17-06-2025
Why a Teacher of the Year Is Giving His Prize Money Away
Good morning. It's Tuesday. We'll meet a Bronx high school teacher who just won a $25,000 award — and decided to put the money toward a teaching prize in Gambia when his hopes for a State Department grant fell through. We'll also find out about Senator Robert Menendez's 11-year prison sentence, which starts today.
Alhassan Susso is a teacher at a high school in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx who has won numerous awards, including a national teacher-of-the-year prize in 2020. He has just been recognized again, this time with an award of $25,000.
That money will now go to self-funding a project he is passionate about — a teacher-of-the-year prize in Gambia, where he is from — because his hopes for a grant from the State Department appear to have been dashed.
For months, Susso had been preparing to submit an application for something called a public diplomacy grant through the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, the Gambian capital. Then, last month, the webpage with information about the grant program disappeared, Susso said.
He had heard about the Trump administration's plans to lay off nearly the entire staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development, more than 9,700 employees. He figured that U.S.A.I.D. had something to do with administering the public diplomacy grants.
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