Students in Co-op City honored their longtime chess teacher on Sunday with a surprise plaque they purchased themselves.<\/p>\n
Romeo Davis, who runs the Young Kings and Queens mentoring and chess program, has been teaching the game \u2014 and life skills \u2014 for 25 years. His club has been operating out of the Baychester Library for the past month, where Davis meets regularly with students to play, study and mentor.<\/p>\n
Students said they saved the money Davis would give them for snacks and pooled it together over several months to thank him for his guidance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to be very cocky whenever I played chess,\u201d said student Michael Nibo. \u201cAfter Mr. Romeo taught me, I learned to be humble.\u201d<\/p>\n
Davis said his work is about far more than chess.<\/p>\n
\u201cBuilding up life skills \u2014 chess is a reflection of people\u2019s lives,\u201d he said. \u201cWhatever they do on the board \u2014 if they\u2019re aggressive, if they\u2019re patient \u2014 I can see it. If they\u2019re trying to trade a pawn for a rook, that tells me they don\u2019t know the values in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
The surprise came during the group\u2019s final session of the year. The library\u2019s branch manager said the location will continue operating on Sundays, offering a range of services for the community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students in Co-op City honored their longtime chess teacher on Sunday with a surprise plaque they purchased themselves.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,8090,4207,26064,9,24,63,2585,33560,129,131,130],"class_list":{"0":"post-64005","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bronx","8":"tag-bronx","9":"tag-chess","10":"tag-children","11":"tag-co-op-city","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-students","16":"tag-teenagers","17":"tag-the-bronx","18":"tag-the-bronx-headlines","19":"tag-the-bronx-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}