As new ACS liaison on A-B Tech board Asheville's Roger Reid to advocate for Black youths

Roger Reid, Asheville City Board of Education’s newest appointment to the Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College Board of Trustees, is a familiar face to many in the community.

Reid, 36, currently serves as the YMCA of Western North Carolina's association teen director. An Asheville native and proud Asheville City Schools alumni, Reid was sworn into the 16-member board last month.

As the liaison between Asheville City Schools and A-B Tech, Reid will play a vital representative role in encouraging dual enrollment programs for students in Asheville City Schools, according to ACS Board Chair Sieburg. Between 2020-2021, 68% of ACS high schoolers enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, but across the state, only 8% of Black students were dual-enrolled, compared to 16% of their white peers.

Reid is known in the Asheville community for his work in community outreach, which is especially focused on youth of color. Reid attended North Carolina Central University in Durham, where he studied microbiology and psychology with a focus on youth advocacy.

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Passion for Asheville's youths

Reid said his experiences growing up in Asheville ― an area with the fifth-highest White-Black achievement gap in the country, according to a 2018 study by the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis ― instilled him with an early passion for youth advocacy in non-white communities.

“I had a lot of friends who were in a community that didn’t know how to articulate or really speak, so they used violence to communicate,” Reid told the Citizen Times.

“So that was a very big passion of mine while in college, was to find out how I can be an advocate for not only youths, but for people of color who don’t have that articulation to be able to speak for themselves and advocate for themselves.”

Reid worked for five years as a teaching assistant at Asheville City Schools. When the pandemic began, Reid transitioned from education to more direct community outreach roles, joining the YMCA of WNC as a membership manager in 2021. Nine months later, Reid became the association teen director, further focusing his work on youth outreach.

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Sieburg said Reid’s background in community outreach, especially in connecting with Black youth in the area, made him a strong choice for the ACS Board’s appointment. Sieburg said between Reid’s history at ACS and his direct community outreach with the YMCA, the board believed he could be a good liaison in connecting and encouraging students of color with opportunities at A-B Tech.

“He was really working on some youth and adult programs through the YMCA that we felt was a really good connector to folks in our community who might not always get the information that they need to get,” Sieburg said.

Reid said he hopes to use his role on the board to encourage students who have traditionally felt discouraged from higher education to pursue dual enrollment and further higher education.

“I think it’s important for us to really hit home on getting our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) kids to know the importance of education from a real life standpoint,” Reid told the Citizen Times.

“It’s given out, but not everyone is taking it serious. So really being a focus of the BIPOC community, saying how important it is that A-B Tech has these programs that you can participate in and take advantage of, and then, before you know it, you can have an associate’s degree.”

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Reid pointed to the recent addition of the Barber Academy at A-B Tech as a means of encouraging economic mobility for Black students in the community through education. Reid noted that Black barbers were long a vital element of Asheville’s downtown community, but that decades of gentrification and urban renewal forced many of those storefronts out.

Reid said he hopes to work collaboratively between ACS, A-B Tech, and the YMCA of WNC, which recently began work on “Project Aspire,” a walkable village in Downtown Asheville with a focus on affordable housing and incubation spaces for minority and women-owned businesses, to encourage young Black students to pursue barber’s licenses and promote the opening of Black-owned barber shops in the community.

“It is a historical fix for me, to try to get back to having black-owned businesses, and elevating our black community in higher education at the same time,” Reid said.

Sieburg said Reid’s presence on the board as a Black man – one of four people of color on the 16-member board – brings a vital representational role to the local Black community.

“Because we as a board know that our district has not always served the Black community to their best interest, we thought it was important to have a good voice on that board who can help be that liaison,” Sieburg said.

Reid said he hopes to work collaboratively between his roles at the YMCA and the board of trustees to elevate community outreach.

“I hope it also brings light about possible opportunities on what we’re trying to as the Y, as well as collaborating with A-B Tech and Asheville City Schools on a lot of things, to bring in light to youth, and providing opportunity for our community,” Reid said.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville native Roger Reid appointed as ACS liaison to AB Tech board