build a bridge the only way she knew how: by sitting down to lunch and having a chat. Are Doctors the Key to Ending Philly Gun Violence? Philadelphia Magazine Renowned for providing lifesaving medical treatment to kids, doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are focusing their efforts on reducing the cycle of youth violence that plagues the City of Brotherly Love. The hospital’s Violence Intervention Program (VIP) grew out of internal discussions about the Sandy Hill Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., and a shocking report from the city government, which found that 5,051 Philadelphia youth were shot or murdered between 2006 and 2012. It’s difficult to know for sure if the screenings, bully prevention lessons and intensive counseling sessions, which make up VIP, is reducing the number of gunshot victims, but the outlook is hopeful, considering most participants say they desire to be a normal teenager, not one packing heat. The Power of Vision in Urban Governance, Governing Every politician may have the goal of being dubbed a “visionary leader,” but Indianapolis’s former four-term mayor, Bill Hudnut, actually was. In order to bring forth the Midwestern city’s potential, Hudnut enlisted help from Indianapolis business and philanthrophic leaders and economic development experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together, these heavy-hitters combined their strengths, collaborating on a plan that eventually brought $1 billion to the local economy — proving that collective vision and use of community assets is key to long-term impact.
What is the ideal size of government? Should decisions be centered in a strong federal branch or diffused across thousands of municipalities? Liberals and conservatives have duked it out over these questions ever since Patrick Henry demanded a Bill of Rights to protect individual liberty from a tyrannical president. But there’s a retro, nonpartisan answer that’s been tested recently to add to the expected pull between local, state and federal governments: a regional body. The model first arose in the late 1960s as cities confronted the rise of suburbs, and it’s making a comeback as dealing with a new era of climate change — flooding, regional transport and open space — becomes a top priority. NationSwell looked at how this system of metropolitan governance has changed two cities and could impact a third.
Metro Council, Portland, Ore.
Leave it to Portland, Ore.’s biggest city, to come up with a new way of doing government. The area features the nation’s first and only elected regional government, which coordinates planning across Portland plus 24 neighboring cities and three counties along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. (Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, have another notable Metro Council, but their board is state-appointed and has been criticized for a lack of accountability.) The core of greater Portland’s government is a Metro Council consisting of six nonpartisan representatives who direct more than 1,600 government employees: rangers for 17,000 acres of park land, economists, climate scientists, urban planners, mapmakers, garbage truck drivers and even animal keepers who staff the zoo. Among the challenges it’s dealt with? Everything from the boundaries of urban growth to retiring old elephants.
The body’s emergence dates back to more than half a century ago, when Portland residents first recognized the need to safeguard outlying forests and historic neighborhoods from population growth — in essence, preserving the attractions that were making the city a destination. At the same time, community members also wanted to see efficient government services, not the “wasteful, fragmented and uneven” delivery that Portlanders witnessed in 1960, according to a League of Women Voters mailer. After a regional vote, the body was officially set up in 1979. “Places in the west — and Portland’s a good example of this — were growing rapidly. This expansion tends to get people thinking regionally,” Kate Foster, an expert in regional governance, tells The Atlantic’s CityLab. Residents cared about “these gaps in service delivery at the regional scale, things like water, sewers, and roads. These are things that weren’t really thought of in the same way in the east.” That concern led to a new model, but today, “it’s oft cited, never copied,” Foster adds.
Unigov, Indianapolis
Indiana, as we’ve written before, has an intricate set of laws regulating the structure of local government that can lead to some incredible results, including one county’s precipitous drop in income inequality. Back in the 1960s, cheap, flat land at the midpoint between Chicago, Cincinnati and Louisville made Indianapolis a prime location for suburban sprawl. The result: 11 suburban towns popped up right outside the city’s downtown in Marion County. A state law passed in 1970 created Unigov, a unified structure that essentially consolidated most of the area’s municipalities under a city-county council with 25 seats. White flight in the postwar years led to a decaying urban core, but the new organization allowed tax dollars to flow regionally. (Nashville and Jacksonville took on similar unifications around the same time.) Some say that Unigov made Indianapolis “a city captured by its suburbs,” but others point to economic growth that resulted from cutting through the bureaucracy of 60 local governments, a population boom that rocketed it to the nation’s 12th largest city, increased clout on federal grant applications, streamlined services and created a revitalized downtown.
