LeBron James’ I Promise School lifts up Akron families with an education that helps at-risk students succeed. We go inside the school and follow one family’s first year.
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Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
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Tylar Sutton
[ Editor's Note: this story was updated April 24 to reflect updated performance scores. ]
Dashua Holliday knew she had to move her family. Again. She had been nomadic from the time she joined the U.S. Army and left her hometown of Akron two decades earlier. Many times, she thought she had found a place to put down roots.
But something always went wrong. By the end of 2016, her third husband had become physically abusive, so she knew she had to go.
Her second youngest child, Caleb, was only 6 and didn’t want to move away from San Antonio. There, the vivacious ball of energy had learned to read by the end of kindergarten, to ride a bike from a neighbor and to remember the names of all his friends on his soccer team.
Holliday’s middle child was living with her father in North Carolina, but that left her other four kids and herself with few options in a town where none of her family and few friends lived. She figured it was time she visited her hometown while she wrestled with the decision of where to move.
“I never thought I would come back,” the 39-year-old says. “I didn’t want my kids to see what I saw: Family members who really are talented, had dreams but never pursued them and friends of mine that were still stuck where they were. But I had been away from family for so long.”
So she decided to move Caleb and her other kids to Akron in 2017. That summer was one of the most stressful of her and Caleb’s lives.
In the beginning, they had no permanent home. So the five of them packed in where they could find a place to sleep: on air mattresses in Holliday’s sister’s one-bedroom apartment, in a hotel, in another hotel.
Holliday finally got a part-time job. While she clocked in, her kids were holed up in a hotel room much of the day with the teenagers watching the younger ones, subsisting on frozen pizza rolls and fast food burgers.
“It was one of the roughest times in my life,” she says. “I have PTSD and depression, and I was taking meds and seeing a counselor, but I wasn’t coping very well. To have my children constantly bounced around and stuck in a hotel room — it was bad.”
Eventually, Holliday registered Caleb at Seiberling Community Learning Center, and the family found a rental home. Holliday tried to get Caleb to read at home like he used to, but he wasn’t interested. After working, taking her older kids to jobs or after-school activities, running errands and cooking dinner, Holliday was just too tired to make him.
One day, Holliday was at work when her sister called to say she’d received a piece of mail from something called the I Promise School that was addressed to Holliday. It stated there was a lottery for public school students to attend a new school.
Caleb was chosen.
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Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
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Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
The Goodyear Blimp droned overhead. Processions of employees from corporate partners waved banners. The Singing Angels youth choir gave a powerful rendition of “This Is Me” from the film “The Greatest Showman.” Police directed traffic as the parking lot filled, and media prepared to share the news with the world: On this breezy afternoon in July 2018, the I Promise School was opening in a multiuse building on Market Street in Akron. A thousand people cheered in anticipation of the King’s speech.
In a gray suit, stylish glasses and crisp white button-down shirt, LeBron James took the stage to address the eager crowd in front of the school he helped found.
“As a kid from Akron,” he began, “I remember walking these same streets, going to Harris Elementary, riding my bike throughout the rest of the city. So when people ask me, ‘Why a school?’, that’s part of the reason: because I know exactly what these 240 kids are going through. I know the trials and tribulations, the ups and downs. I know everything they dream about; I know the nightmares they have because I’ve been there.”
And he has. From Hickory Street with his single teen mom and grandmother to Overlook Drive where the electricity wasn’t always working to an uncle’s house on Silver Street to the Elizabeth Park projects to Woodward Avenue, Frederick Boulevard, Crestview Avenue, Moon Street — James moved around a lot as a kid. Staying with friends, relatives, whoever would put him up, he didn’t have a stable home until sixth grade when his mom got a tiny, two-bedroom unit in Spring Hill Apartments. He famously missed 82 days of school in the fourth grade, largely because of this nomadic lifestyle. Often, he only ate cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
The school is James’ way of redirecting the paths of kids with similar childhoods from his hometown by providing them with the stable support system they need.
“Kids, the most important thing we can give them is structure and a sense that we care,” he said from the stage. “That’s what we want to create here. School is about learning, but more importantly, it’s about the friendships you create every single day. Kids just want to know that someone cares about them. It builds character that will last forever.”
