Universal Right to Literacy:
A Shared Mission

Visual Essay | Photographed for Public Counsel and Enso

About the event:
“It doesn’t even feel like school,” says Jamarria Hall, a senior at Osborn Evergreen Academy of Design and Alternative Energy. “It makes my stomach hurt just walking into the facility, knowing we’re basically getting cheated — really, getting robbed — of education.”

Jamarria is one of the thousands of Detroit Public School students, of whom only 2.2% last year achieved college-ready scores in reading and English. Faced with teacherless classrooms, buildings without heating or cooling, and falling tiles from library ceilings, these students are being deprived of both dignity and opportunity. The conditions in these schools have become so bleak and unacceptable that the students, represented by Public Counsel, the nation’s largest pro-bono law firm, are filing a class action lawsuit charging that the State of Michigan denies children their constitutional right to literacy.

The above paragraphs were taken from Shelley Ong’s article on Medium.

150 diverse cultural leaders from philanthropy, entertainment, journalism, cultural institutions, for-profit and non-profit brands worked together to determine how to frame this issue to engage popular support.

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