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• 1 2019-09-28T19:00:15-07:00 Mary Lavalais teacher at San Francisco Community School 21 plain 2019-10-23T03:11:25-07:00
  
  Why did you decide to become a teacher?
  
  During the summer we would have school, my mother would say, “Okay. Time to come inside.” Every day during the summer she would make me come in in the middle of the day and read and write. Then my friends in the neighborhood said, “Well, where are you going?” I said, “my mama’s making me come inside to read and draw and color,” and they said, “Can we come in?” Then all of a sudden all the neighborhood kids were there, and my mother said, “Sure. Sit down.” Soft voice. She never raised her voice. I never heard her to say a curse word. Nothing ever, just “Oh yeah. Sit down.” Then it came from me and one or two friends to like a whole bunch of kids, and every single day she would have papers for us to write. Our numbers, our letters. And you know, then I said, “Wow. I want to be able to help people like this.”
  
  Tell us about Working at San Francisco Community School and have the demographics shifted?
  
  This place here is really the original family. Joe, our janitor, his wife went here. His sister-in-law went here. His father-in-law worked here, and then he started working here and he met his wife-to-be. So it was a family, and then Martha, her children went here. Then she started working here, and now her grandson is going here. I worked here after my son, and then my granddaughter, I brought her here. So this is really a family-like place. Other teachers who are no longer here, they brought their children here. It used to be ... I feel like there were a lot of whites but there were more Blacks. There were more African-Americans. There were more people of color, but they were pushed out because they had to move out, and they couldn’t continue to bring their children all the way in from Hayward, Fremont. In my mind, that’s the biggest reason, and as kids grow up they leave The City because they can’t afford ... They want to be here but they can’t afford to stay. Just like me. That’s why I left. Couldn’t afford to stay in The City. In order to survive, the parents had to buy homes out of San Francisco, which meant their children had to be put in schools somewhere else. Oh, I know of so many people who have left San Francisco. There’s very few African-Americans here, and the ones that are here are the older ones because most of them move out. They’re in Oakland or ... Even if they’re in Hayward, they’re out. My granddaughter’s gone further out. My  son moved to Las Vegas, gone further out. My son moved to Las Vegas, and he’s been trying to get me to move there. People have moved out because they just can’t afford to be here, and even the ones that come and work back in The City ... We have one or two who are working here whose kids are still coming here, and they’re dog tired. It’s more than one or two. We have maybe six families who have moved out. They’re bringing their kids back here because they want them here, but then after a while they say it’s too hard. There are a lot of educators who are homeless. They’re living from this cousin’s house to the mother’s house to the ... They don’t want to stay too long. I know some personally. I know nurses. I know teachers who have had to leave The City. They’ve been displaced out of their homes that they had been in forever. Renting forever, and they’re gone. They had to move out of The City, and as you get older like me, I’m out of Te City but I’m in South San Francisco, so I can still get here. But if you’re in Half Moon Bay or if you’re in Richmond you may not feel like doing that long drive commute every day. It makes it harder. We had a few people here, teachers that had to leave. They didn’t want to leave but they had to because they couldn’t afford to stay here. So the housing crisis turns into a job crisis because if you’re moving somewhere else it’s pretty soon gonna be more convenient for you to work near where you live. Why come across the Bay and pay all that money every day if you can work in Fairfield? I knew people ... I worked with people from Fairfield commuting every day, no longer here. It’s a personal thing. I know people who are living from couch to couch. I’m so disappointed in how this city has turned out. I really am, because it has pushed a lot of people out.
  
  What has it meant for you to leave San Francisco and your community? I miss the people that I grew up with, and I thought I was going to be growing older with them and we were going to have children, and not necessarily in the housing projects but maybe being able to buy homes, and those of my friends that were in homes, it just got so expensive til a lot of them sold their homes and they moved away. A lot of the elders that are older than me or my age now, they’re constantly thinking “I’m going to move out. I’m going to move out. It’s too much.” Also, the thing that I think is just the absolute worst is that there are people that are coming to the elders’ doors now trying to get them to sell their places in Hunters Point in the Bayview. Te homes down from the projects. They have been harassing the people, and I didn’t know this was happening til I was looking for an apartment with a friend of mine and she was looking at this house and this guy came up and said, “Ladies, are you lost?” She said, “Oh, no. I’m looking at this house that’s for rent here and I was just wondering are there any other houses?” He said, “Well, this is the only one on this block,” he said, “But just be careful walking up and down because a lot of times there are men that are coming and they’re putting literature on all the houses. We don’t know who they are,” but they had been harassing his mother. They had come with a briefcase, and the woman was like, I don’t know. 75, 80. He wasn’t living with his mother, but he would come back and check on her all the time, and this man was literally telling her “This is more money than you’ll ever see. You should just take it and let me take this house of of your hands, and you should go into and apartment.” I found out more and more that there were people that were coming to the homes of the elders and harassing them to sell their property.
  
  The government has pushed people out of their homes in the Bayview. I knew of someone personally that was fighting to keep her home and they wanted to tear it down to build new and modern stuff, and she fought it and she fought it. In the end she lost... What do they call it? Eminent domain? So she had to move from the Hunters Point. Tell me about your work with the union. Well, I was ignorant to a whole lot of stuff until I got involved in the union...The fight is on, and people say “teachers” all the time, but you’re forgetting a whole lot of other people that are also within that union and in the teaching realm. It’s anyone that’s working in the schools, so we try to use as often as possible, educators, because you’ve got nurses, you’ve got classroom paras, you have student advisors. You have a whole range of people. The union, we’ve done a lot of work, paraeducators, in educating our teachers and letting them know if you don’t have a classroom para in there helping you, a lot of times your job is so much harder because you’ve got kids who have other needs, and that paraeducator can attend to the other needs, and most of the time the paraeducators are from the neighborhood. The teachers live somewhere else. They come from out of The City. So many come from Oakland and other areas, but the paraeducators, we’re from right here. We came from the neighborhoods where the kids are. Kids from Sunnydale over here, kids from Hunters Point. They can’t tell me anything because I knew their parents. I knew their grandparents. I have that connection and most paras have that family connection because they are from here or they live in the neighborhood or somewhere close.
  
  Interview by Alexandra Lacey Edited by Alexandra Lacey and Wynn Newberry