The focus of the kickoff year has been creating that encouraging environment for 240 third- and fourth-grade students from Akron Public Schools. Grades will be added, beginning with fifth grade next year, aiming at full enrollment of first through eighth grades totaling some 1,000 students by 2022.
The excitement of the opening day matches the media storm in which SB Nation called it the “first of its kind” and The Nation hailed it as “what all our public education should look like.” Many praise that I Promise is part of Akron Public Schools, unlike other charter and private schools with similar approaches, and that it offers wraparound services like financial assistance, access to Legal Aid and more. Not to mention all I Promise students who graduate high school and fulfill other requirements will have a full scholarship to The University of Akron awaiting them. But graduating is not guaranteed, as the 2017 four-year graduation rate is 76.4 percent in Akron Public Schools, according to the Ohio Department of Education.
“[LeBron’s] ultimate goal started out to change graduation rates in Akron, but as you go deeper, you can’t change graduation rates without looking at the family unit,” says Michele Campbell, executive director of the LeBron James Family Foundation. “And when you start to get to know the family, there are needs, but they don’t know how to navigate the system. They have to do the work, but we’ll help them.”
Can I Promise actually break the seemingly unbreakable cycle of poverty with fanfare and goodwill? All the first-year I Promise students, including Caleb, were in a lottery of Akron Public Schools students because they tested below the 25th percentile on the state’s reading proficiency test for the second-grade level. A recent Annie E. Casey Foundation study supports that students who do not develop on-par reading skills by third grade are at higher risk of never catching up to average-testing students and not graduating.
Skeptics have called out the school for only helping certain kids and railed against the idea that celebrity money — or perhaps not enough of it — can solve the woes of the underprivileged.
Those criticisms do not daunt staffers.
“We believe this is the model that every urban district needs,” Campbell says. “If every urban district could do this, we think we can change the cycle of poverty, of violence.”
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Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
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Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Individual Nike sneakers that James wore in games grace shelves that frame a sweeping double staircase in the stunning two-story main entrance of the I Promise School. Some of the mates of these size 16s are in the homes of LeBron James Family Foundation donors in support of the school. Between the shoes are the words “I Promise” in crisp black and white. Black placards lay out what the students promise as a commitment to this unconventional school: I will work hard, never give up, do my best, dream big, stand tall, succeed, be strong.
Holliday knew this school was going to have a profound impact on Caleb the first time they walked through the entrance and experienced the warm welcome of staffers. “It’s all geared around showing kids this is real, this is about them,” she says.
She recalls Caleb lighting up with his characteristic wide grin. “Mommy, I’m going to love this school,” he said.
The overall model of the I Promise School is summed up in its motto: We are family. Everyone involved with the school takes the sentiment to heart. And it is everywhere: emblazoned on T-shirts and hoodies, printed on notebooks, sculpted in 3D in front of the building.
It manifests in the wraparound services located within the school’s Family Resource Center, like offices for Summit County Jobs and Family Services and I Promise, Too, a GED program for parents in partnership with Project Learn.
With 17 full-time teachers in addition to 20 staff members that include five counselors and three child nutrition specialists, I Promise students get a lot of face time with caring adults.
As part of the Akron Public Schools system, state and federal laws require that I Promise receives the same public funding students would get at any school in the district — approximately $2.5 million for the 2018-19 year. Additional costs are covered by the LeBron James Family Foundation, estimated at around $2.8 million this year.
While controversy has surrounded the extra funding, staffers argue it’s needed to provide the full support I Promise offers.
“I feel this model will save public dollars in the long run,” Campbell says. “If you can get these students caught up by eighth grade and get these families off public assistance, we think we have the magic answer.”
To get students on track with the goal of being at or ahead of grade-level scores by eighth grade and ready to graduate high school, I Promise teachers employ a hands-on approach to a science, technology, engineering and math-focused curriculum that helps students find multiple ways to solve problems. That might mean beginning a science unit with a trip to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park to examine plants and animals in a pond, followed by classroom instruction.
