Didi Watts is bringing affordable housing to Black Los Angeles teachers

She and her husband aim to diversify the teaching workforce 

Peter and Didi Watts walk up to the front door of the house and turn the lock. Inside, moving boxes are scattered around the floor. Peter Watts said someone just moved in. Three men who live there now, but it can shelter up to five.

“It's a five-bedroom, three-bath,” Peter Watts said, motioning around the house. Outside is a huge backyard, grass spanning to the 10 freeway. 

This house is the first home that is part of the so-called Village Initiative the Watts’ said was launched to diversify the teaching workforce and to help increase the number of Black male teachers.

It is also part of the Watts of Power Foundation, which began in 2017, by Didi Watts, a candidate for District 1 LAUSD board, and her husband. The organization’s goal is to help develop Black public-school teachers and help Black youth achieve in Los Angeles public-schools. 

The Village Initiative is a flagship program that provides affordable housing for Black male teachers-in-training. The goal is to eliminate barriers to teaching and to provide Black children with teachers who look like them. 

Expansion is the goal. The couple want to add more units in the backyard and expand all over L.A.

It isn’t just Los Angeles that is pushing for change on this front. In July, the city of San Francisco announced two affordable housing projects that would provide 135 new homes for educators. These developments became the second and third affordable educator housing projects undertaken by the County of San Francisco.

As living costs in California rise, it is no wonder these villages are popping up. In Los Angeles, the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment is $2,090 a month and the average cost of a home is 1.2M.

It is also expensive to become a teacher. Teachers in training first work as a Teachers Assistants before entering the classroom with a veteran teacher for a year. During this time, they are eligible for state grants. The starting salary for a beginning public school teacher in Los Angeles County is not that high – about $71,680. 

“The goal is to be able to support teachers, but have them live near where they work, so that they don't have to have a car, they could walk or use public transportation to get to where they work,” Didi Watts said. 

But do teachers want to live that close to where they teach? Leodes Van Buren is a fellow with the Village initiative, and he said he thinks being in the community with students shows their personality outside of their “teacher mode” adding, “I think that this makes the teachers seem more human. And I think that goes a long way with children.”

“In visiting schools and speaking with teachers,” Didi Watts said, “the schools that do well in terms of relationships with their students, you find that many of the teachers either grew up in that neighborhood, attended that same school, or attended schools in that neighborhood.” She added that the significance of seeing your teacher in the aisles of the grocery store is a connection that is quite significant. 

Watts is running in a seven-person race for CD 1 to replace George McKenna III. Her competitors include Sherlett Hendy Newbill, an education policy advisor for retiring Board District 1 representative George McKenna, and Kahllid Al-Alim, a community organizer. With ballots from Super Tuesday still being counted, the race is not over. But with Newbill taking about 23% of the vote over Watts’ 16%, there is a clear front-runner. But Watts’ loss will not stop her from pushing to make change. 

The Watts’ newest project in the works is something called Freedom Schools, a six-week literacy camp run by some of the teaching fellows. Peter Watts said they would be “working with parents and families on advocacy around their kids' education and civic engagement.”

He warned that the money for their Teaching Village is going to run out soon-about three years. He wonders what the schools will do when there's no more state money. Something must be figured out before this program disappears.

Van Buren said the program changed how he thought about his future. He went to college for philosophy and when he got out, found L.A. to be too expensive. “When am I going to start enjoying my life,” he was constantly thinking. He was on his way to Georgia to live with his parents when he got the call that he had been accepted into the program. The Watts’ sent him emergency funds to come back to L.A. and be a part of the Teacher Village. Now, he is starting a residency program at Cal State Dominguez Hills as a substitute teacher for elementary school.

“You don’t see Black women in these positions of leadership,” Van Buren said, adding that he admires Didi Watt’s leadership and all she has done to support the Black teachers in L.A.

The husband and wife team walked side by side back to their car. The sun was shining down, and the day was crisp and clean. Across the street from the Village’s headquarters stands West Adams Preparatory High School. There's a Catholic school nearby and a few elementary schools, too. It was a weekend, so the campus was quiet. But you could still see the vision, teachers walking to school, parents greeting them at the gates. A place of learning for the community and by the community.