Marquis Perry had a 1.1 GPA at Franklin High School and felt his teachers didn't understand his gifts.
"I felt growing up that my teachers were looking at me as an average student. And I hated it," Perry, 17, said. "I was a loner in class because I wasn’t gettin' it."
Outside of class the Reisterstown teen was rapping in the school courtyard, getting plenty of attention. So the school administrators asked him to rap about education. He wrote about the history of the 1950s and made a video that his teachers showed to his classmates.
"I don’t have a math brain. I don’t have an anatomy brain," he said. But then he rapped about anatomy and somehow finding what rhymed with the scientific words made him understand them better. And when he was put in honors English and had to learn about poetry, he discovered he was writing with alliteration already, he just didn't know what it was called. "In English I just shined,' Perry said.
He was making videos, including one about how he was graduating but didn't feel the school system had ever understood him. Perry who goes by @3rddegreeofficial tweeted it @DDance_BCPS, superintendent Dallas Dance. Dance watched the video. When he walked across the stage at graduation last month, Dance was shaking hands with all the graduates. He stopped Perr and told him that he really wanted to talk with him.
During the meeting, Dance asked if he would work on some projects with him, including one about a campaign he is launching to get students to respect each other.
Perry didn't feel he had gone high enough. Specifically, he didn't understand why the High School Assessments were so important. So Dance told him to meet with the state superintendent. On Tuesday, Perry sat down with Karen Salmon, who he said suggested he perform for the state board.
"I want to open the gateway. There are so many other people who learn in a different way and I think I can be a voice from them."
For instance, he doesn't think four years of math should be a requirement, and he doesn't see why they didn't teach him to balance a check book. He took the High School Assessments, he said, and scored in the bottom 2 percent. He wants to tell his teachers and their bosses that there are other ways to measure a student's abilities.