Education Opportunity Changes Lives

Not only are kids unique in their gifts and challenges, but they may also need different educational options at different points in their growing up years. When parents have many options to choose from, they’re more likely to find schools and resources to help their kids achieve their goals.

That was certainly the case for Makila Carter. When Makila was a 15-year-old sophomore in Madison, Wisconsin, her father passed away from lung cancer. At the time, she was attending a huge school (there were 1500 students in her freshman class). Makila said, “I had become dissociated from everyone and everything because I was just expected to go back to [a] huge school with thousands of other kids and present as if everything was ok in my life. No one asked if I was ok. My teachers weren’t engaging. Everyone just thought I had missed a lot of school that current semester and probably wouldn’t catch up. I came home that day and I told my mom that if I had to go back there I didn’t know what I would do.” Makila’s interest in learning was dwindling quickly.

Fortunately, Makila’s mother knew about a school that fit her daughter’s current needs: Shabazz City High School. Makila’s mother had been a student at Shabazz in the 60’s, and she thought it would be just the thing to rekindle Makila’s interest in life and learning.

One of the things Makila loved about Shabazz was that she had to apply, interview, and be accepted to the school. “If you were a bad apple or didn’t want to learn they didn’t want you there. Loved that,” she said. “Every kid that was there was there because they wanted to be and we were all in this together to make it through high school with the necessary tools to become high-functioning adults. A lot of my former classmates went to 4-year colleges and universities.”
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It sounds great, but what what makes Malcolm Shabazz City High School so different from the school Makila previously attended? For one, Shabazz is much, much smaller. The school currently has 135 students. Its website says, “Shabazz is a choice alternative school. All of its 135 students choose to attend Shabazz--no one is forced to go to Shabazz.”

When asked to describe Shabazz, Makila said that it made her feel happy. “We were equals to the teachers, they allowed us to call them by their first names. A lot of the teachers who were there had been there for many years. My history teacher Jeff (his last name escapes me) was a student teacher when my mom was a student there. My mother spoke of him fondly. He remembered her too. They taught us in a way to make everything relevant.”

Unconventional teaching and hands-on learning are several of the hallmarks of Shabazz. Makila said, “We had a history class called the Life and Times of Bob Dylan. History class was started every day with a song from Dylan and we would have to try and decode the song and pair it to what was happening in that moment in time. Everything was outside of the box. There was another teacher who taught women’s history classes. Classes often started or ended with a debate. Everyone took a lot of notes, but it was because the teachers cared enough to give a different way to teach.”

On Malcolm Shabazz City High School’s student-created website, you can read about Shabazz/Community Service-Learning Partnerships. These are service projects that Shabazz students and staff work on to help their community. They include art projects, poetry guilds, journalism projects with Wisconsin Public Radio, games with elementary students, trail repair for the local arboretum, voter registration canvassing, and rebuilding computers for families who can’t afford to purchase one on their own.

Makila said, “I took a cinematography class and an elective class where I learned to build computers and we would fix the computers in the school.” This kind of hands-on, real-world experience instills confidence in students and helps them to discover skills and interests they didn’t know they had.

When asked about how her life would be different now if her mother hadn’t exercised her right to choose her school, Makila said, “I don’t want to think about where I would be. It wouldn’t have ended well for me if I didn’t find a place to feel safe like I did at Shabazz. My mother, who went to the same school decades earlier, probably wouldn’t have completed school either.”

Makila noted that Shabazz is arts-based, and she is artistic herself. That’s part of what made it such a great fit for her. “Not every child learns the same way,” she said. “Everything we did was linked to some type of artistic outlet. I feel like that helped us absorb more.”

Is Shabazz City High School the best place for every student to attend high school? Of course not. Other students have different interests, learning styles, and desires. But it was a perfect fit for Makila and her classmates. When a variety of schools are available, more students will find a place that feels like home, and more students will find success like Makila Carter did.
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Many thanks to Makila for the interview and her insight into educational opportunity.