Plans for a new public high school project in Los Angeles, backed by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, were approved this month by the L.A. Board of Education.
The school, currently being referred to as Regional High School No. 1, will be located at Audubon Middle School in the Leimert Park neighborhood in South Los Angeles. As detailed in an expansive Los Angeles Times piece about the magnet school project on Monday, transportation options for students outside the immediate local area will be offered.
“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 toldTimes reporter Howard Blume.
For Dre, it’s important to be able to reach “the younger me” as part of the school’s intentions of inspiring students in the regional school system, more than 80 percent of which are Latino and Black.
“This is something new and different that might excite the kids and make them want to go to school,” Dre said.
Current plans are for the new school to be opened in the fall of next year.
While Iovine says Regional High School No. 1 is “nowhere near a music school,” an encouraging focus on creativity will be at the forefront of the project’s ambitions. In fact, the ethos is not unlike that seen in the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, which was founded in 2013 thanks to a “visionary gift” from Iovine and Dre.
Also in the Times piece, Dre addressed his January health scare, which saw him making headlines after being hospitalized for a reported brain aneurysm. According to Dre, he’s now “feeling fantastic” but urged the public to take high blood pressure seriously even if they assume they aren’t currently experiencing issues.
“I’ve always been a person that has always taken care of my health,” Dre told Blume on Monday. “But there’s something that happens for some reason with Black men and high blood pressure, and I never saw that coming. But I’m taking care of myself. And I think every Black man should just check that out and make sure things are OK with the blood pressure.”
Dre and Iovine, of course, have an extended history of collaborative impact in the music industry. In 2017, a four-part HBO docuseries—director Allen Hughes’ The Defiant Ones—documented the individual careers and intersecting legacies of the two Beats co-founders. If you missed it upon its release, the docuseries is currently available to stream on Peacock and is definitely worth your time.
