Rosedale Park Baptist Church members congregate twice a month for lecture and discussion in a meeting room usually reserved for Sunday school.
But unlike typical services at the Brightmoor house of worship, attendees of these two-hour convenings get a dose of higher learning.
The meetings are community Black history classes, and the instructor leading the lessons is Quan Neloms, a former teacher for Detroit Public Schools Community District and current counselor for Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA). Neloms’ classes began about three years ago at the request of church Pastor Gregory Alexander.
“Since this is at a church, you can teach the way you want to teach, so that was intriguing to me,” he told BridgeDetroit after teaching a recent Friday lesson on Black intellectuals Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois. “I love going there and really being able to spark discussion and helping people of all ages learn about the importance of Black history.”
The sessions, coined “Knowing Our Past,” are one of many endeavors the 45-year-old Detroit educator takes on when he’s not counseling young people. One of Neloms’ biggest passions is advocating for more Black men in the classroom, so he created I Am in Demand, a program that connects Black men to opportunities to become volunteers, mentors and educators. He’s also the architect of other mentorship and enrichment programs and, most recently, has been busy entering a documentary he co-directed on navigating stereotypes and systemic barriers into film festivals.
The film, “The ADAPT (Awareness, Development, Achievement, Pride, & Triumph) Narrative,” premiered in November in Lansing, and a private screening is scheduled at 5 p.m. on April 23. The film follows two seniors at Southeastern High School during the 2024-25 school year. Neloms said it’s important for students to have the space to tell their authentic stories.
“Oftentimes, the stories that we hear are not from the students, and it really exploits Detroit in particular. It’s very negative, and it exploits the name of Detroit and its residents,” he said. “The biggest way to expose stereotypes is to tell these counternarratives. If students are able to see these counternarratives themselves, that helps to expose and knock down those internalized stereotypes.”
At the Black history class, first-timer Kossie McCaskell was enjoying the discussion. He learned of the class on the church website and wanted to come out.
“A lot of the things we talked about are still relevant now,” he said. “It felt like a college class. I felt welcomed and like I could ask questions and make remarks.”
Back to where it all started
When Neloms began attending Wayne State University in 1999, he thought he was going to be an engineer, majoring in materials science and engineering. But signing up for AmeriCorps during his freshman year led him down an unexpected path and to the place where he now teaches his Black history classes – Rosedale Park Baptist. Through his program placement, Neloms became part of the church’s student ministry program, with the house of worship doing community outreach at the now-closed Petr Vetal Elementary-Middle School. Neloms created a mentorship program for middle school boys called Harambee, a Swahili word that means, “all pull together.”
After completing his first year of college, the summertime would lead to the creation of Super Kids, an enrichment program at the church to prevent the “summer slide” of kids forgetting elements of what they learned over the school year. The team leading Super Kids were college students like himself, Neloms said. Super Kids is no longer running, but the church continues to offer afterschool programming.
Those two experiences and seeing what schools and the community could build together inspired Neloms to switch his major to education.
“I just saw education done in a holistic way that pretty much got me very interested in being an educator,” he said. “All the things I learned as a young man at Peter Vetal, I’ve always implemented it everywhere I went.”
After graduating from Wayne State in 2003, Neloms began teaching at Post Middle School on Detroit’s west side. When that school closed in the early 2000s, he moved to nearby Fitzgerald Elementary School, now known as Bethune Elementary-Middle School. Neloms spent most of his career as a social studies teacher at Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men in the North End, from 2009 to 2018.
While there, Neloms developed a program that mixed mentorship and literacy with hip-hop called The Lyricist Society. The afterschool program gave students a chance to express their creativity by writing their own raps and learning how to produce beats.
“I had them come after school or during lunch, and people would donate beats and studio time and all that, so they started writing things and doing music videos,” Neloms said.
Hip-hop also plays a large part in Neloms’ other project, I Am in Demand, which started in 2019. To get people interested in the program, Neloms and a group of Black educators put together a song called “In Demand” with an accompanying music video. The video has since netted more than 14,000 views on YouTube.
