DATE: December 13, 2007

CONTACT: Roy Jones, (864) 656-7915
ROYJ@exchange.clemson.edu

WRITER: Alex Hill, (864) 656-2061
ahill2@clemson.edu

Call Me MISTER director named to international advisory board

CLEMSON – Roy Jones, director of Clemson University’s Call Me MISTER program, was named to the advisory board "Teachers as Leaders" established by the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. 

Call Me MISTER, a program that recruits African-American men to become elementary school teachers, is based at Clemson University and administered through 10 other campuses in South Carolina. The goal of the program is to recruit and train African-American men to be elementary school teachers.

There are 150 men currently enrolled in the Call Me MISTER program and 28 already are teaching in South Carolina classrooms. When everyone currently enrolled is in the classroom, half of the black men teaching in South Carolina elementary schools will be MISTERs.

Jones served as dean and associate professor in the division of education at Claflin University in Orangeburg. From 1990 to 1998,  Jones served as director of employment for the Charleston County School District and was responsible for the district's teacher and classified recruitment programs. Jones received his doctorate from the University of Georgia, master's from Atlanta University and bachelor's from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Deutsche Bank recognizes the essential value of teachers in communities around the world with inadequate resources, from distressed urban settings to poor rural areas to post-conflict nations struggling to alleviate poverty and promote gender, racial and ethnic equity.