RE LOG - Spring 2017

SPRING 2017 Ransom Everglades LOG 17 You went from Ransom Everglades to Columbia University. Was that a challenging transition? Ransom was the adjustment, not Columbia. I learned, if you can get through Ransom, you can go anywhere. Ransom was just a good place. It gave a kid a real-life idea of what he or she needed to do academically to be in the running. There was no cutting corners. Every instructor expected the most of you. For those children that weren’t up to par, they just weren’t there the next year. One of the things that’s critical for Ransom Everglades if it wants to remain one of the best schools in the country, is to continue to increase its diversity. Diversity improves the quality of the classroom and campus experience. How did you land in the State Attorney’s Office under Janet Reno after law school? My mother got a full scholarship to the Pratt Institute (in Brooklyn) for clothing design, then got her master’s in education at Columbia Teacher’s College. She taught home economics at Florida A&M in Tallahassee before I was born. When she came to Miami, she got very involved. She was involved with the Miami-Dade Heritage Trust; the Black Archives, a historical foundation in Dade County. My mother had been supporting Janet Reno’s campaign financially, as far as a teacher could support her. When I met Janet Reno, it opened up the notion of being a prosecutor as a good thing. In the neighborhood I grew up, the concept of a prosecutor was not necessarily a good thing. After Columbia, I went to work at the State Attorney’s Office. Working for Janet Reno turned out to offer an ideal start to understanding the importance of fairness. Story continues, page 67 Photos by Joshua Prezant