BY ANTHONY McAULEY | Staff writer
Calvin Mackie arrived for breakfast at the Mid-City Ruby Slipper one recent Saturday morning wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of STEM NOLA and donning a Morehouse College cap.
He apologized for running a few minutes late and explains that he’d just run into Al Collins, head coach at the Patrick F. Taylor Science & Technology Academy, where both of Mackie’s sons, Myles and Mason, went to high school.
Collins had wanted to chat about Mason’s valedictorian speech earlier this year when he graduated with a 4.91 grade point average and to congratulate Mackie on Mason’s winning a place at Yale University, where he’ll be majoring in economics. They also chatted about how older son Myles was doing at Howard University, where he is a Karsh STEM Scholar and a junior in the mechanical engineering program.
Mackie wears his passion for education on his sleeve, literally, and he misses no opportunity to proselytize for wider access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He wants to foster in kids the same kind of expectations that his sons had.
“I like to call myself an ‘eduvangelist,'” he says with a gleam in his eye. “I like to preach about the value of education.”