By Jonathan “Jopp” Post
Friends of Shabazz
I’ve lived on the Northside, next to the Cherokee Marsh, for 22 years. For 18 of them, I’ve driven a bus for Madison Metro Transit. My wife, Kelly, works for the city’s Parks Department — we’re both career civil servants. As a Metro driver, you see your community every day. You see the same families, the same kids as they get older, and neighborhoods changing shape around them. You notice things. And once you notice enough, it’s hard not to want to do something about it. Two years ago, I started to do something about it and started a nonprofit called Friends of Shabazz.
To explain why, I have to go back further.
I grew up in the inner city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 80s — on powdered milk and Toys for Tots. There were stretches where the only place I could count on to eat was public school. It wasn’t just where I learned things. It was my safe place, the one institution that showed up for me when not everything else did. I never forgot that.
That belief in public education is exactly why the name Shabazz meant something to me before I ever set foot in the building. Stuart Dymzarov, a former Peace Corps volunteer who arrived in Madison with a Ford Foundation grant, founded the school in 1971 on a belief that education could look completely different than what the city had ever seen. He built it around a phrase adapted from Malcolm Shabazz himself: education by any means necessary. When it came time to name our own organization, I took that same conviction and made it personal — Friends of Shabazz runs on the motto Public Education by Any Means Necessary. I don’t say that as a slogan. Public education is the reason I have a life worth talking about. It fed me when I needed feeding. It gave me a room to sit in when other rooms weren’t safe. Everything I’ve built since — a career, a marriage, two daughters, great friendships, a home on the Northside — traces back to a public school system that didn’t give up on a kid who came in with powdered milk in his belly and not much else. I believe in public education the way some people believe in their church. I’ve seen what it does when it works.
For six years before COVID, during the splits in my Metro shifts, I put in time at Lindbergh Elementary. I would try and be there for recess after lunch, or help out at lunch, working with kids who needed a little extra attention. And when I say attention, I mean just listening to them. What I found surprised me: you don’t need a title or a degree to change a kid’s trajectory. Sometimes all it takes is listening to a kid who’s never had an adult really listen to them before. I watched it happen, over and over.
That lesson hit home differently when our older daughter, Phoebe, developed serious mental health* struggles in middle school. Kelly and I were scared for her, and we knew East High wasn’t going to be the right fit. So we looked at Shabazz instead. It turned out to be more than the right call — it gave us our daughter back. Phoebe will be a senior at Shabazz this fall and she is thriving at Shabazz. She has become a leader in her school community and is a TA in an art class this semester. Our younger daughter, Polly, just started as a freshman at East and is settling in well — she likes it there. Different kids need different doors, and that’s the whole point of having more than one kind of public high school in this city.
Once Phoebe enrolled, I finally got an inside look at a school I’d been hearing about for decades. My connection to Shabazz really comes down to three things: it’s in my own community, my daughter goes there, and every single person I’ve ever met who went to that school loved it. Ever since I moved to Madison in 1996, I kept running into graduates who talked about the place the way most people talk about a favorite person, not a building. Every time, I thought the same thing: I would have loved to go there.
Now I understand why Dymzarov’s own students named the school after Malcolm Shabazz — known to the world as Malcolm X. Dymzarov’s philosophy was simple: meet students where they are, keep the doors open, and believe every kid deserves to be accepted first, before anything else is asked of them. Dymzarov passed away this past April at 81, but the school still runs on that belief.
Shabazz High School’s curriculum is built around project-based, hands-on learning instead of traditional tests. This type of curriculum means students are learning and working in their community. In Constructions class, students partner with The Bodgery maker space to learn carpentry, welding, and laser cutting on projects with real community impact. In Geography of the North Side class, students map and document this very neighborhood, challenging stereotypes about where we live. And in a course close to my own heart, Writing Children’s Stories, Shabazz students partner with an elementary classroom to mentor younger kids and co-write children’s books with them — the same kind of connection I found meaning in at Lindbergh, now built into a high school curriculum.
Shabazz serves a high number of students with special education needs, LGBTQ+ students, and students facing mental health challenges — kids often underserved by a traditional high school model. Phoebe is one of them. Other Shabazz parents have told me the same thing: they, like us, don’t know what would have happened to their kid without this school.
What genuinely surprised me was learning that for roughly six years, Shabazz had almost no organized outside community support behind it — no active parent network, no alumni association, no corporate or business sponsors, nothing raising money or awareness on the school’s behalf. The teaching happening inside that building is some of the most demanding, creative work I’ve seen in this district, and it was happening largely alone. I couldn’t unknow that. So, with zero nonprofit experience and no idea just how ridiculous the red tape and bureaucracy at the school district can be — which makes navigating and helping far harder than it should be — I got to work and started building Friends of Shabazz from scratch.
Friends of Shabazz is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our mission is straightforward: support and enhance the educational experience at Malcolm Shabazz City High School through fundraising, community partnerships, and volunteer engagement. In practice, that means helping cover instructor fees, facilities, classroom supplies, and program costs the school’s own budget can’t stretch to fund on its own. I don’t plan to run this organization forever. My hope is to spend the next decade building something sustainable enough to hand off to the next person who cares about this school as much as I do.
One of the most important things Kelly and I have tried to give Phoebe and Polly is a simple idea: service to others isn’t a lesson, it’s a way of life. Friends of Shabazz is what that looks like for our family — and I wanted the Northside to know what’s happening inside this amazing school, right in our community.
Our new website, friendsofshabazz.org, is where Northsiders can learn more about the school’s programs, our current priorities, and how to get involved. We’ll mark our hard launch with a music benefit on Sunday, November 8th, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the High Noon Saloon, featuring two sets of live rock from the Low Czars and a short presentation at 1 p.m. Anyone with questions is welcome to reach me directly at jopp@friendsofshabazz.org.
* “Phoebe, Kelly and I believe mental health should be talked about openly, without stigma.”