Due to the success of the video, Neloms was excited to officially launch I Am in Demand in 2020. But then the pandemic hit and put the program on pause. Now, things are starting to ramp back up, with Neloms’ group creating more songs, starting a podcast and appearing in NPR’s 2025 Tiny Desk Contest.
I Am in Demand also has an initiative called The Plug, where Black male professionals meet monthly with students from the Wayne-Westland Innovative Academy, an alternative school in Wayne. Neloms said the Black men involved not only come from education, but are doctors, electricians and carpenters.
“They come from all over the place, and they’re eager to share, and the students are eager to learn from them as well,” he said. “We do these interactive sessions every Saturday that we meet with them, so it’s been beneficial.”
In the midst of creating his programs, Neloms also made a career change into a school counselor. He worked at Bow Elementary-Middle School for a few years before moving to Wayne RESA to become a career counselor.
“I still work with the schools, but now I assist high school students with helping them make plans for after graduation,” Neloms said.
Sky’s the limit
In 2024, Neloms saw a posting on social media about a new education collective and decided to apply.
The collective, called the Detroit Education Narrative (DEN) Collective from The Skillman Foundation and 482Forward, was a one-year course, featuring creative projects from 11 Detroit-based educators that showcased the positives of education in the city.
Neloms’ project was “The ADAPT Narrative.” Southeastern High School was an ideal setting for the documentary since it’s one of the places he serves for Wayne RESA, he said.
When it came to selecting students, Neloms decided to center the story on Miles Hall and KrisTiana Dove. Hall, 19, is now a freshman at Wayne State studying psychology, while Dove, 18, is at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, majoring in chemistry and minoring in theater and visual arts.
Hearing Neloms’ pitch on expressing positive narratives of Detroit youth resonated with the teens and made them want to be a part of the documentary.
“I liked how he showed that there are opportunities for kids out there, and no matter where you come from, you have the opportunity to enjoy life and then go and make something of yourself,” Dove said.
Neloms and co-director Jonathan Jewell-Chatten followed the teens at school, at home and out in the community for the majority of the last school year, and captured big moments like graduation. Hall and Dove felt like they were on a reality show, they said. Neloms wanted to let the cameras roll and see what kind of story would unfold.
“Miles and KrisTiana are phenomenal students,” Neloms said. “They have very interesting backgrounds and goals. We got a chance to see how their goals were unlocked and how their parents, their community and the school supported them to where they are now.”
One of the stories was Hall’s academic journey. He started high school at Cass Tech, but was sent to Southeastern after his grades slipped, and he was placed on academic dismissal. Students at exam schools like Cass Tech must maintain a grade point average (GPA) of 2.5 or higher.
Having the support of his teachers at Southeastern, along with his father and friends, propelled Hall to bring his grades up and apply to Wayne State.
“When I got to Southeastern, it really did help me figure out what I needed to do, because I saw that I needed a smaller school to help me have a better time,” Hall said.
Meanwhile, Dove was preparing for life outside of Michigan and leaving home for the first time.
“I’m the only one of my siblings who went out of state for college, and going to a college such as this (Johns Hopkins), I was trying not to get imposter syndrome,” she said. “And I was just trying to get myself prepared to not see my family all the time, and I was also working so I could save as much money as possible.”
Hall and Dove are pleased with the documentary and hope that it helps change negative perceptions of DPSCD.
“My entire academic career has been in DPSCD and everything that has happened to me happened because of DPSCD,” Dove said. “The district is huge, of course, there’s going to be some bad things. But I feel like the good things should completely outweigh the bad things because there are so many people who come from DPSCD who are doing absolutely amazing things.”
Neloms plans to turn “The ADAPT Narrative” into a series showcasing the stories of other young people throughout Detroit.
“You just got so many communities, so many stories, so many histories to tell,” he said. “These types of things are important. It’s impactful.”
“The ADAPT Narrative” is currently in festival submission and is not publicly available. Attendance for the April 23 screening is limited, and those interested can contact Quan Neloms at qneloms@gmail.com to RSVP.