March/April 2024 Issue

EAST COAST EQUESTRIAN March/April 2024 Page 55 By Amy Worden There are programs that help young people from low-income communities learn to ride and there are programs to help those same students achieve success in the classroom. Now a new non-profit orga- nization in Maryland is marrying the two initiatives. Saddle Up Scholars was founded early last year with a mission to provide tutoring, standardized test prep and academic coaching to children from underserved communities, while partnering with existing equestrian programs providing riding lessons to young peo- ple from Baltimore City and beyond. Saddle Up Scholars is the brainchild of two veteran educa- tors and horsewomen who met through an equine vet years ago. They discovered they had similar careers and interests but also recognized, as they say in their mission statement, “the power of education and the positive in- fluence of horses” to help young people succeed. “We said, let’s go into business and joked about it for years. We both wanted to know, what can we do to help the world at large?” said Win Lewis, who taught at Oldfields School in Baltimore County and was a professor at the Com- munity College of Baltimore County. For Towner the turning point came in 2018 with a student at Harford Community College, where she worked as an admin- istrator. Dominick Merritt was a shy first-year student from Baltimore. In an effort to draw him out of his shell, Towner, who was leading a student empowerment program at the college, asked him about his passions and he said, “thorough- bred racing.” When she pressed him for any specifics that he loved about racing, he said, “All of it.” Towner recalls thinking at the time that she didn’t know much about racing, only that she too loved thoroughbreds, having owned and shown them. But she wanted to help Mer- ritt so she reached out to Chris and Kevin Boniface, owners of Bonita Farm, a thoroughbred breeding and training facility in Darlington, Maryland, to see if they might help. Soon the Bonifaces wel- comed Merritt at their farm and introduced him to hands-on horsemanship with a job mucking stalls and grooming horses. One day a photo of Merritt in boots and hard hat astride one of the Bonifaces’ thoroughbreds landed in Towner’s Facebook message feed as she was sitting in an airport in Texas after receiving a national education award. Seeing that image of her stu- dent sitting on a racehorse filled Saddle Up Scholars– Tutoring Riders from Low Income Communities (Continued on page 70)