The conventional graduation ceremonies occurring across Indiana offer an opportunity to recognize an unconventional one. A Columbia City high school is graduating five seniors from a student body of 38 this year – students nobody else could manage, one at a time, without pomp or ceremony, at about half the cost of a public school.
TROY Center, an independent school founded in 1997, boasts a student body on whom the education system has given up – “bad actors” in faculty parlance, individuals identified by authorities as headed down the wrong path. Its students have been expelled or suspended from other schools or have faced incarceration for juvenile offenses. They were accustomed to slipping through the cracks.