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.”
For
a more pungent assessment of the way Sanders and his partner ended up
in proud possession of a charter school, turn to that recording obtained
by The Dallas Observer, which together with The Dallas Morning News
excavated a lot of the Prime Prep story. Two years ago, Sanders met with
Wallace, his partner, who was paid $120,000 as the school’s executive
director. Sanders got $40,000 as the coach and found that disparity
humiliating.
He decided to get real.
“You
don’t even really know how we got this school,” he told Wallace. “It
ain’t because all these inflated words and wonderful things we said; it
was another way.
“Senators,
political leaders that you hooked me up with, that you put me down with
— that’s how we got the school. You’re talking about a nigger sitting
up there that was an athlete who didn’t graduate, another nigger sitting
up there saying he’s the president, that ain’t graduate nothing, and we
got a school. Think about that, man.
“How in the world do you think we got a school?”
Their
new school bounced into the public eye when the basketball coach at
Grace Preparatory Academy, a Christian school in Arlington, Tex.,
defected to Prime Prep with his college-ready talent.
That was quite a haul, and you imagine Grace Prep officials were not amused. It is most important, Grace Prep’s website notes, to “aid in the spiritual growth of our student-athletes.”
Winning,
however, seems not to hurt. Year after year, Grace collected a
miraculous cache of athletes. And sometimes its players and supporters
have been investigated, and sanctioned once for recruiting violations.
From dust to dust and all that.
The defections set off a tempest. Texas public school rules prohibit coaches from recruiting players from rival schools.
Sanders
and Wallace journeyed to the state capital, Austin, to plead their
case. When it appeared that the players would be forced to sit out, the
Prime Prep founders announced that they would pull out of the University
Interscholastic League.
That did not please the school’s teachers. The withdrawal meant the school could not field a debate team, a choir, a band.
Whatever.
Prime
Prep played in basketball tournaments in Florida and West Virginia, and
finished the season 37-2, ranked No. 6 in USA Today’s Super 25.
Mysteries abounded. Carlisle and Apkom, the Prime Prep board member,
have no clue how the school paid for the travel, nor what the salaries
were for the head coaches and the many assistants. In a recording,
Sanders, who is wealthy, said he had taken his Prime Prep salary and
paid stipends to the coaches.
Slowly
but surely, the wheels came off this car. Last fall, after Carlisle was
hired as executive director, she walked the high school campus. She saw
cafeteria workers sitting idle while parents came in with pizza and
fried chicken and sold it to the students. Sanders’s entourage, men in
sweats and Under Armour athletic gear, clustered around the gym and
wandered into and out of the school without signing in.
“They told me they had the right to be there because they were friends of Deion,” she said. “It was inmates running the asylum.”
She
walked over to talk to Sanders. He looked at her and said into his
cellphone: “Yah, man, I guess she thinks she’s going to tell me
something. Yah, man.”
With that, she recalled, he turned his back on her.
“We need you to leave,” she said.
He turned to her, still on his phone. “I’m not going to leave. Who do you think you are? You’re going to be fired.”
Weeks
later, after a tense school board meeting, Carlisle walked out to find
the back window of her car smashed in. The next week, she was fired.
I
called T. Christopher Lewis, the board president and an entertainment
lawyer. He talked of the school’s many struggles and noted he had fired
Sanders the first time.
Lewis
also rehired him. His second thoughts looked odd, he acknowledged, but
the school is named after the man, and Sanders had not been charged with
a felony assault in the case of grabbing the school official, just a
misdemeanor.
“Deion
is welcome in some capacity,” Lewis said, “and we have to really push
ourselves to best utilize what he has to offer. He’s got a unique
insight on what an academic, athletic-based charter school should look
like.”
It
is not clear that a school of that description could pass legal muster
in Texas. Soto, the former member of the state Board of Education, said,
“Football is the second religion of Texas, but it’s not legal to make
sports talent a condition for getting into a charter school.”
I
had so much to chat about with Sanders. I traveled to his grand home
spread in Prosper, Tex., with its Moroccan columns and palm trees and a
football field out back with banana-yellow goal posts. I sent him an
email and tried his Twitter account.
No go.
So
I went to the Prime Prep high school campus one evening to watch
Sanders run his Truth sports teams, which require athletes to maintain
at least a B average. More than 100 boys practiced hard for two hours,
much of the time in a soaking rain.
Deion,
trim and muscular in his mid-40s, was ebullient, flashing that megawatt
smile and running about the field in his red sneakers and his black
baseball cap turned backward. He ran the practice with brio, getting
down in ready crouches with little boys.
“We appreciate your patience, your kindness,” he told parents at the end.
“We’re a team. We’re a family.”
Deion?
I
began to introduce myself. He held up his hand. “I want a witness,” he
said, signaling to Reginald Calhoun, who works in finance at Prime Prep,
to come listen. Then Sanders reached under his thigh guard and pulled
out a recorder.
He
told me a reporter had tried to pass himself off as a Truth parent
earlier in the day. I assured him I had arrived subterfuge-free.
I
asked about Prime Prep’s appeal. He turned to Calhoun and lectured him
on what an uninformed question this was, as if Calhoun had asked it. I
tried another question, and Sanders again lectured Calhoun on his
stupidity. Then Sanders told me he was having a private conversation.
He turned and gave me a piercing stare, his megawatt gone cobalt. He walked off with a touch of swagger.
Prime Time was over. Prime Prep, maybe not.
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