“This is nowhere near a music school,” Jimmy Iovine told the Los Angeles Times.
Music moguls, friends, business partners, producers extraordinaire Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are collaborating again, but this time to open a high school in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone reported.
The “Still D.R.E.” rapper and Bruce Springsteen producer announced Monday they plan to open a high school in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Leimert Park which is expected to open late next year, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“This is for kids who want to go out and start their own company or go work at a place like Marvel or Apple, or companies like that,” Iovine told the Los Angeles Times.
“Here’s a place that you can go where there’s something that you can learn that you’re really interested in,” Dr. Dre said.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the duo will pay whatever it takes to get the school to open in the South Los Angeles neighborhood.
The former N.W.A. band member added that, by doing this, he is helping the “the inner-city kid, the younger me.”
The Regional High School No. 1 will welcome as many as 250 students and the L.A. Board of Education approved its plans last week, Rolling Stone reported.
The school has been registered as what is known as a “magnet school” and therefore any high school-age student in the area can apply.
“We want to do it in the public system,” Iovine told the L.A. Times. “We wanted to go to where it’s most needed — and it’s most difficult. And we will not be satisfied if this doesn’t scale. We want people inspired enough to scale it.”
Despite Los Angeles being a haven for entertainment, the announcement is a landmark declaration from industry personnel, as the Los Angeles Times reported that it is a rare investment by those from the entertainment field in America’s second-largest school system. More than 80% of students in the area are Latinx and Black and about the same number come from low-income families, according to Los Angeles Times.
Dr. Dre and Iovine became billionaires in 2014 after Apple bought their company Beats for a reported $3 billion, according to Variety.
The friendship and business partnerships of Iovine and Dre were chronicled in the acclaimed 2017 HBO docuseries, “The Defiant Ones.”
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