THE SMART FIGHTER PROGRAM HELPS KNOCK OUT ILLITERACY

Tyrone Booze, former cruiserweight boxing champion, helping one of the local area children with his reading skills. The Smart Fighter Program helps black youth get off the streets, and learn how to help themselves, with boxing lessons AND reading lessons.

The Community Learning Center in Clearwater, run by Scientologist Sharon Hillstead, assisted by one of its best pupils in the adult literacy program, a former cruiserweight boxing champion Tyrone Booze, started a boxing and literary program for young men.

Utlizing Tyrone’s talents as a boxer — and his winning stance as last year’s recipient of the Tampa Bay Reads Adult Student of the Year award — he and Sharon started the Smart Fighter Program. There, black youth can get off the streets and go to daily boxing lessons–with the added punch that they also learn how to read and write.

This program is already so effective that Tyrone was recently honored as the Tutor of the Year for the Tampa Bay region.