Schools & Education

Adult and Continuing Education

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:00:00 -0800

Remember possibility? That feeling that you could be anything? It’s still here. Sharpen some no. 2 pencils, load up your Trapper Keeper, and—oh wait, make that download some textbooks on your Kindle—and recapture it. Across Seattle’s adult and continuing education scene are classes long and short, degrees and workshops, certificates and tutorials. By taking just a class or 12, you really can learn to be a firefighter. A yogi. A professional shopper. A ghost hunter. You can even be the person in charge of babies being born. Hey look, you’re a whole new you.

Get a New Job

Image: Paul Windle

Fire Science Associate in Arts Degree
Be the Hero
Why you should Fighting fires is high paying, high risk, and highly impressive to toddlers everywhere. Admit it; you always wanted to be a fireman or firewoman. Bellevue’s Fire Science program sees everyone from high school graduates to second-career seekers, and its mostly online associate degree program preps them for entry-level fire jobs. Courses involve watching lots of fire videos on YouTube and diagramming how to stop them; then comes the complicated stuff, like learning how an electric car fire is different from a run-of-the-mill flaming Corolla. Students can also get certified for wildland firefighting or go on to become EMTs elsewhere for extra badass points.
What it takes The two-year program includes general education classes and costs roughly $8,5oo.
When to start Applications are accepted through January 4 for the winter quarter. – Bellevue College, bellevuecollege.edu

Become a Mystery Shopper! Workshop
Earn $$ While You Shop
Why you should It’s not (always) a scam: Some companies really do pay people to shop. You anonymously try out a store or service, then submit a report for a small paycheck. Teacher Bethany Mooradian, the self--proclaimed “Queen of the Random Job” who once cleaned Bill Gates’s bathrooms, has more than a decade of mystery shopping under her belt. She demystifies the market research technique, points out where nonscammers hire, and hands out a book covering 170 legit companies and resources. Be warned that it takes volume for the $5 or $10 gigs to be worth it, but Mooradian once made more than $2,000 per month.
What it takes The $44, three-hour workshop runs at University of Washington’s Experimental College, a student--led noncredit initiative.
When to start February 7. – University of Washington, depts.washington.edu/asuwxpcl

Master in Education in Counseling
Offer Advice
Why you should All that harrowing life experience you accrued over the years has to be good for something, right? It’s really the best prep for the Master of Education in Counseling program at University of Puget Sound, where graduates head off to jobs in schools, substance abuse programs, adoption groups, and career and employment services. Students really get to know their classmates during the nighttime classes, since they simulate the cognitive behavior techniques and humanistic methods that counselors use to comfort and guide troubled souls.
What it takes Part-time students who already hold a bachelor’s degree can complete the course in two full years for around $39,360.
When to start Applications for a fall start are due March 1. – University of Puget Sound, pugetsound.edu

Contemporary Boatbuilding Associate Degree of Occupational Studies
Come Sail Away
Why you should Constructing wooden boats was the hottest career of the nineteenth century—and, surprisingly, a good bet in the twenty-first, when a handcrafted skiff can sell for more than 10 grand. Located in Port Hadlock, the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding teaches skills both time honored and contemporary, using wood and composites. The associate degree starts when you make your own wooden mallet and dovetail toolbox, and by the end of the first quarter you’ll make your first dinghy, hopefully one that’s even seaworthy.
What it takes The nine-month, full-time Contemporary Boatbuilding degree costs $13,050, and all you need is a high school diploma.
When to start Courses start in October, but shorter not-for-credit workshops run during summer months. – Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, nwboatschool.org

