Shabazz City High School class of 2004 alumna Alexis Johnson is the executive assistant/office manager at HealthX Ventures, a digital healthcare-focused venture capital firm in Madison, WI. Before that, she spent six years at Noric Consulting, helping the company to grow from less than 30 employees to over 800 by the time she left. But had it not been for her experience at Shabazz City High School, she's not sure she would have even graduated high school. Here is her story...

"I always had a lot of anxiety surrounding school, from a very young age. I was an average student, able to get by easily without putting in too much effort, until I reached high school. Due to my anxiety and several other factors I started engaging in some self-destructive behaviors early on in high school and quickly found myself falling behind my peers and feeling quite hopeless about my future. I was attending a large high school and it was very easy for me to slip through the cracks. I was not being disruptive in school (I was barely going) and I mostly did enough just to scrape by with passing grades. My guidance counselors, Principal and parents did what they could to try to get me on track. I would often get things together for a few months at time, just enough to pull up my grades to passing, before slipping through the cracks once again and continuing down a self-destructive path. After a particularly bad semester due to some health issues added on to everything else, a guidance counselor recommended I look into attending Shabazz City High School. I was not too keen on the idea of going to a new school but everyone around me was encouraging me to go so I thought it was worth a try."

Shabazz was so different from any school I had ever attended, and I found myself interested and involved in a way I had never been before.

"Classes at Shabazz were tailored to things the students were interested in and I found myself excited about learning for possibly the first time in my life. I got to take a history class centered around the music of Bob Dylan, made my own Djembe, and learned so much about racial inequalities and social justice issues. I became a peer mediator and facilitated mediations with students at Sherman Middle School which is in a shared building with Shabazz. I got involved in Student Government. I became the “Shadow Coordinator” assigning potential students that were coming to “shadow” for a day with a current student. I went on a caving trip with Stress Challenge class and attended an Ethics Symposium. Shabazz felt like a family, it was the first time I felt like my teachers really cared about my success. I didn’t have the option of slipping through the cracks the same way I did at my home school. The school and classes were smaller, and they had an attendance policy, so if I wanted to stay there, I had to go to school and participate. I don’t think I would have graduated high school without Shabazz."

"After High School I managed some local restaurants and coffee shops until I ended up with a position at Nordic Consulting. I started at Nordic in 2010 when there were less than 25 consultants and only 4 of us in the home office and when I left in 2016 Nordic had over 800 employees. I started out as a receptionist at Nordic and when I left I was in charge of Billing and Reimbursements, overseeing a team of 8. I’m now working at HealthX Ventures, a digital healthcare-focused venture capital firm and I truly love my job and my life. I know I would not be where I am today without my time at Shabazz and I’ll be forever grateful."

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