When we asked the Cut’s Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz to talk with parents of students at Capital Prep Harlem, the charter school that Diddy founded in 2016, about their reactions to recent allegations of assault and abuse against the rapper, she found that their concerns went far beyond the school’s former partnership with him. Those she spoke with described an atmosphere of chaos and dysfunction that made learning almost impossible, a sentiment echoed by teachers and students. Fights and school-wide lockdowns were not uncommon. The school was at times so understaffed that students could go months at a time without receiving instruction in certain subjects. Record-keeping was such a mess that some students’ transcripts had them passing classes they’d never taken, teachers and parents said, which complicated the process of applying to colleges. And parents who hoped their children might benefit from the school’s pedigree and connections to Diddy instead discovered that he had little involvement. “He was supposed to be an inspiration to those children, coming from what you might consider the hood,” one parent told Sangeeta, “and he was not.”
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