College, College, College, College
Don’t be fooled by the radiance, confidence and bubbly warmth of Azanni, Symone, Jada and Immani, four seniors at View Park High School in South Los Angeles, an ICEF charter school. They are stressed. Imani and Azanni applied to 22 colleges each, Jada to 20, Symone to 11. “I wanted to have options!” Jada tells me and the girls all laugh, agreeing. We’re sitting at a picnic table on the quad at View Park, where they’ve taken time from their classes to give me a tour of the school, talking over each other in their enthusiasm as they tell me the various places they’ve applied, ranging from Brown and Penn, their dream schools, through UCLA, Berkeley, USC, Spelman, the Claremont schools, several Cal States and many others.
Though View Park is only a couple of miles from Augustus Hawkins, whose population is primarily Latino/a, View Park’s student body is 95% African-American. In addition, the student body is classified as 58% socioeconomically disadvantaged, in contrast to the LAUSD in general, where 80% of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, orAnimo Leadership in nearby Lennox, where 94% of students classify that way (a designation that combines students eligible for free and reduced lunch with students