Booker principal has deep community roots

Marcus Mason knows the name of every employee at his school.

The principal at Kermit Booker Sr. Elementary School greets everyone as they come across his path and somehow slips in a quick but natural compliment. He knows the value of every staff member's role because Mason has done everything in education from cleaning bathrooms to directing curricula.

His seemingly effortless kindness has as much to do with Principal Mason's upbringing as his expertise in education.

"I always knew I was going to teach. It was a calling," he said.

Mason began in the Clark County School District as an elementary school custodian in the early 1990s and has had an extraordinary trek through the field of education that will long inspire children who dream they can be anything.

As is the case with many life transitions in Southern Nevada, the College of Southern Nevada played a role in helping Mason establish a foundation for success.

Although he was born and largely raised in North Las Vegas, where he developed strong roots in his church and with neighbors, Mason's parents eventually moved him west near Rainbow Boulevard and Westcliff Drive, where they felt he was safer. His uncle used to take him to fly kites at the CSN Cheyenne campus, and he and his friends would get welts from rolling down the grass hill in pillowcases near the intersection of Gowan and Pecos roads.

Before he graduated from Bonanza High School, Mason began pushing a broom as a custodian at two Clark County elementary schools.

Recruiters had signed Mason to attend Wheaton College in Illinois on a basketball scholarship, but when he hurt his ankle his junior year at Bonanza, Mason recalled, "Everything fell apart."

He enrolled at CSN.

There, he found he had challenges to overcome. He needed to learn to write at a college level, a skill he had never grasped in high school. The image of an English professor returning his paper dripping with red ink in front of him still resonates.

"In retrospect, that professor helped me out. He forced me to see that you have to use complete sentences. The No. 1 thing we reinforce now (at Booker) is that you have to learn to use complete sentences. Literacy. Literacy. Literacy. Learn to master language and you can rule the world," Mason said.

Writing is now a strong skill for Mason who tweets as well as crafts memos and other formal prose.

Another memory he has of CSN was in a psychology class. A professor looked at his handwriting and told Mason in front of the entire class that he had "powerful handwriting."

"That changed the way I perceived myself. That one statement," he said. "CSN laid a good foundation for me to build on at UNLV."

He finished his undergraduate degree and a master's in education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Being a custodian at the time made him appreciate the classes he was taking, he said.

"It was humbling, but the experience gives me a keen view on how to handle different experiences," he said.

It also taught him how important relationships are.

Mason went on to teach at three elementary schools and was hired as dean at Bailey Middle School. He then became acting assistant principal and was hired in 2011 as principal at Booker.

"I never really left CCSD," he said.

When he sees teachers who knew him as a custodian, they sometimes cry, out of happiness, Mason said.

At Booker, he stresses the importance of literacy but also mathematics and technology. He is working to secure $350,000 in alternative funding to purchase iPads for all of his 590 students. To fill the jobs of the future, students need to be familiar with cutting-edge smart technology, he said.

Mason noted that South Korea will eliminate textbooks in lieu of tablets in the near future.

"I want my children to be able to compete for the jobs of the future," he said. "Some of those jobs haven't even been created yet."