For all the positives, politics was never far from the decision to unify. Some insiders speculated Republicans had created Unigov to dilute the Democrats’ urban vote with conservatives in the suburbs (the GOP held power for 30 years). And to get the law passed, legislators settled on a big compromise: school, police and fire district borders stayed unchanged, allowing richer (and much whiter) suburbs to keep property tax dollars within their enclaves. “The spectre of racial integration … would have met instant death for the plan,” the head of the school board said at the time. That hasn’t changed much, but consolidation continues to have support, with the local police and county sheriffs joining forces in 2005 and the creation of a centralized fire department in 2007.
A view of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.
County Merger, Cleveland
After being a hot trend in the 1970s, the reorganization of local government had died down — until recently. On the shores of Lake Erie, Cuyahoga County residents are now debating how to merge the two cities, 19 villages and 38 townships around Cleveland. The change in thinking started slowly and has been discussed for more than a decade. Back in 2004, Cleveland watched Louisville merge with Jefferson County, Ky., as its own population packed up and left. It took notice and rewrote the county charter to switch from a three-member board to a more active 11-member council and a county executive.
But a full merger is still in the works. In 2012, engaged readers of the local paper, the Plain Dealer, sent in thousands of color-coded maps for how the county could be reorganized. If nothing’s done and things continue as they are, at least 10.5 percent of the region’s housing stock — about 174,900 homes — will sit vacant and abandoned. East Cleveland, a separate city, is looking at bankruptcy. Based on what the experts are predicting, Cleveland could be the next spot to try out a different system of government.
In the immediate wake of the Great Recession, as 4 million homeowners lost their houses to bank foreclosures while risk-taking executives took home $32.6 billion in bonuses, the glaring disparity between rich and poor ignited a debate about income inequality. Occupy tents unfolded in public squares, and the Tea Party protested bank bailouts. Since then, the financial markets have recovered and there’s a decrease in measurable unemployment, but wage disparity continues to capture headlines.
“Millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, and yet all the new income and wealth are going to the top one percent!” Sen. Bernie Sanders declared at the Oct. 13 Democratic debate, a viewpoint that the presidential candidate has voiced for years. Republicans once derided these arguments as “class warfare,” but this campaign season features the populist rhetoric from both parties, with Republican Donald Trump saying that the middle class is “getting absolutely destroyed” at the same time hedge fund managers “are getting away with murder.”
For all the posturing this election season, there’s been little serious discussion about how to effectively reduce inequality or which cities are models of success. With assistance from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, NationSwell dug into the data to identify the municipality that has done the most to reduce inequality since the latest financial downturn. Surprisingly, it isn’t a major city or even a minor one that’s made the greatest strides toward egalitarianism; it is a Midwestern exurb. The Anson housing development in Whitestown.
A half-hour’s drive northwest of Indianapolis, Boone County, Ind., has reduced the ratio of the top 20th percentile’s earnings compared to the bottom 80th percentile by 23 percent (the largest decline for any American county with more than 50,000 residents), an achievement that stumped Boone County officials. In government and business alike, no one realized the county had become a national leader in reducing inequality, let alone how exactly they accomplished this feat.
Over the last month, NationSwell pieced together the story of how two towns — an upper-crust enclave and its scrappy, younger neighbor — battled for land and altered the course of the county’s growth. There was no redistribution of wealth in this red state, but financial pressure from a statewide tax revolt forced these localities to reinvent themselves or risk becoming ghost towns. Unexpectedly, amidst all the turmoil, the middle class moved in. The Clark Meadows neighborhood of Whitestown.
Boone County’s evolution over the past decade may read as a bureaucratic string of annexations, civil suits, tax caps and government restructuring, but it’s really a story of how small-town America is redefining itself to attract young Americans. After World War II, the suburbs were a place of radical equality, where cheap subdivisions offered middle-class families a home and a driveway. As time passed, the price of home ownership continued to grow and became unattainable for many. Today, a new model centered on a dense suburban core (theorists also refer to it as New Urbanism, Smart Growth and Transit-Oriented Design) is emerging. This “city in miniature” model is particularly appealing to Millennials, renewing the suburbs as the home for America’s dwindling middle class. New Whitestone retail center.
Since its founding in 1851, Whitestown was a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it town without a traffic light. But at the start of this century, the population exploded from 471 in 2000 to 2,867 in 2010, making it the fastest growing city in Indianafor several years running. (The population is estimated to have doubled again in the last five years.) Its vinyl-sided developments were unglamorous, but the bargain prices drew young families who wanted good schools, green space and the urban amenities a short drive away.
