Shinnecock Resident Sa'Naya Morris Earns Prestigious Gates Scholarship

Sa’Naya Morris will be the first to tell you that she’s fiercely independent.

She handles her business with a kind of maturity and determination uncommon in most adults, never mind high schoolers.

The Southampton High School senior and member of the Shinnecock Nation took ownership of her academic career from an early age, and it has paid off. She learned earlier this month that she was one of a select group of students from around the country to earn a prestigious Gates Scholarship, which will essentially provide her with a free college education.

The Gates Scholarship, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is described on its website as “a highly selective, last-dollar scholarship for outstanding minority high school seniors from low-income households.”

Launched in 2017, the Gates scholarship program is based, according to its website, on evidence that “by eliminating the financial barriers to college, a last-dollar scholarship can enable high-potential, low-income minority students to excel in their course work, graduate college, and continue to be leaders throughout their lives.”

In addition to funding, The Gates Scholarship program promises to provide further support to recipients, by “engaging with them and their institutions in a variety of ways, to ensure they have access to the resources and services they need, from their first to last day of classes, through graduation and the transition to their chosen careers.”

It becomes evident early on during a conversation with the 17-year-old Morris why she was chosen to receive the scholarship, which has a rigorous application process, and which is awarded to fewer than 800 students out of the more than 53,000 who apply.

Her academic bona fides are impressive enough: She graduated from Southampton High School’s ISA program, an immersive Spanish-language learning program that earned her a New York State seal of bi-literacy, while also taking almost every Advanced Placement course the school had to offer. She also played multiple sports throughout middle and high school, including field hockey and lacrosse.

She comes across immediately as self-assured, but without any of the typical teenage bluster or bravado. She matter-of-factly makes the stunning admission that she did not even tell her mother, Linee Matthews, that she had applied for the Gates Scholarship, which she first heard about on TikTok, of all places.

“I’m very independent, so anything I did, I did it on my own,” she said. “I didn’t tell my mom I was applying — I just kind of did it. My whole academic career, my mom has left it up to me — she trusts me and knows I’m not going to mess that up.”

Cultivating independence in a teen seems like a feat of magic in these modern times of helicopter and lawn-mower parenting, but Matthews pulled it off, and, to Morris’s credit, she stepped up to the challenge.

Morris said one of the few times she remembers her mom intervening and putting her foot down was when Morris wanted to drop out of the dual language program when she was in middle school.

“I do remember my mom saying, ‘No, this is the greatest thing ever,’” Morris recalled with a laugh, before saying she was glad her mom made her stick with it.

While her independence has been a primary feature of her personality, Morris also earned a reputation in the school for being an uplifter of her community in a very particular way, one that resulted in what she calls her proudest moment as a high schooler.

Morris co-founded the Black Girl Magic club with friend London Bess, with a very specific goal, she said, of “making it known that there is a Black community in Southampton, even though it may exist quietly or however you may see it.”

During spring break in April of last year, Morris and Bess led a seven-day road trip with 24 minority students to visit 13 colleges across seven states. It was the culmination of a planning process that had started in December 2022.

“It was something we’d been talking about since we started the club,” she said, adding that she and Bess came up with a plan for the trip, polled club members about where they’d like to go for visits, coordinated with the schools, mapped out the best route, came up with a budget, and did some fundraising. They also presented their plans to local organizations like the Southampton Youth Association and were able to earn grant money and sponsorship dollars to fully fund the trip.

“The most rewarding thing for me was seeing everybody get excited about college,” she said. “People were, like, ‘Wow, now I know where I want to go and what I want to do.’ That was our whole goal.

“A lot of minority students need to work right out of high school or may not be able to afford to go to college,” she continued. “We wanted to give them that taste of it, and then they can make that decision for themselves.

“When I got home, it hit me how big of a deal that was.”

Not surprisingly, Morris has a clear vision of what is next for her and what she wants, both in the immediate future and further down the road.

In the fall, she is headed to the University of Tampa, where she will major in criminology and will be on a pre-law track.

She spoke candidly about what motivated her to follow that career path, sharing that her brother — one of two much older siblings — had a troubled time as a youth and struggled with learning disabilities and behavioral issues.

