About us
The Maya Angelou Academy is the school at New Beginnings (formally, Oak Hill) Youth Center, the District’s secure facility for youth who have been adjudicated delinquent and committed to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS). See Forever assumed management of the Maya Angelou Academy Academy in June of 2007, bringing with it the same positive culture and high expectations that make our Maya Angelou Public Charter Schools so successful.
See Forever’s mission at the The Maya Angelou Academy is to provide a safe, nurturing, and mutually respectful environment that motivates and prepares each student to fulfill his academic or career potential. With the support of a wide circle of caring adults, students will develop the skills they need to make sound decisions and lead rewarding lives.
 Our History
Although our new school at the Maya Angelou Academy just opened last year (in June 2007), See Forever’s work here really began 11 years ago. In 1997, two young lawyers saw that kids leaving D.C.’s juvenile detention facility had no good programs to help them get on track. Those lawyers, James Forman, Jr. and David Domenici, left their jobs to give a few young people what they needed: job training, a salary, and tutoring to help them in school. They subsequently founded the See Forever Foundation and the Maya Angelou Public Charter School.
Now that the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services has asked See Forever to run the school inside the New Beginnings Youth Center itself, our work has come full circle, and we have the chance to reach more of the young people who need help reconnecting to school, work, and their own futures.
During the eleven years See Forever has spent building successful alternative educational programs for young people who have been court-involved, truant, or unsuccessful in traditional schools, it has become clear what works: respectful, loving guidance and support from adults who really care, a relevant, challenging, and multifaceted academic program, employment and personal development training and opportunities, and empowerment of the young people as agents of change for themselves and, ultimately, their communities. The Maya schools have been very successful. This past year, 93% of the graduates from MAPCS campuses were accepted into 4-year or 2-year colleges and universities. Research shows that they are outperforming their peers. Over 70% go on to college or postsecondary school (compared to less than 40% of students graduating from DCPS). And once they enter postsecondary school: twice as many of them earn bachelor’s degrees than other low-income, African American high school graduates nationally.
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