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Inclusive Future As a junior at Flint Central High School, Dawn Demps (Africana Studies and Social
Sciences ’08) would often skip class to visit the public library across the street, enriching herself with learning that she was missing from her high school experience. Demps would spend hours reading, her mind flowing from poetry to history, stacked books charting her sincere pursuit of knowledge.
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itching class for the library certainly isn’t an expected mode of teenage rebellion, but the unique factors of Demps’s truancy were met with indifference from school administrators. There was no intervention to help get her back on track. The absences began stacking up. A long history of academic achievement was soon pushed to the wayside. After all, Demps had researched college and
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BRIDGES / SUMMER 2022
arrived at the “slow, depressing realization” that her family could never afford to send her to college. Demps felt like she was being actively excluded from a meaningful, transformative education. She dropped out of high school when she was 16 years old. It was only after becoming a mother—and discovering the University of Michigan-Flint—that Demps uncovered the true possibilities of an inclusive and vibrant learning