“I watched him get in trouble and go through the system at such a young age and not be rehabbed properly,” she said, adding that he became “institutionalized,” and suffered a number of injustices at the hands of the criminal justice system.

Witnessing that happen to a loved one activated another primary feature of Morris’s personality: her commitment to standing up for what’s right and calling out injustices when she sees them.

“I’ve always been one where, if I see something that’s not right or don’t agree with it, I speak out,” she said. “I’ve never held back my tongue on anyone. Everybody that knows me knows that I’m a no BS person when it comes to social justice or anything of that sort.”

She also shared that she has an affinity for true crime and is drawn to documentaries that tell the stories of people who have been mistreated.

It’s all fed into her desire to study the law and immerse herself in that world, she said. She plans to enter law school after earning her undergraduate degree and taking the bar exam, but said she’s still unsure if she would practice law — a career as a district attorney or judge is appealing, she said — or go into a profession where knowing the law and having passed the bar would come in handy, perhaps in a related field pertaining to mental health.

Thanks to the Gates Scholarship, she now has the kind of financial support and backing to support her in that journey.

Morris said it took a while for the full weight of how monumental winning the scholarship was to sink in. She let her mom know she had applied once she had been informed she’d made it to the semifinalist stage.

There was an interview with a Gates Foundation employee, and Morris also had to write a 600-word speech as if she were presenting to Congress asking for funding.

She wrote about Best Buddies, the program at Southampton that creates bonds and friendships between intellectually and developmentally disabled students and their peers. She served as vice president for Best Buddies during her time at Southampton, and also participated in the unified physical education program at the school as well.

She said being part of the organization was one of the highlights of her high school career as well.

“They really meant a lot to me,” she said of the friends she made in that group, including a student named Liam, who would jokingly refer to her as Shania Twain. “They were really my friends, not just kids with autism. I looked past that and treated them like normal people while still being conscious of what things set them off and what doesn’t.”

Morris connected with fellow students from all walks of life while at Southampton, and certainly made an impression on her teachers as well.

Paula Wetzel taught Morris for many years at Southampton, including in AP English, and calls herself “the luckiest teacher in Southampton” to have spent time with Morris and have her as a student.

She said she remembers being immediately impressed by Morris’s maturity when she first met her, when Morris was in sixth grade.

“She was one of about 25 students who had me as their English teacher three times, which, although that’s the norm in Bridgehampton, is very unlikely in Southampton,” Wetzel said. “Basically, that’s sticking by them through a lot of academic and social development, with puberty and a global pandemic thrown in there.

“Sa’Naya and I worked hard during the pandemic to keep her fully engaged, but we were close enough for me to be very real with her and helping her meet my academic expectations despite the circumstances,” she added. “I kept the letter she wrote me the following year thanking me for ‘driving her crazy’ during remote learning by making sure she was engaged with the content and mentally feeling supported.

“Ninth and 10th grade can be a difficult time in regards to social and emotional development,” Wetzel continued. “And every student was facing unexpected challenges with moving to high school under these circumstances. This inevitably brought us closer, so by the time we were facing each other again in AP class junior year, we were very much family.”

Wetzel continued to gush about Morris, saying that in addition to having “extraordinary emotional intelligence,” she also “knows what she wants and how to make it happen.”

“She makes good decisions in regard to her future,” Wetzel said. “Her career goals make her an obvious choice for the Gates Scholarship. She is pursuing a law degree — which makes perfect sense when you get to know her, as she can always recognize when something is unfair, someone is mistreated, something is not right in a situation. She can quickly figure out a sensible and logical approach to any problem. Her maturity informs her innate sense of justice and equity.”

Morris got the news that she’d been chosen as a Gates Scholarship recipient over spring break, while she was with family in Maryland for a funeral. It was after 8 p.m. at night, she said, that she got the news via email.

“I ran down the stairs at my uncle’s house and told my mom, and she started crying,” Morris said.

Morris will spend the rest of the summer working at Hamptons Art Camp, run by the community nonprofit Hamptons Community Outreach. She’ll also put in some hours at another job she’s had for awhile, at the Southampton Golf Range, before heading off to start the next big phase of her life.