Post-Baccalaureate Teacher Preparation Program, Elementary Education (K–8)
Chalk it Up
Why you should You’ve got a bachelor’s degree and a general affinity for rug rats; all you need is the certification to teach. The flat rate tuition at the online WGU Washington covers as many credits as you can swing in a six-month semester, or as many as your personal mentor thinks you can handle. It usually takes about a year and a half to master everything: classroom management, teaching methods and strategies, not to mention remembering how to do long division again. As soon as the classes are over, the student teaching and spitball--avoiding begins; after that comes state certification.
What it takes The university peruses undergraduate transcripts before acceptance, then mentors students through three or four terms for around $9,670.
When to start Online terms start anytime. – Western Governors University Washington, washington.wgu.edu

Image: Courtesy Pacific Yoga Teacher Training

Yoga Teacher Training
Stretch Yourself
Why you should When Pacific Yoga teacher Theresa Elliott started downward dogging, she could count the number of Seattle yoga studios on one hand; now there are dozens. The only prerequisite for a 200-hour teaching certificate at her Crown Hill studio is a limber torso and the desire; a next-level 500-hour course assumes some previous yoga instruction. The series of packed weekends is filled with classes on asanas (the poses), pranayama (the breathing), anatomy, and the philosophy of yoga. And don’t forget the business end of the operation; the course even teaches how to take a killer promotional yoga photo.
What it takes $3,495 for eight weekends of instruction
When to start A 500-hour certificate program begins in February 2013, and the 200-hour course starts in winter 2014. a Pacific Yoga, pacificyoga.com

Translation and Interpretation Certificates of Accomplishment
Speak in Many Tongues
Why you should If you already speak a foreign language (and, well, English), you’re sitting on an incredibly marketable skill. A Translation and Interpretation certificate at Bellevue College turns that proficiency into a career. Classes are first a guide to the business, ethical, mannerly, and practical considerations of juggling languages—like what to do when changing an idiom like “It’s raining cats and dogs!” into a foreign tongue. Things are kicked up a notch in upper-level practice classes in translation (which uses written language) and interpretation (which is all spoken).
What it takes Besides fluency in English and another language, just a year and a half of evening classes and $4,740 in tuition
When to start Begin any quarter; spring term starts in April. – Bellevue College, bellevuecollege.edu

Image: Courtesy North Seattle Community College

Watch Technology Associate in Arts Degree
Gear Up
Why you should Here’s the secret about watchmakers—they’re an older bunch that’s retiring in droves, so the industry actually needs workers. Because yes, people still wear (and break) watches. Tinkerers with excellent eyesight can earn an associat degree or certificate in watch technology from North Seattle Community College in two years, provided they pass the hands-on tryout. The program was created in partnership with Rolex Watch USA, and almost every single graduate has found watch repair employment in recent years.
What it takes No experience is required, but fine motor skills are tested before students are accepted into the two-year, full-time program. Tuition is $12,558.
When to start Registration for fall 2013 entry begins in May. – North Seattle Community College, northseattle.edu

Master of Science in Midwifery
Birth the Future

Image: Courtesy Lila Kamani Photography

Why you should Recession or not, people will always have babies. They’re counting on it at Bastyr, a natural health university in Kenmore, where earning a master of science in midwifery requires training in epidemiology, pharmacology, embryology, and dozens of other --ologies. The low-residency model means classes are taught online with regular on-site visits to campus. Graduates go on to deliver babies in private practice or become teachers themselves, and all midwives emerge ready to apply for state and national certifications—and with an abiding appreciation for the miracle of life and stuff.
What it takes No nursing experience is required for the 11 quarters (about three years) of classes costing $64,167 before fees.
When to start Applications are due February 1 for the September start. – Bastyr University, seattlemidwifery.org

Image: Paul Windle

Game Art and Design Bachelor of Arts
Play the Game
Why you should If becoming a video game artist was easy, every ex-Mario addict would do it. The BFA course at the Art Institute of Seattle is intense and rigorous, with courses in everything from drawing (you have to start somewhere) to storyboarding, 3D model making, and rules of intellectual property. Seattle’s outpost of the school boasts a 100 percent job placement rate for its 2010–11 graduates of the Game Art and Design program.
What it takes An abiding love for video games, three years at the downtown campus, and $87,300 in tuition
When to start Winter quarter begins January 7. – Art Institute of Seattle, artinstitutes.edu/seattle

