Warriors try to get minorities teaching
To get the students’ attention, the San Francisco teacher turned to someone familiar: Stephen Curry. Well, not the real Curry, but the idea of him.
During a recent virtual class for Malcolm X Academy, a predominately Black elementary school in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, Codion Isom asked his group of kindergarteners if they knew which Warriors player was 32 years old, 6-foot-3 and married to Ayesha. Referencing Warriors players is one of the ways the first-year teacher is able to hold his students’ attention.
“‘Can you tell me what player that is?’” Isom recalled asking. “And some of the kids are like, ‘That’s Stephen Curry! That’s Stephen Curry!’ We’re always talking about them in the classroom.”
Isom, 27, is a product of the “Man The Bay” teacher development program from Urban Ed Academy, a San Francisco-based organization that aims to increase the representation of Black and Latino educators in classrooms. Since 2014, the Warriors Community Foundation has granted more than $300,000 to the program.
“Representation matters,” said Urban Ed’s executive director Randy Seriguchi. “You need to be able to see somebody that looks like you and, even across the screen, that’s great.”
Today, Black men make up less than less than 2% of America’s teaching force and Latino men make up less than 3%, according to Urban Ed. Through the “Man The Bay” program, the organization works with Black homeowners in the Bayview area to help renovate their homes in exchange for housing prospective teachers at an affordable rate. Urban Ed then provides “fellows” like Isom with training, housing and mentorship.
Because of his experience working at his local YMCA in his hometown of Detroit, Isom knew after earning his degree from Texas Southern University a little more than a year ago, he could make an impact by working with children.
As classes resume virtually during the coronavirus pandemic, teachers are challenged to keep students engaged and make the personal connections that happen in the classroom.
“It’s been pretty difficult but the thing that I do is I’m making sure we’re always having fun,” Isom said, referring to his namethat-Warrior game. “Sitting in front of the screen
can be distracting and disengaging, so we play different games.”
Before these socialdistancing times, Warriors players visited Malcolm X Academy, making them a bit more than just Jeopardy!-style answers to the students.
In 2018, the first year of the partnership between the school and the Warriors Community Foundation, former Warriors center DeMarcus Cousins visited the school. Instead of a quick pop-in, Cousins stayed the entire afternoon and played basketball with the kids.
“He appreciated that this was a Black organization of Black students in a Black neighborhood,” Seriguchi said. During Cousins’ visit, a local news crew caught the 7-footer blocking a student’s shot. The clip went viral. “The kid loved it, ate it all up,” Seriguchi recalled.
As president of the Warriors Community Foundation, Nicole Lacob — the wife of Warriors majority owner Joe Lacob — aimed to address the achievement gap among communities in the Bay Area. She homed in on Bayview — a neighborhood with the city’s highest Black population (21.5%, according to the 2010 U.S. Census) and had a high-school graduation rate of just 23% when the partnership started six years ago.
“We really thought we’d invest our money specifically there so that we could move that needle,” Nicole Lacob said.