The Northern Virginia Urban League awarded $50,000 in scholarships to local high school students at its annual Community Service and Scholarship Awards Dinner Friday, April 19. The organization, whose mission it is to enable disadvantaged youth to achieve economic and academic success, awarded one scholarship to South County Secondary School senior Tyrone Simpson.

“We need to excite our kids about science, technology, engineering and math in elementary school, so when they are a junior in high school they can really learn those areas of focus and participate in related extracurricular activities, like Lego Robotics,” said Cynthia Dinkins, president and CEO of the Northern Virginia Urban League. “Then when it’s time to go to college they can seriously consider majoring in one of those areas.”

Dinkins said the importance of STEM learning must be imparted by all parties in the educational system.

“We need assistance from the homes, the schools, the churches and any other community groups. Learning starts at home, so it’s upon us as parents that we encourage children to learn things that are different than they might normally learn, to go outside the box a little bit,” she said. “And it’s incumbent upon the schools to ensure we have teachers in the classrooms that make math, science, engineering and technology exciting. There are so many things youth can do in those programs.”

SIMPSON HAS DONATED his time and effort to many causes outside of school. He co-founded a service member support organization at South County, organized a donation drive for soldiers overseas and helped raise finds for a wreath to be laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

He also tutors middle school students in history, volunteers at the Lorton Community Action Center, his local library and on Potomac River cleanups.

“I haven’t decided where I’m going to college yet, hopefully I can get into the University of Virginia to study neuroscience,” he said. “Neuroscience focuses a lot on chemistry and biology, in order to be a doctor, to become a neurosurgeon, I need to be strong in those fields.”

The Northern Virginia Urban League also presented awards to Boeing and Randal Pinkett, a Rhodes scholar and winner of season four of “The Apprentice.”

Pinkett said that the coming years would prove vital to the future of minorities in the U.S., because they have an opportunity to increase their impact on the STEM fields.

He cited the fact that while the U.S. population consists of 13 percent African-American, 14 percent Hispanic and 1 percent Native American peoples, they only make up 6 percent, 8 percent and .6 percent, respectively, of the U.S. college engineering population.

“Minorities, while we are witnesses to this digital world we live in, we are not as active participants in this technological revolution as we need to be,” he said. “What we need is not more of us engaged in technology as consumers, we need more of us as active producers of technology, creating, designing, programming, imagining, because consumers change very little about the world. It’s producers who innovate change the landscape and the marketplace. That opportunity is right at our fingertips, because young people are already inclined to be comfortable with technology.”

MARC MORIAL, the president and CEO of the National Urban League, was also in attendance, and he urged the audience to make STEM education a top priorities.

“This commitment to STEM education, to enabling, ensuring and equipping our children, is not only something that is good to do, it is an imperative for us,” he said. “Great nations do not just buy things, great nations make and invent things.”