Roxbury Prep High School students stood outside in the cold in front of Boston City Hall on Jan. 16, when they should have been on the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s meeting agenda.

Tabreia Vann-Crump, a Roxbury Prep junior, was at City Hall this week asking for help to get the project placed on the February 13 agenda. Tabreia’s very compelling request to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for help is published below.

Malcolm X said “education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” For my peers and me, this means education is our license to drive and open up doors of opportunities and that if we prepare ourselves now and learn as much as we can, in the future we’ll meet our goals in life.

Sadly, the students at my school, Roxbury Prep High School, have been denied the opportunity to learn in a single unified high school building that can put all of us together in one facility that we deserve. Month after month, we wait for the City to put our high school project on the agenda of the Boston Planning and Development Committee–the agency that can deny or approve our future home.

As a Roslindale resident, as well as a Roxbury Prep student, I have attended or spoken at various community meetings. In those meetings, our school took in a lot of feedback and even changed the size of the building to accommodate the community’s response. The traffic studies have been done. We have done everything we were supposed to do. The current empty auto repair shop and used car lot is actually zoned for a school.

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