SOUTH LOS ANGELES — Rap icon and serial entrepreneur Andre “Dr. Dre” Young has partnered with music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine to help the Los Angeles Unified School District launch a new magnet school serving South Los Angeles.
According to the school district, the new public school, slated to open in fall 2022, will focus on “training the next generation of young leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs.”
Young told the Los Angeles Times that he wants to reach “the inner-city kid, the younger me” by creating a “place that you can go where there’s something that you can learn that you’re really interested in.”
Meanwhile, Iovine said the school will cater to students interested in running their own startups or working for technology and entertainment juggernauts like Marvel or Apple, the newspaper reported.
The school, which was approved last week by the Los Angeles Board of Education, will be housed on the Audubon Middle School campus and referred to as Regional High School #1 until the formal naming process is completed, the school system stated.
The magnet school will welcome only 124 students initially but is expected to eventually expand capacity to 250 students, KABC reported.
The program is modeled on a similar approach applied at a namesake University of Southern California academy founded by Iovine and Young, the Times reported, characterizing the music industry legends’ philanthropy as a “rare investment by the entertainment elite in the nation’s second-largest school system, where more than 80% of students are Latino and Black and about the same number come from low-income families.”
Young told the newspaper during an interview at his Brentwood Country Estates home that the program is designed to reach “that guy that didn’t have an opportunity, that had to scratch and figure out things on his own, that had the curiosity but didn’t have these type of opportunities, really smart kids.”
“We want to touch and give them this open door and these opportunities to be able to show what they can do,” Young added.