Audubon Middle School

What is Audubon?

Audubon Middle School is an urban school consisting of 97% minority students. The school is in Los Angeles’s Crenshaw neighborhood, one of the city’s most dangerous areas. 89% of the students are economically

disadvantaged, including several students live in homeless shelters or are otherwise displaced.

LaceUp's Involvement

We worked with Ellis Tatnall, a special education teacher who is passionate about helping students. Ellis uses basketball to educate special needs students, splitting them into NBA teams for activities and teaching math lessons with a basketball focus In early 2023, Ellis started and organized Audubon’s first intramural program Many students in the program had never played organized sports. We chose the Audubon partnership because basketball can encourage and incentivize these students to work hard in the classroom and stay in school