Ashtyn Denson wiped away tears as she thought of all of the reasons she loves her Spanish immersion school.
Her friends, class projects, and performances with the after-school Mexican dance club are all among her favorite memories. She’s also growing more confident in her language skills.
Denson said she didn’t understand much of the language when she started at Global Prep Academy in the first grade. Now, the incoming sixth grader said she’s taken science and literature classes entirely taught in Spanish.
“I feel really good about it now,” she said, overcome with emotion. “It’s really wonderful.”
Denson will continue her studies this year from a brand new school. Still with Global Prep, the 11-year-old will be among the first students to attend classes in the K-8 charter academy’s new middle school.
Beginning this fall, kindergarten through fifth graders will attend classes at the charter school’s original Riverside location near 21st Street and Gent Avenue. Sixth, seventh and eighth graders will go to school in the newly renovated building at 25th Street and the Monon Trail.
School founder Mariama Shaheed said the expansion was years in the making as parents flocked to the school, quickly increasing its enrollment. However, Global Prep’s new campus is opening amid an uncertain time for public schools in Indianapolis.
While some schools are growing, others are losing students. Education leaders across the city agree: it’s put enrollment out of balance.
Within the IPS district boundary, there’s more than 100 IPS and charter schools open today serving about 40,000 students. At IPS’ peak enrollment, the district served about 109,000 students across 110 schools.
A new group, called the Indianapolis Public Education Corp., was formed this year to figure out how to fix those imbalances across both IPS and charter schools.
The group’s work will almost certainly affect Global Prep in some way, Shaheed told Mirror Indy, but it’s too soon to tell exactly how. Regardless of what the new public education group decides, Shaheed said she’s confident Global Prep’s strong enrollment will protect it from bigger changes like school consolidation or closures.
“If your school is one that’s desired, you don’t worry about being closed,” Shaheed said. “We’re slated to have higher enrollment than we’ve ever had before this year, so we must continue to serve our children well.”
Why parents choose Global Prep
Global Prep opened its first campus about a decade ago in an underperforming IPS school.
In a deal with IPS, Global Prep agreed to take over academics at the former Riverside School 44 while IPS continued to provide building maintenance and bus service for students living nearby.
Global Prep proposed opening a dual-language immersion school where students spend about half of their day speaking and learning in English and the other half in Spanish. The idea has grown more popular over the last decade and draws upon research that shows the earlier a child is exposed to a language, the more successful they will be at learning it.
Global Prep’s model — a dual-language charter school with no attendance boundaries — proved successful. In Global Prep’s first year, the school enrolled fewer than 300 students. Last year, enrollment jumped to just over 800.
Parents like Dominique Patrick, who lives near Castleton, and Pam Brozan, from Speedway, decided to drive their kids across the city to attend Global Prep.
Both parents say they were initially drawn to the school for its Spanish immersion program, but keep coming back because of its culture — one where students learn from native Spanish speakers and where administrators make themselves readily available to parents.
“This school is a breath of fresh air,” Patrick said. “They apply feedback. They don’t just listen to it, they apply it and they want to know how they can make things better.”
The school is diverse. About 50% of students are Hispanic and 32% are Black, Shaheed said.
And, benefits from the immersion program go both ways.
Hazel Barco, who is now in high school, still thinks about the progress she and one of her friends, a native Spanish speaker, have made through the program. Barco, whose family speaks primarily Spanish at home, attended Global Prep from second to eighth grade.
“It’s like crazy to see how we can actually have conversations in English,” Barco said about their experience. “At one point, I could only speak to her in Spanish.”
Finding space for a new school
As enrollment grew, Global Prep worked with IPS to set up temporary classrooms on the school’s athletic fields, but school leaders didn’t like how the arrangement separated older students from the rest of the school.
So, Global Prep enlisted help from The Mind Trust — an influential supporter of Indianapolis charter schools — to search for spaces that could accommodate a new school.
That’s how they found 1002 E. 25th St., a former warehouse in the growing Monon Yard neighborhood just west of Martindale Brightwood. At $2.6 million, the building was the right price and size for the school’s needs.
Administrators also liked that the property sits within the same transportation zones as the Riverside campus so that middle school students who were already receiving transportation could continue taking the bus to the new school.
Global Prep enlisted the help of local architects at DELV Design to renovate the former warehouse space. The school took out bonds to finance the $14.5 million project.
However, crews worked only within the existing building. The new school sits within a brownfield, a designation given to the land formerly used for industrial and rail purposes.
Earlier this year, Chalkbeat Indiana reported that a soil management report commissioned by the school found no hazardous contaminants in soil on the property. Even still, school leaders limited the scope of renovations to only refurbishing the existing warehouse structure to avoid disrupting soil in the area.
School leaders said they found ample opportunity to customize the space. The academy brought in smartboards, glass doors and windows, and comfy furniture meant to encourage collaboration between students.
A new science lab will allow middle schoolers to participate in animal dissections for the first time, and a TV production studio will project students’ work to screens across the campus.
“It’s about centering our kids,” Shaheed said. “Everwhere we can center them, we will.”
Barco, who is now a sophomore at Providence Cristo Rey, is excited about what the new school means for her younger siblings.
She returns to Global Prep often to visit her family, including both her brother and sister, in the first and fifth grades this year, and her school family.
“Global Prep was really a place where I got to meet a lot of people that are like family to me now,” Barco said. “It really did feel like a home.”
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Mirror Indy reporter Carley Lanich covers early childhood and K-12 education. Contact her at carley.lanich@mirrorindy.org or follow her on X @carleylanich.
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