Teaching is only a part of the I Promise model because the difficulties these students struggle with often go beyond the classroom: homelessness, domestic violence, food insecurity.
“It’s important to share that some of the students here are two and three years behind,” Campbell says.
Combatting these larger issues requires a substantial time investment, as well. To avoid the infamous summer slide, I Promise goes year-round, with seven weeks of summer camps instead of the common longer summer break. Uniquely, each school day stretches from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Every student receives breakfast and a hot lunch, and the largely self-led illumination hour caps the day with participation in activities like soccer, robotics or book club.
“This is more than a school,” Campbell says.
That idea is at the heart of the model. With 10 different languages spoken amongst the student body and living situations that range from homeless to below poverty level to middle class and from single-parent to two-parent to grandparent-led, the school serves a diverse population. So I Promise is continuously adjusting to ensure it’s removing the barriers its families face, like helping those with limited access to amenities by planning to add a laundry area.
“There is no public school that pulls all the lowest performers with a model to follow,” she says. “We want to provide that model, so we’re building it as we go.”
Tylar Sutton
Dashua Holliday and Caleb
Holliday grew up never knowing her own father. Over time, she noticed patterns in her mother’s choices. The men her mother dated entered and exited their lives frequently, and that often left Holliday and her sister to fend for themselves.
“I always felt like, when these men are gone, we’re what’s left, so how can you put us second?” she recalls.
She noticed similar issues in her extended family: Her great grandfather was their only relation who owned his own home. An aunt, she heard, had been great on the basketball court and had received a full-ride college scholarship — but opted not to take it.
“As a kid, I watched my family just give up,” she says. “I realized they were stuck.”
Holliday’s idea of “stuck” sums up the cycle of poverty: Statistics show that for every child raised in poverty who manages to escape the cycle — like James did — scores of others continue living at or below the same income level as their parents. U.S. census data from 2017 shows that 35.2 percent of Akron residents under age 18 live below the poverty level, and the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank indicates nearly 20 percent of children in Summit County do not know where their next meal is coming from.
Holliday was one of the lucky ones. She had a strong role model in a Reserve Army Training Corps officer at her high school who encouraged her to join the Army as an E3 private.
Military service gave her a path out of Akron and help with college tuition to study psychology — something she’d dreamed about her whole life but didn’t think was financially possible until she joined the military.
Having five kids with different fathers was not her dream. Now raising them as a single mom, she wants them to see life as more than the patterns she learned from her mother.
“You have to know there are bigger things, better things,” she says.
But energetic, friendly Caleb started shutting down when they moved to Akron.
By the end of kindergarten in Texas, Caleb had been reading on his own, and Holliday read to him nightly. Starting off without a permanent home in Akron left them exhausted, stressed and increasingly hopeless, and neither one of them was interested in bedtime stories.
And in the chaos of the move, Caleb had to leave his bike in Texas, so he couldn’t get exercise or explore the neighborhood much. Idleness was taking a toll.
Anxiety took over on a visit to a cousin’s home in Akron, when Caleb witnessed a neighbor firing a gun in the street. He had nightmares and an overwhelming fear that something horrible was going to happen to their family. He had to work with a counselor at Seiberling, the first school he attended in Akron, to help cope.
“That really shook him,” Holliday says. “It was really, really hard. Having all those police cars around, he was really afraid.”
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
A quiet little boy with thick glasses says he’s feeling “yellow” today. Sitting on the classroom floor in a circle, Stephanie Arnett’s fourth-grade students take turns sharing how they feel.
“Can you work yourself back off that?” Arnett asks the bespectacled boy. He talks about his irritations with his mother’s boyfriend.
“We’re not in control of other people, are we?” Arnett responds. “What are we in control of?”
The class answers in chorus: “Ourselves!”
The I Promise Circle happens every morning. The color zones are part of the school’s social-emotional learning, designed to help kids figure out constructive ways to deal with complex components of their lives. Green means you’re relaxed and ready to learn; yellow indicates worry or frustration; blue might mean you’re sick or feeling sad; red is a sudden sense of anger.
