“It’s A Family”: DC SCORES at Ward 8’s Leckie Education Campus
For over a decade, the Leckie poet-athlete “family” has been defying stereotypes, speaking truth to power, and serving their community.
Coach Jordan cannot believe he has coached DC SCORES at Leckie Education Campus for more than a decade.
“Wow, it’s a lot,” says Jordan. “I’m really a 75-year-old man,” he jokes. “The kids keep me young!”
Ward 8’s Leckie officially joined the DC SCORES program in 2013. Since then, the school has expanded its offerings of the nonprofit’s after-school soccer, poetry, and service-learning programs to students in grades 1 through 8.
“It’s been very impactful, the amount of kids we’ve reached, and to watch the consistency of the program,” he says. “One thing about our school here, it’s a family.”
A Family Dynamic
That metaphor is literally true for Aquasyia McKissic, a Leckie parent who has children enrolled in every level of DC SCORES programming.
Her younger son Amion is in the Junior program (1st-2nd grade), her daughter Jeloni attends the elementary program (3rd-5th grade), and her older son Jamartae participates in the middle school program (6th-8th grade).
Having her kids at the same program five days a week after school has been extremely helpful for McKissic, who recently moved to DC for work. “It definitely provides the anchor that’s needed as far as them being able to have somewhere to stay,” she explains.
But more than that, McKissic is grateful for the safety, community, and learning opportunities that the program provides. “Just to keep the kids, you know, in that positive, safe space, safe area, and they have somewhere to go and they don’t have to go towards the negativity that’s out there,” she says. “It’s a family-oriented environment that they provide to the kids, and it has them comfortable to just be themselves.”
McKissic’s experience is not unique. “We have at least 4 to 5 families playing each level,” explains Jordan. He says there is no other program at Leckie that supports entire sibling groups in the way DC SCORES does.
He adds, “It’s great because we don’t have to turn anybody away, so now we have a lineage that goes into it.”
Bridging a Gap
The team’s family culture extends to coaches, too. Coach SauNa’ Spriggs’ daughter Zi’ona attends the program, but it doesn’t mean Zi’ona gets special treatment. The coaches work hard to ensure a supportive mentoring relationship with every child in the program.
“They keep you straight and make sure you learning,” says 8th grader James of his DC SCORES coaches. “Even if you’re not doing well in class, they’ll take you down here and make sure you understand what you’re doing. There’s never a time when they’re not helping.”
Providing that support means meeting kids where they are.
That approach is Zi’ona’s favorite thing about her mom’s coaching. “She puts games out for us to easily understand because that’s how our language is,” she explains. “When they talk all fancy and stuff, we don’t know what they mean. But once you put it in a game-like setting, we know because we have fun a lot.”
Ensuring sessions are youth-centered is key to DC SCORES’ model, and Jordan says that has inspired poet-athletes to embrace the new skills and opportunities offered by DC SCORES.
For instance, Jordan admits that when he first signed up to coach, he wasn’t sure that soccer, a sport predominantly played by white, wealthy kids in the US, would work in a Ward 8 school community that is overwhelmingly Black.
“Soccer, Southeast, I didn’t know if it would stick,” he shares. “But at one point in time, I can proudly say that we probably had the largest program on this side of town!”
DC SCORES’ success at Leckie is meeting a substantial need in the neighborhood.
Families in Ward 7 and 8 report greater interest in out-of-school time (OST) programming than other households, yet face higher competition for enrolling in OST programs. This means many young people are locked out of proven OST programming benefits, including higher academic success, greater college and career readiness, improved social and emotional well-being, and reduced exposure to violence.
To help bridge this gap, DC SCORES launched a campaign to raise $30,000. The amount will fund an entire year of programming at a Southeast school in Wards 7 and 8. The campaign is part of a broader initiative called Poet-Athlete City to establish a DC SCORES program at every Title 1 middle and elementary public school in DC by 2030.
“DC SCORES changed the stereotype,” says Jordan.
Challenging Stereotypes
Playing soccer is not the only way the Leckie team is defying expectations.
“It’s a lot of Black kids here and they might think we’re ghetto and stuff,” says 8th grader Janiyah, “but I feel like the kids in my school, we know how to treat each other. We’re nice, we feel confident, and express ourselves with each other.”
Determined to correct negative and inaccurate perceptions of their school community, the Leckie team picked up their poetry pens and began to write. At the culmination of the fall poetry curriculum last year, the squad came away with first prize at the DC SCORES Middle School Slam for their stereotype-busting performance.
Janiyah shared a solo poem that implored people not to judge her based on her facial expressions. “It’s kind of hard for me every day to have to explain to people, I’m not upset, that’s just how my normal face is, and it kind of gets annoying,” she says, “so I wrote a poem about it.”
Zi’ona helped deliver a group poem about how factors such as educational biases and difficult home lives can impact young people’s behavior at school and in the community.
“It felt like I was giving word out to people,” she says. “I was giving a mindset to change people’s perspective on things. I was making a difference.”
Building Community
Over the years, the Leckie team’s poetry has changed Jordan’s perspectives, too.
“You saw how these kids’ minds work,” he says of the first time he took a group of poet-athletes through the DC SCORES poetry curriculum. “The kids show up at school one way, how they think we should think they are. But once they actually put it on paper, that’s who they really want to be seen as.”
He points to numerous individual success stories: the development of Zi’ona’s soccer skills since joining the program in elementary school, Janiyah’s stellar slam performance, James’ leadership skills as team captain.
But the program has also been a success for the wider community, too.
“The school’s hard on service learning,” Jordan says. “Our service learning is probably one of the things that we pride ourselves on.”
For years, Leckie poet-athletes have used DC SCORES’ service-learning curriculum to support Leckie’s Closet, a school initiative that provides essential clothing items to families in the school who need them.
“I think the first service project, we had three bags. Now we have a roomful in the annex!” says Jordan.
This year, the team is designing their very own soccer jersey with Design FC, an after-school nonprofit that works with young people to promote creative thinking, self-expression, and autobiographical storytelling through sports jersey design.
The team’s jersey will emphasize the poet-athletes’ love for their school and neighborhood community, a theme that is fitting for a group of young people who take great pride in their roots.
James, who serves as one of Leckie’s team captains, believes that embracing community values like this can be a transformative experience.
“Everybody knows the world’s not the greatest,” he says, “so, just being there, trying to pull up, just trying to help people out is helping the world be good again and making it better for others.”
