A Rochester teen is the winner of this year's Princeton Prize in Race Relations.
18 year old Shalinda Bollar was honored this week at the award ceremony at Allendale Columbia School.
Bollar was recognized for work she has done both with the city school district and at the Teen Empowerment Center where she is a youth organizer.
Bollar, a student at Early College International High School, has worked on the effort to revamp the Code of Conduct in the city school district, so that suspensions are used only as a measure of last resort.
She says one problem is the fact that there is a large population of minority students with not too many teachers of color.
But Bollar does see slow, steady progress.
“We’re seeing more openness and students and teachers willing to talk to each other and just get a more open dialogue, so that it won’t be as shallow, everybody’s being real with each other.”
Bollar says winning the prize will help her spread her message about the need for better understanding.
“When my teachers found out that I had it they wanted me to speak to the younger students in the school so I kind of feel like it just gives me a broader audience, a different type of audience, not just youth that I see on a daily basis but also my peers, my mentors and things like that.”
Bollar received a $1,000 prize and will go to Princeton University next month to attend a symposium on race relations.
Two other awards handed out included one to the West Irondequoit School Superintendent, Jeff Crane helping bring the first of the Roc2Change conferences that now gather hundreds of high school students to take action against racism and racial inequities.
Another award went to the Greece Central School District, which has fostered the MOSAICS program, not only as a diversity club but as a for-credit senior English elective, with a curriculum created by students to deal with all sorts of inclusion issues.