Hungry for space to expand, Whitestown began eyeing land to annex, including areas close to its white-collar neighbor, Zionsville. Whitestown went “annexation crazy,” says Marc Applegate, a county commissioner. “[The town] gobbled up an enormous amount of territory,” adds Aaron Renn, an Indiana native and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Maps were redrawn several times until Whitestown’s limits had stretched right up to Zionsville’s outline.
Zionsville residents, for their part, didn’t want anything to do with their neighbors. A bedroom community for attorneys, doctors and mid-level managers who commute to Indianapolis, Zionsville featured quaint brick storefronts lining Main Street. “You could probably have driven down it 50 years ago and think that it doesn’t look that different today,” says town council president Steve Mundy. Its residents worked aggressively to preserve the serenity, prohibiting big-box retailers and setting a strict quota on building permits. Downtown Zionsville.
The town’s restrictive approach didn’t last long. In 2007, anger over high property tax bills cost 21 Indiana mayors their jobs. Three years later, discontented Hoosiers approved a constitutional amendment capping property tax: residential at one percent, multi-family housing at two percent and commercial at three percent. Zionsville’s budget, which relied heavily on the assessed value of its well-kept estates, suddenly lost much of its revenue and needed to diversify the town to make up for the shortfall. To provide services long term, the town needed commercial development, but didn’t want to destroy its charm in the process. “It’s a tight rope we have to walk,” says Zionsville Mayor Jeff Papa.
Over in Whitestown, town manager Dax Norton says that with the tax caps, “communities had to find ways to grow, because in Indiana now, you’re either growing or you’re dying.” Developers there skirted zoning restrictions by building on land annexed by Whitestown, but within Zionsville’s prized school district.
“Part of what happened, I think, was these developers realized Zionsville is not going to let us come in, but the Whitestown area is very pro-development,” says Renn, of the Manhattan Institute. “That kicked off a free-for-all fight,” a mad civic frenzy over which town owned the land just outside of Zionsville. Whitestown won a lot of the battles, simply by having filed its paperwork first.
Whitestown’s competition and the dire need to fill the town’s coffers broke Zionsville’s long-standing policies, kickstarting development. Pro-growth candidates assumed power on the town council and two nearby rural townships received the opportunity to voluntarily reorganize as special districts within Zionsville. (Opposed by Whitestown, one of the mergers is being disputed before the Indiana Supreme Court.)
Zionsville also competed to attract business. Because of Boone County’s central location in the heartland, many shipping companies place warehouses outside Indianapolis, giving them easy access to half the country within a short truck ride. “The land in-between [Zionsville and Whitestown] is so hotly contested because there’s a huge amount of development along the I-65 corridor,” which links the area to Chicago and the Deep South, says Jamie Palmer, a senior policy analyst at Indiana University’s Public Policy Institute. Medco is a mail-order pharmacy that pays its 1,300 employees higher wages than the average “picker packer” lifting boxes in a warehouse.
In 2007, Whitestown won a contract with Medco, a mail-order pharmacy and, the following year, an Amazon Fulfillment Center, a facility with seven miles of conveyer belts. To match that, Zionsville courted a FedEx distribution plant that opened last year. The Amazon Fulfillment Center in Whitestown.
Even during the recession, construction never stopped in Boone County, enticing outsiders to the area. Today, big roadside displays advertise grand openings of new single-family construction. “This year, we’ll break a record on single-family housing with 300 homes,” says Norton. Most will be priced at around $170,000, he notes, astonishingly cheap to most urban city-dwellers.
A series of recent progressive initiatives in Whitestown — non-discrimination protection for sexual orientation and gender identity (passed as the rest of Indiana lurched rightward on “religious freedom”), wider boulevards for bikers known as complete streets and a field of solar panels beside the municipal building — has only bolstered the town’s appeal to young people. “It’s a different kind of place in the ever-fearful-of-change Midwest,” says Norton. “It’s really a Millennial-driven community, and that’s made it pretty interesting. I’m not one of those, but I enjoy it.” Benders Alley, located off of Main Street in Zionsville.
While Boone County’s ability to draw young, middle-class families may be instructive to other communities, the exurb still has much to accomplish to reduce inequality. Its significant decline only brings it in line with other American communities. Throughout the U.S., the richest Americans make about 4.4 times their poorest neighbors; in Boone County, it’s 4.2. That ratio of inequity, however, fails to express the divide between wealthy homeowners in Zionsville and poor tenants across county lines in Indianapolis. Boone County may be heading towards greater equality, but it could also be gentrifying, forming a homogenous group of families that all bring home high wages.
