Every day, Mr Winston wakes up with one goal in mind. To help people. In the morning, Mr Winston clocks into work at North High, helping coordinate the school and students for college. After hours, he goes to Worcester Tech to help students with trades get the career opportunities they need, helping wherever he can. He spends whatever time he has available, he takes the time to help give people the resources they need, and that is why he’s such a special figure at North High.
From a young age, Mr. Winston learned what it meant to pass on kindness. Mr Winston. was born in Springfield and moved over to Worcester when he was 27. When he was a kid, his parents would take him to fun places like museums. However, every time they went out, his father would always make sure he would take a friend that wasn’t as fortunate as him so they could have fun as well . “So just watching him do all that, made me realize if you got it, why not pass it on?” As he grew up, this bubble seemed to grow with him. One of his first jobs was working at a teen lockup, which opened his eyes even more to the fact that students like us, need to make this critical decisions for their life and career earlier. “So I felt like I needed to get them before that. And the way to do that, I started joining after school programs and ran those, the Boys and Girls Clubs and the YMCA. And then I figured, how can I help even more?”
At 27 years old, Mr. Winston would eventually move to Worcester. here. “So I just started to apply to different places in different cities and was gonna say, whoever offered me the first job that paid the best, I would move. So that ended up being Worcester.” In Worcester, he would land a job as an assistant for a program at North High. Not just any program, but GEAR UP.
GEAR UP was a program at our school North High that assisted students in preparing for college and giving scholarships to children with the program. For a time, Mr. Winston was an assistant for gear up. For the last 3 years however, he worked as the director for the program, and left a substantial impact on our school. “And I felt like over those three years, we became the heartbeat of North. We made sure as soon as a student entered North High School, they knew who we were. They knew we were a resource, and they used this to the best of their ability. Um, so I just believe we were the heartbeat to make sure that kids knew we were the safe space. We wanted to help them find their purpose, even if they were struggling with it.” His work as the director of GEAR UP left a lasting impact on not just our school, but the many students who came out of it and went to college because of the program. Even though the program may have been terminated, Mr. Winston still continues to follow the pursuit of helping people.
Mr. Winston has been a large figure for Black Student Unions all over Worcester. He’s gone from North High, to South High, Doherty, and many other schools and colleges, planting seeds for Black Student Unions to grow. This year marks his fourth leading the BSU at North High, hosting new events that haven’t been done before, and it only continues to spread and celebrate Black excellence to the children of Worcester…