‘It Almost Got Me In Tears, Man’: Houston Basketball Coach Vincent Grayson Is Alleged Kingpin Of Brazen $1.9M Teacher Certification Scheme That Has Rocked A Proud Community

A Texas high school basketball coach has been arrested and charged with masterminding a million-dollar scheme to facilitate fraudulent teaching certificates. Now he and his gang of fraudsters have also stained the credibility of current and future Blacks trying to do right within the Houston educational system. “It almost got me in tears, man, ” Jack Willliams, a 1967 graduate of Jack Yates Senior High School in Houston’s Black Greater Third Ward neighborhood, told CNN on Friday evening. “We are fighting hard to overcome, to show that we are more than qualified…I’m just being straight up with you.” Vincent Grayson, a winning coach who worked 20 years at Booker T. Washington’s and led the boy’s basketball squad to its first UIL state championship appearance in 2023, was identified as the leader of a criminal enterprise that corralled more than $1,090,000 since May 2020, according to Harris County felony chief prosecutor Mike Levine. Houston ISD, with nearly 200,000 predominantly Black and Hispanic students, is the largest in Texas and the eighth largest in the country. Booker and Yates were the city’s first two high schools for Black students prior to desegregation. So this betrayal of trust at so many levels, has...