Twenty Horace Mann students are selected for the 10-day program, taught by UCLA faculty and graduate students, which focuses on finding creative ways to craft each student’s personal story. Covering all areas and specializations of programming at the Theater, Film and Television School, the Workshop’s modules include the exploration of genres, creative writing exercises, and cinematography and lighting labs, where students not only learn the tools of storytelling but also how to effectively voice their viewpoints. This workshop is held every June on the UCLA campus.
The public Horace Mann UCLA Community School located in Inglewood, South Los Angeles, is envisioned as a cornerstone for rigorous, personalized college-prep education. Currently, 53% of the school’s students are African American and 46% are Latinx. As of 2017, only 6% of the neighborhood’s residents have graduated from college. Horace Mann UCLA Community School is tailored to the needs of the neighborhood and informed by the success of the original UCLA Community School at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in Koreatown, which serves grades K-12, and where the college acceptance rate has more than tripled to 99% since the school opened in 2009. The recently established Horace Mann UCLA Community School seeks to reverse years of declining enrollment at the former Horace Mann Middle School by including grades 9 and 10, with full enrollment of grades 6 through 12 slated for 2020. Adding elementary grades is also slated to begin in Fall 2020.