Okey Apkom, a dissident member of Prime Prep’s board, told me it was common knowledge that athletes received the grades they needed to keep their eligibility.
The proposal noted the school would rely on a Sanders company, PrimeTimePlayer, to raise money. Here the proposal’s language acquired a legend-in-his-own-mind quality: Sanders’s company “shall introduce” the school to “its vast corporate circle of influence,” which was “not limited to C.E.O.s, C.F.O.s.” PrimeTimePlayer would claim 10 percent of the money raised, as a commission, and collect a monthly retainer of $1,000 to $7,500.A majority of the board voted yes; Soto voted no.
-Angela
A Star-Powered School Sputters
Prime Prep Academy, Founded by Deion Sanders, Comes Under Scrutiny
A few years back, Deion Sanders, the Hall of Fame cornerback and N.F.L. commentator who still digs being called by the nickname Prime Time, was approached with a splendid business proposition.
A partner suggested creating a Texas charter school.
They would name it after Sanders: Prime Prep Academy. They would
collect and mentor the finest male athletes in Texas and elsewhere and
become a powerhouse.
God
only knows what business opportunities might come along, particularly
if they could tap Sanders’s deep-pocketed backers, like the sports
clothing manufacturer Under Armour, for which Sanders works as a brand
ambassador.
All
went swimmingly. The Texas Board of Education fell over itself to
accommodate Sanders. The coach of a small Christian school defected to
Prime Prep and brought along his collection of nationally ranked
basketball players, including Emmanuel Mudiay, a preternaturally
talented, 6-foot-5-inch, 190-pound point guard.
Just like that, Prime Prep went world class. It had a top-ranked basketball team, its games broadcast on ESPN.
As for Prime Prep’s academics? Not so world class.
A
respected Texas nonprofit group has ranked Texas public schools. Prime
Prep’s lower grades received an F. I could not find the grade for Prime
Prep’s high school, so I called the nonprofit group.
“Unfortunately,” a spokeswoman said, “we were unable to rank it due to missing data.”
We’re
accustomed to living in the shadow of the rotten tree that is major
college sports. It’s almost refreshing that so many college
administrators and coaches have dropped the pretense that recruits are
more than underpaid young men and women in shorts, jerseys or shoulder
pads.
Now that rot has spread, its roots extending deep into high schools and even middle schools.
There
is the Nevada prep school created to field a basketball team and the
players who switch high schools two or three times in four years. Last
week, the top high school player in Michigan announced that he was
transferring to a prep academy in the Napa Valley in California —
although that school does not yet exist.
Prime
Prep offers baroque twists on this American sports tale. It features
celebrity culture run amok and shoddy oversight of a charter school.
Under Armour provides all of the school’s uniforms and practice
equipment.
There
is the strange curlicue that is the high school career of Mudiay.
Academics at Prime Prep are enough of a shambles that he might have been
blocked from playing major college hoops. So he exited east, heading
for the Guangdong Southern Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association,
where he will make $1.5 million before jumping to the N.B.A. in a year.
The
N.C.A.A. eligibility center’s staff members insisted they had examined
Prime Prep’s academics in “granular detail.” They found some cause for
concern but appear to have missed several boulders of evidence.
Poor
and working-class parents talked of academics but cherished most dearly
Sanders’s promise that their sons would play and play, and with luck
obtain scholarships and pro contracts. Okey Apkom, a dissident member of
Prime Prep’s board, told me it was common knowledge that athletes
received the grades they needed to keep their eligibility.
“The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”
There
are deeper pools of darkness. Former Prime Prep staff members make
credible accusations of violence and intimidation by Sanders and his
hangers-on. In his reality show — “Deion’s Family Playbook,” on Oprah
Winfrey’s television network — Sanders told his son that he was so angry
that late report cards were threatening to make his athletes miss games
that he had “locked up” with a Prime Prep administrator, although “I
ain’t hit him.”
He
was technically correct. Witnesses said Sanders grabbed tight in his
fists the collar of a school official, who fell to the floor. In another
instance, Sanders was heard on a recording — obtained by The Dallas Observer
— threatening his business partner, D. L. Wallace, because he had
blocked Sanders from hiring coaches and from allowing him to recruit as
he pleased.
“I feel like throwing this chair and breaking your damn neck,” Sanders told him.
Kimberly
Carlisle, Prime Prep’s former executive director, twice tried to fire
Sanders, who served as football coach, only to watch the board rehire
him. The second time, she asked a 6-5, 300-pound friend to accompany
her.
Did
you, I asked, feel scared? She paused a couple of beats and replied, “I
would say there was not a culture of safety at that school.”
Prime Prep’s fire could be extinguished. The Texas Education Agency announced last month that it would revoke the school’s charter after Prime Prep could not prove that it had used money for a school lunch program to serve meals to students.
A local district attorney is investigating that one.
School
officials have appealed the revocation. Sanders, who spoke to me in a
brief interview, and those officials exhibit a striking confidence that
their school will experience a resurrection. The state education
commissioner is a friend of Prime Prep’s new superintendent, who in turn
is a planet in Sanders’s orbit.
Despite
the threat of imminent closing, enrollment at Prime Prep is up. As for
the basketball team, Andre Johnson, a Sanders loyalist, assured me:
“We’ll be top 10 in the nation again. No problem.”
In Texas, betting against Prime Time and Prime Prep is a precarious dice roll.
“The
high school was chaos,” Carlisle said. “Academics didn’t even play
second fiddle. It was all about getting those athletes scholarships and
contracts. You didn’t mess with Deion World.”
Prime
Prep was conceived in celebrity, its charter proposal offering a near
satirical turn on edu-speak. The proposal mentioned “our training
methods” and a “Leadership Studies Curriculum” without explaining the
nature of that special sauce. Students, the proposal noted, would “model
traits” such as “responsibility” and “courage.” Students would “become
self-actualized.”
Yes, well.
After
wading through 50 pages of that, I dialed up Michael Soto. A
Harvard-educated Ph.D., he teaches American literature at Trinity
University in San Antonio and sat on the Texas Board of Education when
it approved the Prime Prep charter.
You could practically hear him grimace. Sanders, he recalled, spoke as board members tossed adoring questions.
“Sanders
made himself available, and I was quite embarrassed by this, to pose
for pictures and sign autographs for my colleagues on the board,” he
said. “The financial planning was suspect; the curriculum design was
nonexistent — it was laughable.”
The
proposal noted the school would rely on a Sanders company,
PrimeTimePlayer, to raise money. Here the proposal’s language acquired a
legend-in-his-own-mind quality: Sanders’s company “shall introduce” the
school to “its vast corporate circle of influence,” which was “not
limited to C.E.O.s, C.F.O.s.” PrimeTimePlayer would claim 10 percent of
the money raised, as a commission, and collect a monthly retainer of
$1,000 to $7,500.
A majority of the board voted yes; Soto voted no.
“It was Sanders’s celebrity status,” he said, “that got this proposal approved.”
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