It’s the unofficial last day of high school for seniors at New Orleans Charter Science & Math High School, known around the city as Sci High, and students are in the cafeteria taking photos with their friends and signing each other's t-shirts with heartfelt messages.
It’s also where the School Cypher Summit is going down.
A cypher is when a group of rappers and beatboxers gather around in a circle to improvise and freestyle together. Jamila Sams — founder of We Do It 4 The Culture, the organization hosting the School Cypher Summit — created the event as a way to use storytelling in hip-hop to help students learn interpersonal skills.
At the Summit, students perform poetry, spoken word, and rap. It’s part of the culturally responsive social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum Sams created for grades 6-12. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Sams said around 60 % of students say they have felt isolated or that their identities and cultures are not represented in academic spaces.
Sams created the School Cypher Summit to help students connect culturally with teachers as well as their classmates. This can translate into conflict resolution and other social-emotional skills in the classroom.
“How do you meet young people where they are, but then also provide a safe and brave space for them to just be themselves?” Sams said during an interview at New Orleans Public Radio’s studio a day before the summit. “[It was] that combination of the sense of urgency around education and creating safe and brave spaces for young people to just be themselves is kind of what is the nucleus or the magic sauce for We Do It 4 The Culture.”
That ‘magic sauce’ filled the air at Sci High. Makia Pree was one of the students who joined the cypher, where she freestyled about having anxiety.
When she’s at home, Pree said she will find a beat on YouTube and start freestyling. She said rapping helps regulate her emotions.
“Whether it be about love, hate, [or] like anger, I just like to let it all out, and it feels really good, especially when it sounds good too,” Pree said.
Every student cheered on one another as they grabbed the mic. They had the extra motivation to perform because Sams partnered with La Reezy, a 21-year-old rising rap star from New Orleans. Over the past year, his music has generated millions of streams and received praise from critics and other artists — including some of his heroes, like Tyler the Creator and Kendrick Lamar.
La Reezy joined in on the cypher, and he and his “Chief Growth” Officer, Jourdan Johnson, along with two students, kicked the summit off with a panel discussion on emotional intelligence and the future of New Orleans youth. We Do It 4 The Culture also showcased a capstone project where students submitted original poetry or left a lasting remark before leaving high school.
Afterwards, students voted on awards for their classmates. The awards came with a necklace with a “UTH” pendant. “UTH”, pronounced “youth”, is the name of La Reezy’s brand and nonprofit, but it's also an acronym that means “utilizing time here.” He is the self-proclaimed “Leader Of Da UTH.”
“When you use your time on you, you discover who you are and what your purpose is,” La Reezy said. “But if you're always using your time on somebody else's stuff and all distractions, you never have time to see who you are. What's your human experience? What are you called to do on this earth?”
For La Reezy, utilizing his time meant deciding not to attend college and focusing on making beats, writing rhymes and producing social content. His music has elements of positive manifestation, uplifting Black youth and highlighting New Orleans’ culture.
Sams said they met last year at the Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx after La Reezy received the Rap's Next Generation Award. His music fits the themes of the curriculum We Do It 4 The Culture teaches, and it was a great way to highlight Mental Health Awareness Month.
“I had this idea. La Reezy is dope. We don't have any relationships with any schools in New Orleans or Louisiana proper, for that matter. So let's partner with La Reezy. Let's find out where he went to high school, and let's start what we now call the School Cypher Summit,” Sams said.
La Reezy graduated from Sci High in 2022, and he said coming back to his alma mater was a full-circle moment.
“I am literally them. This is just four years later of hard work and intent, positive mindset. And care about the words,” he said. “Every word you say comes back to you. So, for me, I think I want them to just be like, ‘Oh. There is a reference point. There is someone that I could aspire to be like. It is possible.’”
We Do It 4 The Culture’s SEL-focused curriculum is in over 100 different schools across the country and is growing. Sams said the School Cypher Summit at Sci High was everything she envisioned 10 years ago, and she looks forward to hosting more across the nation.
There’s been pushback on SEL curriculum from conservatives, who claim it is used to push liberal ideology on students. Oklahoma State Sen. Shane Jett proposed a bill in 2022 against SEL. He said it seeks to find trauma in children as a way to push anti-family, anti-logic and anti-reason philosophies.
Dr. Jessica Wheeler, a teacher at Sci High and La Reezy’s former homeroom teacher, said SEL is crucial for the unique challenges this generation of students is facing.
“The way in which they interact with people primarily has changed,” Wheeler said. “The type of things that they're exposed to has changed, and so they really deserve a lot of support in figuring out how they develop their responses.”
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