Along with checking in on their emotions, Arnett’s kids suggest ways to “get to green”: talking with friends, dancing, listening to a song.
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
“We’re fortunate to have social-emotional learning time built into the schedule,” says Nicole Hassan, executive director of the I Promise Network and an 18-year veteran with Akron Public Schools. “As a teacher, there wasn’t time for it, so you had to take away from reading or science in order to address things like resilience and self-regulation and character building.”
Many of the students, Hassan says, have experienced trauma — like issues with foster care or parents who are incarcerated, addicted to drugs or deceased — and grapple with focusing on schoolwork.
“We have a lot of kids that are very reactive,” she says. “Trauma-informed learning is based on brain functioning and how certain life experiences have developed their brains differently.”
For example, if a door slams loudly and interrupts a lesson, most students will be only momentarily startled. A student who has experienced trauma, however, may react with an immediate fight-flight-or-freeze response.
“My thing that I’ve been fighting for, for years, is it has to be equal focus — academics and social-emotional learning,” Hassan says. “Once they get themselves in control, then they can learn.”
Social-emotional components abound in I Promise, from hugs upon students’ arrival to reciting promises aloud every day. Alongside smaller class sizes that cap at 20 students and greater teacher training, I Promise employs a climate coach who may take a student out of the classroom to work through a traumatic response or sit with a child in the classroom to help with focus.
“The I Promise Circle is one of the most impactful things we’ve done,” Hassan says, noting that it took about two months to show results, like fewer incidents of lashing out and more cases of students verbalizing their fears. “Students have learned to trust their teachers, each other and themselves to expose things about themselves they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
Holliday sees the social-emotional component paying off in Caleb’s ability to handle the stress he often feels. When asked one day how he got himself from a red zone of frustration with noisy classmates to a more relaxed green zone, he said, “My stress ball.” Squeezing that sparkly purple ball with an elf inside is Caleb’s strategy for success.
Tylar Sutton
Caleb
Holliday picked up a bag and began browsing the shelves in the I Promise food pantry. She selected milk, fresh peppers, apples, bananas and oranges. When she checked in with Victoria McGee, director of the Family Resource Center, she had encouraged Holliday to take whatever she needed to feed her four kids.
She was surprised to see name-brand cereal, organic oatmeal, frozen meat and fresh eggs among the options — a stark contrast to the prepacked boxes of often-expired or wilted items at other food banks Holliday had been to.
“Being able to get healthier foods and have different choices and take what you want, to have no judgment — that’s wonderful,” she says.
Holliday makes this trip once a week or so. And if she can’t get there during the pantry’s scheduled hours, she can arrange a more convenient time.
“I wish the school had been around when we first got here because those were resources that I really, really needed,” Holliday says.
The one-stop-shop model at the Family Resource Center works for Holliday in other ways, like being able to schedule eye exams at the health clinic for herself and the kids without taking time off work.
“It can be hard, dealing with some of the outside stuff that you may not even know about,” Holliday says. “We never really know where a person is, what they’re lacking.”
This open-arms approach extends to school events like monthly Hometown Hall meetings where meals are served. More than 90 percent of families attend I Promise events, which is unheard of at many other public schools.
And the kids get extras too. As part of his orientation, Caleb received a green multispeed bicycle. Because having a bicycle meant freedom to James as a kid, he’s been giving bikes to kids since the LeBron James Family Foundation started in 2004. In September, Caleb got to ride for the first time since Texas. Though wobbly from having not ridden in over a year, he cruised with his little sister and mom in tow to Reservoir Park.
“It feels like flying!” he said.
Image courtesy of the LeBron James Family Foundation
A wall mural on the school’s lower level includes images of often-celebrated accomplished African-American men — Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. Painted alongside them are fifth- through 10th-graders in the I Promise Network, looking just as inspiring.
James could have fallen into patterns others in his neighborhood did.
“Someone asked me, When you were a kid growing up in Akron, when so many things were happening — gun violence, drugs — what stopped you from going the other way?” James recounted onstage at the school opening. “I look out in the crowd and see a lot of my childhood friends. They’re the reason that stopped me from going the other way.”
