Season 1, Episode 1: Starting 5 with Dominque Johnson

“After I played basketball overseas in Romania, I was questioned by an elderly woman in the airport. I was the only Black American on that plane, coming out of Bucharest. I guess she just wanted to know why – why was I on that plane? I told her, I played basketball. But then she said, what if that basketball stopped dribbling?" Two weeks later, Dominque received a text from her middle school assistant principal, “Can you work at my school?” In this pilot episode, “Starting 5,” tenacious teacher Dominque Johnson talks about how she has defied the odds on and off the basketball court, and why she took her passion as a professional athlete to the court of student achievement, helping lead her public school post-pandemic to reading levels 3 times higher than any other in the nation’s capital, outpacing national averages.Dominque Johnson is the ELA chair and a middle school teacher at the Friendship Blow Pierce Elementary and Middle School campus in Washington, D.C., where over 80 percent of the student population represents groups most severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.