Why Platinum Minds
- In New Jersey over 30% of minority students drop out of school. New Jersey has the 3rd largest number of segregated schools in the nation. Research tells us when schools are segregated students suffer and our society suffers “Three years before Brown v. Board in November 1951, students in a civics class at the segregated black Adkin High School in Kinston, North Carolina, discussed what features an ideal school should have for a class assignment. When they realized that the local white high school indeed had everything they had imagined”.
- A press release contained news about a New Jersey school district’s decision over the controversial practice known as “tracking”—designating students for separate educational paths based on their academic performance as teens or younger.
- The education department and advocates have said tracking perpetuates a modern system of segregation that favors white students and keeps students of color, many of them black, from long-term equal achievement. Segregation is a system derived to limited access, opportunities and equality.
- Platinum Minds is a non-profit leadership/ educational development program, with the mission to help academically motivated boys from underrepresented communities with leadership and educational development skills so they excel and become positive role models to the community.
- The organization supports the vision that boys from different circumstances and backgrounds can and should have the opportunity to learn about and from one another with an interest in developing a society where all people are given equal opportunities and are able to live harmoniously with a common goal of building the strongest nation in the world. And that better life, begins with greater access to educational opportunities, a positive, encouraging and safe place to develop, and an environment where all boys feel accepted, valued and appreciated. Platinum Minds provides opportunities for boys to learn about the world around them and to become well educated, intelligent, compassionate, leaders of integrity.