San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lincoln High’s ‘Brutha Luv’ inspired many
Any extracurricular activity at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco needed one essential element to get the spirit going, and that was Kenyatta Scott.
Scott taught math and computer science, coached both boys and girls soccer and served a long stretch as athletic director. But his main job in all of this was to be the school’s chief enthusiast. He would get out on the football field in a neon green Adidas track suit and lead a lip sync Gangnam Style at a pep rally for the annual Bell Game between the Washington Eagles in the Richmond District and the Lincoln Mustangs across the park in the Sunset.
Scott was the life of the teachers’ lounge and the Friday happy hour. The alumni association could count on him to emcee the annual alumni crab feed. Scott did it all for 22 years without letup even after being diagnosed with colon cancer in 2021.
He worked through the punishing chemo treatments before finally calling in sick on Nov. 14. When he was still absent two days later, his best friends on the faculty went to his Sunset District apartment to check on him during their lunch break. Scott
could barely make it to the door, so they called an ambulance. He died in hospice on Nov. 19, said his sister LaDana Scott of Austin, Texas. He was 53.
“Kenyatta would call himself ‘Brutha Luv,’ just because he wanted to spread positivity,” said Lincoln principal Shari Balisi, who worked with Scott since 2004. “He always made sure the kids came first so that when students leave Lincoln, they have that Lincoln pride, that community feeling.”
As such, Scott wore a coat and tie in the classroom and conveyed Southern charm and gentlemanly courtesy. He was that way online, too. Fellow staffers would return from vacation or a long weekend to find an inspirational email in their inboxes, signed “Brutha Luv” with a link to a music video to get them pumped up.
“At the end of each staff meeting he would say, ‘More love, more love,’ as a reminder to the teachers to be kind to each other and kind to the students, because it could be rough out there,” said Jorge Goncalves, who teaches digital media design at Lincoln.
With 2,000 students and a faculty of 120, Lincoln can be a big and impersonal place — less so when Scott was there.
“He was bigger than life,” Balisi said. “That was part of his personality as well.”
Kenyatta Octavius Scott was born Aug. 30, 1969, in Milwaukee, the fourth of five children raised by their mother, Ethel Scott. He was 8 when he was put up for adoption and moved to Richland, Miss., with his adoptive family. He graduated from Richland High School, where he played football, and earned his bachelor’s degree in at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., in 1992.
“He always wanted to give back to the community,” his sister said. “He wasn’t only a teacher. He was a counselor, a listener, a confidante. He was patient and gave sound advice.”
After teaching in Mississippi for two years, Scott came to California and was hired at Lincoln in 2002.
Elaine Walenta had one year in at Lincoln, teaching English and running the drama department when Scott was hired in 2002.
“He was outgoing and charismatic from the start,” Walenta said. Generally, the sports crowd and the drama crowd don’t mix, but Scott and Walenta saw similarities between the two pursuits and formed a bond. She started going to his soccer games and he started attending her plays.
He always attended the opening or closing night of a performance and often both. On Saturday mornings, when students build the set for an upcoming show, he’d bring in bagels. If a comedy was being staged, the
kids wanted him in the audience for every performance, because he’d supply the first laugh that got everyone else laughing.
Walenta, Goncalves and Scott took a six-month sabbatical at the same time so they could meet in Australia and travel to New Zealand. Even in a different hemisphere, Scott was the same person. He would greet people in the streets of Melbourne exactly the way he did it in the hallways at Lincoln.
“It was who he was,” Walenta said. “The love for his fellow man was at his inner core.”
As Lincoln’s athletic director, he held coaches and players to a high standard. He once forfeited a JV football game that Lincoln had won 52-0 because he learned after the game that a player had suited up who was not on the eligibility list.
“I was pissed off but it was the best lesson I have learned,” said the coach, Kevin Doherty. “He could have swept it under the rug but integrity for him was the most important thing.”
Last May, when Scott was deep into cancer treatments and also dealing with Type 2 diabetes, he organized a faculty happy
hour at the Sunset Reservoir Brewing Co. Normally, the teachers pitch into an ongoing fund that covers the tab and everyone assumed this was the case. But Scott paid for the food and two rounds of drinks and did not want anyone to know it. He also supplied much of the entertainment.
“He was in hyperdrive in terms of wanting to connect people more,” Goncalves said. “When you get a diagnosis like that you want to appreciate every moment.”
Scott worked weekends as a soccer official in various leagues in San Francisco and was a referee at the Gay Games, both in the city and abroad.
When school started this August, Scott was in his usual role of campus cheerleader, as if nothing were wrong.
“You could see him in the hallway not moving as fast,” Goncalves said. “He wanted the kids to have one full semester with him.” But he came up a month short.
The day after he was hospitalized, in November, Lincoln played Lowell in the city’s Academic Athletic Association varsity football playoffs. Scott was named honorary captain and Doherty presented Walenta with a vintage Bell Game jersey
and instructions to deliver it to Scott at the hospital, which she did along with the news that Lincoln had won, 27-6.
The jersey — red and gold,
No. 74, size XXL — was still at the foot of the bed when Scott died on a Saturday morning with Walenta holding his hand.