Before Global Media Studies became a magnet school, it was an acclaimed media program founded by counselor Cathee Cohen, pictured at left.

 

Affectionately called "The House Cathee Built," the current GMS facility was conceived in 1996 when Ms. Cohen won a grant to start a media program at Cleveland High School. The Media Academy officially opened in 2003, but Cohen wrote the curriculum and enrolled students as early as 1999. The construction contract was scheduled to take 230 days, but it ended up taking four years!

 

A fancy facility is nothing without a passionate and talented team of teachers, of course, and that role was ably filled by founding teachers Evelyn Seubert and James Gleason. This dynamic duo not only taught together and created a number of specialized media classes, including the broadcast class which produces KCAV, but they saw the program through several incarnations.

 

The Media Academy became a small learning community called GAIMS (the Global Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies) in 2015. This program merged three existing programs into one (the Green Power Academy, the Media Academy, and Interdisciplinary Studies). In 2016 GAIMS applied and was approved to become an LAUSD Linked Learning school (which it still is today). In 2018 GAIMS applied to become a magnet school, and in 2019 GMS officially opened its doors, with the ability to draw interested students from all over LAUSD.