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African-American Studies

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Something Within Me

A film by Jerret Engle and Emma Joan Morris

• "These days we hear too much about youths' problems rather than their potential. This film is an antidote to despair." - Marian Wright Edelman, Children's Defense Fund
• "This is one film that earns that much-abused adjective ' inspirational'." - Newsweek

St. Augustine's is a Catholic school in one of the poorest sections of the embattled South Bronx. In 1985, enrollment was so low that the school was about to close. Instead Father Robert Jeffers, the school's pastor, approached music teacher Tom Pilecki and together they decided to commit the school to a new curriculum - a curriculum in which the arts, and especially music, would be treated with the importance of any academic subject.

Something Within Me is the story of this remarkable school and the children whose lives it has shaped. It is the story of a school where over the last six years enrollment has tripled and reading and math scores, the lowest in the Bronx, have improved dramatically. The school produces disciplined, self-confident eighth graders with the skills to overcome their environment. This is a heartwarming reminder of the creative potential of all human beings and a signpost pointing the way toward true educational reform.

Winner of Three Major Awards, Sundance Film Festival, 1992

55 min. Video or DVD. Sale $125. Rental $55.

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