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In 2020, Tashia Thomas Neal noticed students across the Syracuse City School District were unsettled by the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing civil unrest, while also struggling to return to daily life after months in quarantine.

As students struggled to return to life at school, Neal, who was then working at the Onondaga County Department of Children and Family Services, was inspired to give students an outlet to educate and empower themselves and others while combating racial injustice. Along with colleagues Monica Bacote, the diversity, equity and inclusion director at CFS, and Jenny Dombroske, now executive director of community engagement at Syracuse University, she developed the Student Coalition on Race and Equity program.

“I (thought) maybe it’ll be pretty cool for kids to learn about things like implicit bias and Black history and then teach it to teachers,” Neal said.

SCORE is an after-school program that prepares students in the community to educate others about racial disparities, bias prevention and the histories of minority groups that aren’t taught in schools. The founders hoped students could learn from one another and provide support in the face of systemic racism.

“If we could give them access to the tools to learn about these complexities, maybe then they could share their insights in a way that adults could learn from,” Dombroske said. “Maybe they could even teach the teachers.”

The program was recently awarded the Unsung Heroes Award by SU, presented annually in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The award is given to community members, students, faculty and staff who have positively impacted others but are not widely recognized for doing so, according to the university’s website.

“When I was asked to join the MLK Celebration Planning Committee, and was reminded of the Unsung Hero Awards, I knew immediately that I would nominate this group,” Dombroske said. “SCORE embodies everything the Unsung Hero award stands for and they deserved recognition for being such an impactful and unique forum for learning and growing toward a more equitable world.”

In honor of Black History Month, SCORE has hosted youth-led teaching sessions open to the community throughout this week.

On Thursday, student educators will present “Teaching Hard History,” which examines the history of the African American experience, specifically targeting stories that aren’t taught in public school systems. They’ll also present “A Better Way to Tell the Story,” which focuses on reframing narratives of African American history to highlight resistance and underrecognized Black figures, Neal said.

The presentations, along with the many other SCORE-hosted events, are led entirely by students who went through the program.

“It really increases your confidence and how well you can publicly speak, and also how to ask questions and get a crowd involved,” student SCORE Leader Avya Mangla, said. “It’s really a skill that you can use in any facet of your life, and I really learned a lot of that from SCORE.”

The program provides students with in-depth training, lessons from expert speakers and resources such as mental health and yoga workshops. It also provides a stipend to the students who complete it. This past year, the organization employed four youth “SCORE Specialists” to help lead its initiatives.

“It’s really important in recognizing and valuing the work that they do. They are giving a service to the community by conducting these workshops and by learning the material and conducting the workshops,” Neal said. “That also ties in with the youth-guided, youth-driven aspect of where we want SCORE to be.”

Other workshops that SCORE has trained students to run include “Implicit Bias,” which focuses on acknowledging and reducing subconscious biases, and more recent workshops focusing on reducing implicit bias toward the LGBTQ+, Arab and Muslim communities.

The organization has inspired students to bring what they have learned through the program to other facets of their lives, Neal said. For student leaders Emma Wilson-Hefti and Ososeno Ikhide, the training motivated them to start a DEI-focused club at their high school.

Wilson-Hefti and Ikhide, both first-year SCORE leaders, helped lead this month’s BHM workshops. In their club at East Syracuse Minoa Central High School, they relay what they learn in SCORE training to their peers and tackle topics of bias, discrimination and diversity.

“Being able to teach other people about these heavy topics, such as implicit bias and Black history, especially at schools, is something that students aren’t able to do,” Ikhide said. “Opening a space or creating a space where students can do that has been very helpful to us.”

SCORE conducts workshops in August throughout Syracuse after students have completed training. It’s conducted these core workshops for around 3,000 community members since its founding. In addition to working in tandem with SCSD, other community organizations like the Dunbar Association and Allyn Family Foundation also give support.

SCORE leaders plan to continue expanding the program. Many students who have completed the program, including those in college, are set to return this summer to help lead the organization.

“Oftentimes young people are discounted, there’s so much adultism, ‘young people don’t know anything, they don’t care about anything,’” Neal said. “SCORE highlights the skills that they have, the passions that they have, the abilities that they have.”

Published on February 19, 2025 at 9:12 pm

Contact Anna: aclevitt@syr.edu