Score New Skills

Image: Paul Windle

Overcoming Procrastination Class
Stop Stalling
Why you should Name one job or career that isn’t derailed by procrastination—no, not later. Now! See, you can’t do it. Which means the class Overcoming Procrastination for Greater Peace and Productivity, held in Seattle Central Community College’s not-for-credit wing, is for everyone. Run by a time management expert, the course zeroes in on myths about procrastination (news flash: It isn’t simply about laziness!) and techniques that work.
What it takes It’s a two-hour session that usually costs around $39, which won’t tempt you to put it off.
When to start The next session is January 17. – Seattle Central Community College, seattlecentral.edu

Image: Paul Windle

Introduction to Communication Class
Listen Carefully
Why you should Trying to spruce up workplace interactions? Don’t head to a public speaking class (unless your job title is Chief Orator). Try Communication Studies 101 at Shoreline Community College; yes, there’s a public speaking unit, but the course also addresses the principles of small-group and cross-cultural communication. In practice, you’ll mimic situations regularly found in the twenty-first century workplace, and—shhh!—learn the fine art of nonverbal and listening skills. Bosses love that.
What it takes The evening course meets for several hours a week, and tuition runs around $615.
When to start Winter quarter begins January 7. – Shoreline Community College, shoreline.edu

Speed Spanish Class
Talk Fast
Why you should Because Spanish is a vital language in business and service sectors. Because you took Ancient Greek in high school. Because you have a trip to Buenos Aires on the books. Whatever your reason for rushing through español, there are only six “magic recipes”—basically easy-to-grasp techniques—in South Seattle Community College’s online course. The class emphasizes on-the-street proficiency, not stuffy grammar, and there’s even a final-week lesson on how to use complex negative sentences. You know, for when you get really pissed off at your Buenos Aires cab driver.
What it takes There are two video tutorials for each of the six weeks of class, all online. There are similar courses for Italian, French, and Japanese, all $99 each.
When to start Sessions begin December 12 and January 16. – South Seattle Community College, southseattle.edu

New Huskies in Town

Image: Paul Windle

A tech school moves in next door to the techies.

Northeastern University is exactly where you’d think it would be: smack in the middle of Boston. So what are the Northeastern Huskies doing in South Lake Union? A satellite campus—the university’s second, after one in Charlotte, North Carolina—opens this winter across from a row of Amazon buildings. As dean, the university named Tayloe Washburn, a lawyer who worked with Governor Gregoire on securing Boeing manufacturing in the state. While some institutions look online for the future, Northeastern is setting up shop in Seattle, where it’ll offer 16 graduate degree programs in techie fields: cybersecurity, computer science, health informatics. Apparently the Northeast doesn’t think we need more PhDs in philosophy. – northeastern.edu

Image: Courtesy BWYSE Internet Marketing

Facebook Fan Page for Small Businesses Class
Spread the Word
Why you should We’ll give you a moment to digest the idea of taking a class to learn Facebook. Okay, now that you’re done feeling like an old fogey, consider this: If you set up your business’s page incorrectly, Facebook could take it down. Oops. And do you know the best time of day to update your company page? How to run an online contest or create a Sponsored Stories ad? Connect with each of your Facebook fans on his or her birthday? It’s all covered in a Facebook Fan Page course run by an Internet design and marketing firm, taught at North Seattle Community College.
What it takes Three evening classes at three hours each, with a tab of $135.
When to start The next course starts January 8. – North Seattle Community College, continuinged.northseattle.edu

