Jimmy Iovine owes a lot to the inner cities of Los Angeles, he said, and he intends to pay back those communities and the people who live in them.
One way the co-founder of Interscope Records is doing so is by opening a public high school with rapper and producer Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, in Inglewood that will focus on interdisciplinary studies, geared toward pushing underserved students to their highest potential.
The Inglewood Unified School District and Iovine announced on Monday during an assembly at Morningside High School that the Iovine and Young Education Group will launch the Iovine and Young Center Inglewood, a public high school academy in fall 2025.
The exact location of the new campus is still being determined, Jessica Ochoa, Executive Director of Communications and Community Relations for the district said Monday.
“This academy is a milestone of evolution in the city,” Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts said Monday. “What we want to do here in Inglewood is offer things that other cities don’t offer; we want parents to want to put their children in the Inglewood Unified School District.”
Iovine and Young have worked together since 1991 when the Young released his first solo album “The Chronic” through Interscope Records when Iovine was head of the label.
When the pair launched Beats Electronics in 2008, “we started hiring people and realized we couldn’t find people that could speak different disciplines in work,” Iovine said. “We had engineers, designers, artists, and they couldn’t speak to each other — this is the problem in education.”
They’d intentionally hire interns from the inner city, Iovine said, offering opportunities to those who may not typically get the chance work in such industries.
“Education is siloed,” he added, but once someone enters the workforce, they’re suddenly united. “People need to work together and collaborate.”
In creating the Iovine and Young Education Group, they surveyed big corporations around the nation and found that those businesses most want collaborative innovations when hiring new employees.
“We found that our interns, the kids from the inner city, had superpowers,” Iovine said. “Because of how they grew up, they were set with interdisciplinary behavior of technology, culture and design.” “We wanted to start (the high schools) in the inner cities because I owe a lot to the inner cities of L.A., and we intend to pay it back.”
In a video played Monday about the growing network of schools, Young said that the center is meant to appeal to the rapid growth of today’s world, mixing traditional classes with hands-on, real-world problem solving and pitching business solutions.
“While school didn’t change, kids did,” Young said in the video. “Kids have technology before they can walk.”
He plans to revolutionize the entire educational system, he added.
“This is where kids figure out what they care about, learn how to think and not what to think,” Young said in the video. “Once the schools change, the world will too.”
Morningside, meanwhile, is set to close at the end of the current school year, along with Crozier Middle School and three elementary campuses in the district because of declining enrollment and lack of funding.
Saba Araya, principal of City Honors, will be principal of the new Iovine and Young Center when it opens.
The first ninth-grade cohort will begin in fall 2025, Araya said, adding a class each year until grade levels are in, during the 2028-29 school year.
The school will embrace students’ unique perspectives and ideas, Araya said, creating a pathway for students to become critical thinkers and empathetic innovators to create impactful solutions to the challenges of the rapidly changing world.
“They’ll engage in real world projects to identify needs, brainstorm creative solutions and refine their ideas,” Araya said, “They’ll present their innovations to panels of industry experts (to) receive their genuine feedback and go on trips to see how their classroom learning applies in the real world.”
The curriculum, she added, will become increasingly complex and have more real life impact as students progress in grade. Junior year will feature an “impact lab” where students will develop solutions to social problems and create their own nonprofit companies, and senior year will have a “garage experience” capstone project in which students will build prototype solutions to problems business are facing.
With curriculum based in design, business, entrepreneurship, technology and art, students will learn about things like coding and AI, Araya said, but among all will focus on developing their ability to think creatively in an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive and reach their full potential.
“We’re nurturing their authentic selves, helping them discover their passions and equipping them with the skills to turn those passions into innovations that can change the world,” Araya said.
The upcoming Inglewood academy isn’t the musical mogul duo’s first education-focused venture.
A Los Angeles Unified School District-based Iovine and Young Center opened in 2022 in Leimert Park. One also opened in Atlanta earlier this year.
And in 2013, Young and Iovine opened the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation. That USC-based undergraduate academy expanded with a graduate program in 2017, offering the opportunity to earn online masters degrees in integrated design, business and technology.
An Iovine and Young Hall opened at USC in 2019 to house the programs.
“Students deserve a future that is free of the barriers that so many of our students encounter every day, be those socioeconomic, racism, classism,” Bernadette Lucas, Chief Academic Officer for Inglewood Unified said Monday. “We know these opportunities are going to tear down those barriers and open up the future for our students that they so richly deserve.
IUSD currently serves about 7,000 students at 17 schools.
The Iovine and Young Education Group is investing in state of the art technology, professional development for staff and any requisite campus improvements necessary to create the new academy, Ochoa said in a Monday statement. The organization will also provide ongoing support to the district to offer students opportunities to interact with industry professionals in both nonprofit and for profit sectors throughout the region.
The district and the Iovine and Young Education Group did not share how much the new school costs.
