About

---

Being born and raised in South Jamaica Queens in the 80’s couldn’t have been easy. Add a hard

working single mother raising two children to the mix, sprinkle in her low academic scores with a

fighting change to pass her elementary school classes, throw in being bullied and you have an

emotional uphill battle to climb. It can be easy for one feel hopeless and desire giving up or

worse, but when you meet LaTanya now, you can see the overcomer in her. Her fight, resilience,

passion and heart for students combined with her zeal for life; She is unmatched.

Committed to helping students see their strength and potential, LaTanya committed her earlier

years in school preparing for the opportunity to teach students a subject, that while struggling in

school she fell in love with; English. During this time, LaTanya has also created a girls mentoring

program, where she helps young girls come to see their strength within and teach them how to

leverage that strength to help themselves and others.

LaTanya has witnessed students with a wide variety of socioeconomic, financial and learning

challenges that made students want to give up. Through observation and interaction, one of the

main things students struggled with was embracing the confidence to rise above those

socioeconomic and emotional challenges to become students who believe that they have a

problem to solve in the world today and those ahead of them, A fight LaTanya once knew all too

well!