James never knew his father. But he found sanctuary in throwing hoops through a plastic milk crate nailed to a telephone pole. His love of the game led him to role models — his youth football coach Frank Walker and St. Vincent-St. Mary High School basketball coach Dru Joyce II — who helped him become the greatest athlete to ever play basketball.
By giving kids in Akron the same kind of support that changed his life, he hopes they’ll glean the validation that their lives have promise, too.
Caleb only knew his father until he was 3 years old. He has an older brother, but Holliday still worries about how he’ll learn to be a man.
“I didn’t have a dad, so I don’t really know what it feels like to have that male role model,” she says.
Holliday sees the men working at I Promise — like “Big Mike,” the Akron police officer who mans the front desk and high-fives Caleb — as strong, positive influences.
It’s been nine months, but that support is already buoying Caleb, reigniting his interests. His love of reading has returned in force, as seen in his first interim report showing improvement in his reading skills. Now Holliday often negotiates with him about how many books he can stuff into his backpack — he wants to carry seven at a time, but mom prefers two or three, so his bag isn’t too heavy.
“Caleb struggled with reading in second grade, but he wasn’t here a month and he was already jumping levels, reading, joining a book club,” Holliday says.
While Caleb is quickly showing improvement, others may take longer to catch up. Caleb has dealt with classmates calling him names and being disruptive, making it difficult for him to concentrate on lessons. Teachers address this behavior that can stem from real-world issues the students experience by guiding them through social-emotional learning tactics such as character building and empathy.
Hard evidence of progress in this first year can be seen in the fall-to-winter test scores Akron Public Schools released in April. While all the third- and fourth-graders entered I Promise with below grade-level reading skills, 23 percent of them demonstrated at or near grade-level reading in this round of testing. This incredible growth has surpassed others in the district with 90 percent of students, who were one or two grades behind, meeting or exceeding individual growth goals in reading and math.
“We’re closing the gap,” says Campbell. “If you talk to our families, you will hear: my child finally likes to go to school, my child is coming home wanting to do homework, my child finally has a friend, my child isn’t being bullied anymore.”
A calmer routine has helped Holliday and Caleb feel more optimistic these days. With a school schedule that aligns with her job as a special needs paraprofessional at Towpath Trail High School, a permanent home and reliable food source, Holliday can focus on what matters — family.
“The whole ‘we are family’ — I didn’t really understand what that meant,” Holliday says. “A lot of times, you feel overlooked, so to have a whole staff telling you how great you are and they love you — it can change your whole world.”
The hugs and high-fives of I Promise may feel over the top to some people, but the environment is meant to celebrate those who maybe haven’t been seen, who’ve struggled in the background, who’ve been stuck. This type of honest, equal expression of love and hope may seem too good to be true. But maybe it really is the “magic” answer.
“I want people to know that these kids have the same opportunity as everyone else [despite] being underprivileged and feeling like you could be a statistic,” James said on opening day. “As adults, we have a responsibility to not let these kids down. These kids are our future.”
His vision already inspired U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown to introduce legislation shortly after I Promise’s opening day that would create competitive grants to forge community-school partnerships in areas hit hard by the opioid crisis. Brown’s tweet about the bill said it’s intended to replicate I Promise in cities that do not have “a LeBron James.”
There’s a new idea of how to reform education every few years, and whether James’ model of compassionate support will be the one that takes hold is yet to be decided. At the very least, the I Promise kids will have access to the pivotal element many weren’t born into: opportunity.
As the world has seen with James, opportunity is a life-changer.
Brown is right in saying that a LeBron James can’t just swoop into every city. He’s got Akron — but the rest is on us to offer support that levels the playing field and makes sure opportunity is not a privilege but a right every kid has. Maybe one of them will do something extraordinary and end up on that mural. Or maybe they will simply lead happy, quiet lives.
For now, these 240 kids — and more to follow — have options.
“I’m really praying this can spread,” Holliday says. “Because, honestly, I look back on my childhood and really do believe if there were people in place who said, We won’t let you fail, We have your back, Once you’re here, you’re family — I think life would have looked different for me.”
