Marva Collins

Marva Delores Collins (née Knight; August 31, 1936 – June 24, 2015) was an American educator who started Westside Preparatory School in the impoverished Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1975. 2Early life Collins was born in Monroeville, Alabama, to father, Henry Collins, a businessman who owned a funeral home and worked with cattle, and to mother, Bessie Collins (née Nettles). She grew up in Atmore, Alabama, a small town near Mobile, Alabama, during the time of segregation in the American South. When she was young, Collins went to a strict elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse in Atmore, Alabama, an experience which influenced her later in life. She graduated from Clark College (now known as Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia. 2Career Collins taught school for two years in Alabama, then moved to Chicago in 1959, where she taught as a full–time substitute teacher in inner–city Chicago Public Schools system for fourteen years. 3Westside Preparatory School Dismayed at the low levels of learning that she felt some students were experiencing in particular areas, Collins took $5,000 (a large sum of money at that time) from her own teacher's retirement fund and started a private school in the top floors of the brownstone in the West Garfield Park neighborhood where she lived in 1975. The school she started was called Westside Preparatory School. Westside Prep became an educational and commercial success. Collins created her low-cost private school specifically for the purpose of teaching low income black children whom Collins felt that the Chicago Public School System had labeled as being learning disable