Image: Paul Windle

Photoshop CS6 Essentials Class
Picture This
Why you should So you totally exaggerated on your resume about being a Photoshop whiz. Never fear; they see that all the time at Ballard’s Luminous Works, a training center authorized by Photoshop maker Adobe. Founder Steve Laskevitch calls his Photoshop CS6 Essentials class “intense without being sadistic,” and he estimates that his 12-hour tutorial approximates what a solo learner could figure out after in 400 hours of fiddling. The personal touch: Every student has a computer (Mac or Windows, as they like it), and graduates are welcomed back within a year for a free refresher course or just to email the instructor for follow-up tips. With a little luck, you’ll pull off that lie after all.
What it takes Two intense days, back to back, run $525.
When to start Sessions start December 12 and January 28. – Luminous Works, luminousworks.com

Become More Interesting

Image: Paul Windle

Modern Constitutional Battles Class
Play Politics
Why you should What use are you at a cocktail party if you can’t chat about commerce clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution? It’s key in understanding hot-button issues like health care reform and same-sex marriage. At UW’s over-50 branch, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, an experienced attorney explains these constitutional conundrums in a -homework-free atmosphere. Membership in the institute is required—as is a birthday that predates the Kennedy -assassination—but the no-stress, no-credit environment is still approved by UW’s academic departments.
What it takes Four two-hour sessions cover a slate of modern issues, but there’s no required reading in between. Membership is $85 per year, and each class is an additional $35.
When to start Offerings for 2013 will be posted in early December. – University of Washington, osher.uw.edu

Image: Courtesy Bellevue College

Wilderness Skills Certificate
Get Out of Town
Why you should Snowshoeing. Backpacking. Sea Kayaking. Rock Climbing. That’s basically the class lineup for a Bellevue College certificate that might well be called Outdoorsiness 101. Students can go on to become physical education teachers or trip leaders, but many just want the nuts-and-bolts instruction—not to mention the supercheap equipment usage—in the Northwest’s signature sports. First aid and leave-no-trace skills are fundamental, but the main thrust of the program is risk management: Turns out that hiking in an alder forest during a windstorm is much riskier than hiking in bear country, since free-flying branches do more damage than wild creatures.
What it takes Eight separate courses, most held in the great outdoors, earn the certificate. Completing the program costs $2,030, but single courses start around $100.
When to start Winter term begins January 2. – Bellevue College, bellevuecollege.edu

Image: Paul Windle

Make BioChar Workshop
Burn Green
Why you should If your backyard is overgrown with blackberry bushes, reed canary grass, or bamboo, you’re just two days away from producing biochar. It’s a form of charcoal that returns carbon to the soil and turns regular dirt into super soil perfect for gardening. At Antioch University’s Sammamish farm, the weekend workshop starts with a 55-gallon oil drum, which students mold into a biochar stove. High heat, low oxygen, and those pesky weeds become natural charcoal, which replaces harsh pesticides and soil additives—a small Band-Aid on global warming. The oil drums stay on the farm, but the environmental bragging rights are yours to keep.
What it takes The two-day class is $25.
When to start Spring’s first workshop is April 27 & 28. – Antioch University, antiochseattle.edu

Drop-In Improv Dojo
Act Like You Mean It
Why you should Jet City Improv’s weekly classes are, hands down, the easiest way to pick up a new skill in Seattle. There’s no registration for the Monday series, just room for the first 18 students to immediately attack one aspect of improv comedy. Teachers from the University District’s school mold the two-hour workout around nonverbal contributions or instinct, leaving room for, well, improvisation. The comedy form develops quick thinking, creative expression, group interaction skills, and the ability to laugh at yourself.
What it takes Arrive early to snag a spot for $10, or purchase a four-for-$30 punch card.
When to start Next Monday. – Jet City Improv, jetcityimprov.com

Image: Courtesy the Book Larder

Lunch-Break Cooking Class
Feast on Knowledge
Why you should Because this hour-long class comes with a free lunch, for one thing. Even better, that meal is seasonally appropriate and taught by Rachael Coyle, the culinary director of the Book Larder, Fremont’s foodie bookstore. The chef demonstrates the meal before a small crowd of 10 before serving it up, and ingredients are sourced from the seven sites that make up the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance.
What it takes It’s $25 for the class, lunch, and a treat to go.
When to start Classes are every Monday at noon. – The Book Larder, booklarder.com