So far, Boone County has seen only a slight uptick in median income, from $64,961 in 2000 (adjusted for inflation) to $66,023 today, which suggests the county is not simply pricing out poor residents. That fits trends nationwide, says Joel Kotkin, an urban studies fellow at Champan University in Orange, Calif. Extreme wealth disparities exist in urban areas like New York City, he says, but suburbs ringing small and mid-size cities (particularly in the Midwest where land is cheap) offer the best shot at restoring stability to the middle class. Zionsville’s Main Street.
With Americans, in general, preferring single-family homes and a car, “all of the stuff about the death of the suburbia is overblown,” Renn explains. The major question today is not whether suburbs will survive, but how. “When they get old, [suburbs] have to reinvent themselves in the same way cities did.” The growth in Zionsville and Whitestown — prompted largely by the need for higher tax yield — serves as a model for how diversifying a graying, upper-middle-class population and reinventing a place where nothing much had happened since the post office opened in 1853 can do just that.
Boone County is still, on the whole, a rural county, primed for denser growth in its towns over the next decade. If anything, the boom has just begun.
Stephen Goldsmith is the former mayor of Indianapolis and former Deputy Mayor of New York City for Operations. He sat down with NationSwell and shared his thoughts on how government can work more effectively with data, unions and the private sector.
When thinking of musical hotspots, Indianapolis is certainly not the first city that comes to mind — especially when it comes to indie music. But one little record label is kickstarting the arts scene in the Crossroads of America — and providing a boost to the economy, too. Asthmatic Kitty Records got its start in 1999 when it launched the music of the experimental small scene happening in Holland, Michigan. At the time, the primary artist was co-owner and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens.
At the time, Asthmatic Kitty Records was headquartered in Lander, Wyoming. But as the label grew, it needed a manager, so San Diego resident and graduate Michael Kauffman came on board in 2001. In 2005, he moved the label to Indianapolis where it continued to grow and expand. Soon, Asthmatic Kitty Records was a global organization with employees in not just the U.S., but England, too.
With so many music hubs in the country, why Indianapolis? First of all, the low cost of living made it easier for the label to function — something which might not have happened in New York. Second, according to Kauffman, “there seemed to be a real exciting, embracing community in Indianapolis and an influx of cultural things within the city.”
That open community is precisely what made Kauffman see the move as an opportunity to “make a cultural impact on [Indianapolis].” From there, it just became a matter of engaging it.
The label began signing local Indianapolis acts, offering advice to others in the music scene and organizing local musical evenings. It began an informal partnership with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and helped create an “Unusual Animals” pop-up art gallery.
Asthmatic Kitty continued to work with the community, when, in 2011, it helped host a screening event of Gary Hustwit’s film Urbanized. Hustwit attended, and the day expanded to include various speakers discussing Indianapolis and urbanization. The end result: the start of We Are City – a virtual think-tank run by Asthmatic Kitty employee John Beeler who twice a week sends out an email to 1,200 Indianapolis residents discussing urban action.
The label’s influence continued to expand when Indianapolis hosted the Super Bowl in 2012. Kauffman worked to create a showcase of local bands for the festivities, while Beeler established The Music Council, which aims to influence city policies to help expand the music scene and is composed of members of music blogs, indie labels, the chamber of commerce, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and various education groups.
All of this work has not gone unnoticed by citizens and the local government. City officials are increasingly looking to this former little label for help in bringing in young professionals to expand the urban scene.
Clearly, this “little label that could” is not just a force to be reckoned with in the music industry, but it’s a great unifying force for the city of Indianapolis itself. MORE: Detroit’s Newest Parking Garage Becomes An Unlikely Canvas
With several interstate highways intersecting in the state, it’s obvious why Indiana has been dubbed the crossroads of America.
The state itself is committed to that role and to further its reputation, Indiana is considering ways to revolutionize transportation.
In a recent Statehouse presentation, Gov. Mike Pence presented ideas outlined by a panel commissioned to prioritize state transportation needs, including everything from building a second beltway around Indianapolis to promoting driverless cars and solar-powered roads.
The panel, helmed by Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann and Langham Logistitcs head Cathy Langham, produced a 73-page report full of recommendations on where the state should focus its resources, such as designating high-occupancy-only lanes for carpooling as well as improvements for air, truck traffic and rail, the Indianapolis Starreports.
