‘Mending Fences’: USC’s Relations With Community

Your cover story (“Mending Fences,” March 21), touched on USC’s improvements in its community outreach. Yet, it spent a great deal of time examining trivial concerns and rehashing battles of days gone by.

Many of the children and parents enrolled in the Neighborhood Academic Initiative’s support programs wanted to respond to the article’s implication that the university has failed to satisfy the larger needs of the community.

I think you will find that the children and their families do not feel shut out of the gates that surround USC. In fact, they feel very much a part of the Trojan Family.

JAMES C. FLEMING

Director of the USC

Neighborhood Academic Initiative