Image: Courtesy Gage Academy

Crash Course in Composition
Focus Your Art
Why you should No one’s waiting for the muses to strike at Gage Academy of Art; the one-day collage class is immersive and intense, a boot camp in making the kinds of decisions to which artists must commit. Not that the art class is all about the fast and dirty—skills of editing and rearrangement are key. You have to give the muse a little time to poke her head in.
What it takes The $95 class runs for a complete weekend day. Before buying the required X-Acto knife and cutting mat, look on the school’s website for the list of stores offering a discount to registered students.
When to start The next class is February 23. – Gage Academy of Art, gageacademy.org

Coursera

Image: Paul Windle

The future is online, and bonus: It’s free. (For now.)

What kind of University of Washington class gets a minimum of 20,000 students to sign up? No, it’s not Free Kegs 101—try Computational Neuroscience. Or Scientific Computing. And just last fall, Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics drew a whopping 30,436 learners.

The classes are MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, the latest wave in virtual education. Last summer, UW joined dozens of other universities on the website Coursera, a destination site for online classes from the likes of Stanford, Caltech, and Duke. They’re all totally free, created by their host university but run without an instructor. No midterms, just quizzes—and no credit.

Lectures are presented via video, and the throngs of enrolled students connect on online discussion boards. The draw is professional enhancement, or maybe just some learning for learning’s sake. Alongside similar sites edX and Udacity, Coursera represents a new expectation: that universities provide content for anyone, anywhere, who wants to learn a little something.

Except now UW wants to take it a step further. It’s the first U.S. university to take the MOOC model up to a for-credit, for-a-fee level. They’ll offer, say, a free version of an applied mathematics program in scientific computing, but also make available an enhanced version that earns credit. Whole certificates can be earned that way.

For a university that already boasts some 50,000 continuing ed students, it means a whole new pool of UW Huskies, this time located anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Classes that can be done from a laptop while you’re in bed? That sounds like a college education to us. coursera.org

Image: Courtesy Neil McNeill

Paranormal Studies I Class
Spirit Away
Why you should Brace yourself: Ghost hunting isn’t anything like Ghostbusters. Skeptics and believers both can embrace this three-night study of parapsychology, a field that’s actually (truly) scientific. After all, there’s a difference between a haunting, a poltergeist, and an apparition, classifications all covered in North Seattle Community College’s quick course. And did you know that most of ghost investigation—something students perform themselves at an allegedly haunted site—is about methodically ruling out false positives caused by rats, foundation cracks, and faulty plumbing?
What it takes Three weeknights (the third one a field trip) cost $95.
When to start The next haunt happens January 17. – North Seattle Community College, continuinged.northseattle.edu

Image: Paul Windle

Urban Weeds and Wild Foods
Eat Your Greens
Why you should There’s no such thing as a plant too ugly to eat, or so says Seattle Tilth, an organization dedicated to urban gardening and sustainable food systems. A one-day wander through the weeds identifies plants that can be foraged inside city limits, such as dandelions or nipplewort. And because eating raw nipplewort is less fun than it sounds, the harvesting class is followed by a how-to-cook session on preparing your bounty. Also included: inside info on what’s legal and what’s just plain polite when picking weeds in the city.
What it takes The pair of two-hour workshops at Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center are $36 each for non-Tilth members.
When to start Spring class dates will be posted December 15. – Seattle Tilth, seattletilth.org

Parents Fight Seattle Public Schools Over New Grade School

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 10:39:00 -0700

Image: Olly/Shutterstock

When Seattle Public Schools announced in February that it planned to open a new math- and science-focused grade school in West Seattle this fall, parents of Mary Mathletes and Bunsen Burner Bobbies felt like they’d found nerdvana. The STEM program—short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—would add about 250 seats and help address the district’s growing capacity problem. But mainly—math and science! The only hitch? “This is Seattle Public Schools,” says Heidi Alessi, whose son will be a second grader at the school. “You have to take the leap of faith that they can really pull this off.”

