PURE Academy, a nonprofit private boarding school, recently opened its new facility located on 3925 Chelsea Avenue Extended.
“At PURE Academy, every young man deserves the chance to overcome challenges, discover their potential, and succeed,” officials said. “With a 100 percent graduation rate and an 83 percent college enrollment rate, along with 17 percent of students entering trade school or military careers, this expansion provides the capacity to impact even more students and continue shaping the future of Memphis youth. ”
Prior to opening the new location, PURE Academy was located in Whitehaven, where they were only able to house 25 students. The Chelsea location is currently in its first phase and can house 64 students. At full capacity, they will be able to hold 250.
“Urban agriculture is a key piece of PURE Academy’s programs, serving as hands-on education and social-emotional outlet spaces,” officials said in a press release. “The outdoor areas on the new campus will include classrooms, a fully equipped kitchen, meditation [areas] and small meeting spaces, creativity zones, technology hubs, and fitness areas.”
CEO and founder Melvin Cole, founded the PURE Youth Athletics Alliance in 2012 after being released from prison, following a pact he made with God to make a difference in the lives of young men who looked like him.
Cole initially started a little league team to reach youth through sports. Through coaching, he was able to see the different walks of life his players came from, some having no adult supervision, electricity, food, and more.
Shortly after, Cole and his fiancée opened their two-bedroom apartment Downtown to about 15 young men. This experience helped him to see the “deficiencies” in the education system.
“At the time I got with a good friend and said ‘what if these kids lived with me, but we put them in a private school, so we’ll take care of the environment,’” Cole said. “The environment is what’s creating the kid — the mind, the adult that comes up and commits crime, and has that way of thinking.”
This led Cole to his own introspection, where he found he wasn’t inherently “bad” as a child, but he was a product of his environment. He found this to be true for several of his kids. According to the 2024 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet from the University of Memphis, the city has a poverty rate of 22.6 percent, while child poverty is 36.3 percent.
Cole was able to get the boys he housed tested into a school, however they scored in the zero percentile in reading, writing, and math. As a result, Cole closed down his for-profit gym and turned it into a “home-school tutorial” — known as their pilot program.
“The first year we got a 3.7 grade-level jump,” Cole said. “The next year we had a 3.1 grade-level jump.”
After seeing these results, Cole was ready to put his students up against standardized testing such as the ACT to see their placement. Not only were his students scoring in the 20s on their first attempt, but one student from the pilot program received a full athletic scholarship from Texas A & M.
“We went screaming ‘it works, it works!” Cole said.
Fast-forward to 2020 when school and inner city sports began to shut down. Cole said he approached his board about the importance of sports in many of his students’ lives, saying, for some, it was the only way to change the trajectory of their lives.
Cole then launched a football team, and began looking into Category 1 private certification in the state for non-public schools. After meeting the requirements, PURE Academy was officially launched.
PURE Academy’s core mission is rooted in opportunity in lived experience. This also extends into their curriculum, which focuses heavily on real-world application and situations. Cole said he found this was the best way to not only keep students engaged, but to catch those who had fallen behind in other school systems.
“We created something that was going to be successful for the kids,” Cole said. “These kids are just like me — if not in worse situations. The treatment and the curriculum was easy to build. If you don’t teach kids how to apply knowledge, it’s pointless.”
At its core, PURE emphasizes the importance of equaling the playing field for those less fortunate. He said kids can’t choose if they live in poverty or not, which means they shouldn’t miss out on the opportunities offered to their peers.
“These kids need the same damn opportunities we got to be successful,” Cole said. “People forget that. Our children that are living in double the national average of poverty, they cannot create opportunity for themselves. We have to help them, period. If you’re not helping, you’re hurting.”