Sodasia 'Soda' Thompson, formerly of Bay Shore, will compete on next 'Survivor' season

Sodasia “Soda” Thompson, a special-education teacher originally from Bay Shore, will try to adapt her classroom-management skills to competitor-management skills when she goes up against 17 other castaways on season 46 of CBS' “Survivor,” premiering Feb. 28.

A Bay Shore High School graduate who went on to Hofstra University in Hempstead and then earned a degree from SUNY Purchase, the 27-year-old Thompson now lives in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. She teaches at the private Banyan School, which has locations in the towns of Fairfield and Little Falls, New Jersey.

“It was a pretty dysfunctional household that I grew up in,” Thompson says in her “Survivor” introduction video. “I was raised with my aunt,” Claudia Bizzle, who she was told “was my mom,” who died when Thompson was in her mid-teens. Her father “never even knew I existed. He and my bio mom both battled addiction,” she explains.

Thompson in response embraced education as “my way out of all the dysfunction.” She dug herself a metaphoric “trench, found myself … and climbed up with one hand … [saying] ‘You’re getting out of this ... ditch.’”

Her mother, despite her addictions, “was a good person,” Thompson told Newsday in 2014, upon receiving a full scholarship to Hofstra. “I always had a soft spot for her. We saw her from time to time; she used to do my hair a lot.”

An original song by her and fellow Bay Shore High student Joe Pastore won the $5,000 grand-prize grant for their school in VH1’s “Battle of the Bands” competition in 2012, and she lasted through two early rounds of the Long Island auditions for Fox’s “The X Factor” in 2013. She went on to study vocal jazz at Hofstra before changing her career ambition, and after graduation from SUNY Purchase found work with the Brooklyn-based Trail Blazers summer youth program.

In 2019, Thompson became a first-grade special-education teacher and later a K-2 science teacher at Voice Charter School in Queens, according to her LinkedIn page. She joined the Banyan School last July. 

Additionally, she says in the “Survivor” video, “I’m going to be married now for six years to the love of my life. That’s where I’m at. I’m good. I’m great. I’m golden.”

As for her chances on the island-survival competition, “I think I have what it takes, because the thing about trauma is, it leaves you resilient. I didn’t even know who my parents were and here I am today. If that doesn’t say ‘survivor’ written all over it, I don’t know what does.”