March was student Empowerment Month and Newport News Schools presented three Wednesday sessions for students.  The March (March 9th and March 25th) were lead by the NNPS Student School Board representative Jordon Moody.   The sessions provided students with information about mental health and building a positive self-image.

The first empowerment session was called “There’s More to Me”, which was a session that talked about how to deal with mental health. The speaker, Andrew Brown had been shot in Newport News while being out at night, and he discussed how he had struggled with his mental health because getting shot was a difficult subject for him to talk about which took him a while to heal from that traumatizing incident. After he had finished sharing his story, Brown led the group in a breathing exercise which was to inhale for eight seconds and then exhale for eight seconds.

The second empowerment session was called Boss Moves (The Path To Greatness) and was lead by Dr. Charles Corprew, a psychologist who helps women, non-binary, and people of color find entrepreneurship jobs in the United States.  He talked about how minorities can start out entering the business world and the resources they could get to help them.  He also talked about the importance of dealing with mental health in the business world by going to therapy.