ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Keeping student athletes on a path to success is the focus of the S.M.A.R.T. program at Monroe High School in the City of Rochester.

“It’s just a very great experience, you meet a lot of new people you never thought you would meet,” says Nicholas Reeves, a 10th grader at Monroe. “In school you never thought you would go to a college campus for free, we’ve been on a lot of trips, we have this thing called S.M.A.R.T. Olympics where we compete against each other and have fun.”

S.M.A.R.T is a club made up of mostly student-athletes, who think they may want to do sports-related jobs in the future. “We talk about what things we want to do, and what stuff we want to major in in college and we do job shadowing too,” said Luis Falu, an 11th grade member.

Principal Jason Mohammad started S.M.A.R.T. at Monroe 4 years ago. “We have data from the district that says the more sports a student plays, the higher the GPA, the higher the average daily attendance rate, the higher the graduation rate, the lower the suspension rate,” Mohammad says.  “You don’t have to suspend an athlete, you tell them they can’t play and that’s worse than a suspension so we put together smart… (stands for) sports majors athletics and regents track, we’re connecting students passions for athletics, regardless of what it is, to their academics in a real way.”

For example, Mohammad says, “you may have a young person who doesn’t want to take a statistics class but they can tell you LeBron’s stats from last night so, how could you not want to take a statistics class when you just told me all of the stats that Curry had last night…It’s finding a way to ignite their academics in the same way that they’re passions have been ignited.”

And it’s working.

“It really has taken off, and we have a cohort of about 75 students, and they have the highest GPAs in the school, they have the highest average daily attendance,” Mohammad says. “Last year’s valedictorian and salutatorian were two African American males from the S.M.A.R.T program, now traditionally, I don’t want to say traditionally but historically, you don’t find two black boys as the valedictorian and the salutatorian,” he notes. 

Every athlete isn’t in the S.M.A.R.T. program and everyone in the S.M.A.R.T. program isn’t an athlete but they all have a passion for sports. So, advisors try to connect them with as many professionals that work in the sports industry as possible to show them all the options out there, after graduation.

“Different opportunities for everybody, there’s different things you can do out in the world,” says Julieann Falu, a 12th grade member of S.M.A.R.T. at Monroe.  “It helps you learn those things so you can push for it in the future,” added Reeves.

The school even runs summer programs for SMART students to keep them engaged both academically and athletically even in the off-season.

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