The governor intends on sharing the report with state agencies, which may inspire future transportation planning in Indiana.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is the four pages on innovation. Some suggestions include promoting and allowing driverless cars (once the technology is acceptable) as well as building lanes that charge electric cars while they’re moving. The solar-powered roadbeds would be heated to help melt away snow and the smart roads, or “iWays,” would be able to transmit information to drivers about the road conditions, possible safety hazards or weather conditions by projecting messages on windshields.
These concepts are not out of reach. As the Wall Street Journalreports, big tech companies like General Electric and International Business Machine Corp. (IBM) are already collaborating with city planners to invest in smart infrastructure.
In fact, IBM is testing software that can predict traffic jams up to 45 minutes before they actually clog the roadways by examining current traffic patterns. The software has proven to be about 90 percent accurate in predictions in the central business district of the pilot city Singapore. The data collected is then utilized in coordinating 1,700 sets of traffic lights to help adjust the traffic pattern.
Additionally, in Minneapolis, government officials have made bridge safety a priority since the collapse of the I-35 structure in 2007. A new bridge was designed with more than 300 sensors to track changes in temperature, corrosion and effect of winter weather. Researchers at University of Minnesota are using the data to inform how to build better bridges in the future, according WSJ.
For now, Indiana’s transportation priorities lie with adding lanes to the central highways that pulse through the state, I-65 and I-70, as well as a bridge to connect I-69 over the Ohio River and a new partial beltway to loop around Indianapolis. But as technology continues to influence and advance our infrastructure projects, building solar-power roads may not be too far off. MORE: Public Transportation Is Getting a Major Makeover
Some problems seem almost too daunting to solve. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. And that’s the optimistic viewpoint that lawmakers in Indianapolis are taking.
In order to help alleviate two major problems in our country — the student loan bubble and the still-weak economy — they want to offer qualified students up to $9,000 in state funds to pay off their loans if they go on to become teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM subject areas), according to the Associated Press.
This proposal, currently awaiting Senate approval, would also extend to teachers in areas with educator shortages, the AP reports. Recipients would receive this money after completing their third year of teaching in Indiana. MORE:This 6-Year High School Challenges Everything We Thought We Knew About American Education
This law could be especially helpful not just for our trillion dollar student loan bubble but also for our economy, as the fastest-growing jobs are in STEM fields (think: physician assistants, computer software engineers, dental hygienists, and veterinarians, to name a few). According to the Department of Commerce, STEM jobs grew at a rate of 17 percent in the past 10 years, compared with a 9.8 percent growth in other occupations. President Obama has endorsed an education in STEM to help make sure our students have the skills they need for the jobs of the future. Looks like Indiana is making a promising start.
Montaque Quentrel Koonce of Indianapolis dropped out of high school at age 16. Years later, when he was laid-off from his job on an assembly line, he struggled to find an affordable place to live. That’s when he turned to the Excel Center, a Goodwill-sponsored charter school that offers the city’s 150,000 dropouts a chance to earn a high school degree and college credit. Koonce told April Brown of the PBS NewsHour there were “two things [he’s] terrified of,” becoming homeless, and “having to do math. So I had to confront both of those fears at the same time.” Koonce overcame his fears, graduating with a high school degree more than thirty years after he dropped out.
Goodwill is mostly known for its thrift stores, whose sales fund job training and programs for a variety of needy people. But although Goodwill hadn’t previously been involved in education, representatives of the City of Indianapolis’ mayor’s office approached Goodwill of Central Indiana about starting a program to help the city’s dropouts who’d been severely affected by the recession. (In Indianapolis, the mayor’s office is able to sponsor state charter schools.)
Jim McClelland, CEO and President of Goodwill of Central Indiana, decided its education centers would offer dropouts the opportunity to earn high school degrees rather than G.E.D.s, because according to research, those with G.E.D.s fare little better in terms of job opportunities and money-earning potential than dropouts do. The Excel Center also offers college credit and classes that prepare students to earn technical certifications.
The Excel Center now enrolls 3,000 adults at nine different locations in Indiana, where the teachers hold them to high standards. Kandas Boozer, an algebra teacher for Excel, told Brown, “I expect them to always give 100 percent no matter what that looks like. Everybody is at a different level, so I just want to make sure they give me everything they have.” People like Koonce are getting a lot in return.