Alessi and the rest of the parents who took that leap got slammed back to earth this summer. From the beginning the district planned to place the new school in the Louisa Boren Building on Delridge Way Southwest, which had sat vacant for more than a year. It was a big campus that would provide a safe, quiet learning environment; the loudest distraction kids would encounter would be the clink of test tubes.

But then in June, Middle College High School—an alternative public school—got squeezed out of the space it had been using at South Seattle Community College, and SPS decided to stick it in the Boren Building as well. Without telling the STEM parents. Who found out about it from the West Seattle Blog. And promptly went from geeking out over the new program to freaking out that their children would be exposed to the underside of teenage culture: cursing, kissing...Facebook. “We were outraged,” says Kathleen Voss, the parent of another second grader. “It was like a slap in the face.”

SPS will spend $3.9 million to open the building this year. Had it waited another year, that price would have doubled.

The district unveiled the new STEM school only one month prior to the enrollment deadline, and parents had to commit their kids before a principal had been hired or any major curriculum decisions made. (They were crossing their fingers for Singapore math, the trendy but effective, everyone-learns-at-his-or-her-speed teaching approach.) Tensions started to cool when the district introduced the new principal, Dr. Shannon McKinney, an administrator from Arizona who had recently turned around a perpetually underperforming middle school. And in May, they got their wish for Singapore math. But then came the announcement that students would be required to wear uniforms. It wasn’t the end of the world, but…uniforms? Really?

The whole process felt rushed. And it was. Although Seattle schools spokesperson Teresa Wippel says the district launched the STEM program to cope with overcrowding, the decision to do it now was certainly motivated by money. SPS will spend $3.9 million to reopen the Boren building this year. Had it waited another year—and taken more time to plan—that price would have doubled, thanks to a City of Seattle requirement that any public school building closed for more than two years undergo “substantial alterations.”

Seattle Public Schools had planned to relegate the teenagers to portable units in the parking lot, where they’d have no contact with the younguns, but Voss, Alessi, and the other STEM parents rallied. They planned their response on a Yahoo message board. They spoke at school board meetings. They sent emails—hundreds, by Voss’s count—to the district. And they won. The kids will still be required to wear uniforms, but in August SPS found space for the Middle College students at a nearby community center. And it learned a valuable lesson: Parents of young achievers are not to be trifled with.

My College Reunion

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:34:30 -0700

Image: Adam Hancher

I had a great time in college, but I have feelings about my upcoming college reunion. Whenever I type the word reunion, what ends up on the page is “ruin.” Crystal clear to both Dr. Freud and myself is the fact that I don’t want to go. I just don’t know why.

I can rule out fading looks. The upside of never looking that great in your youth is that you don’t look that much worse as you age.

My college friends are all abuzz. It’s like they’re going to a sunny beach resort with cabana boys and an open bar, and I’m going to a root canal convention with “Test Patient” tattooed across my forehead. Their remonstrations are revealing: “Come on, other people aren’t that successful.”

Ha, they think I’m threatened by others’ successes. It’s not peoples’ successes I’m interested in. It’s their failures!

Kidding. But even if my psychic suitcase were bulging with schadenfreude, shouldn’t that make me more interested in reconnecting? After all, I have since college avoided bankruptcy, divorce, betting it all on something big and losing, murdering someone, being publicly humiliated, “becoming a consultant,” and getting thrown in jail. I’m a success!

Sigh. To my mind, those who see no competitive posturing at their reunions are not paying attention. The plain girl who came to my high school 10-year tossing glamour off the ends of her hair. The kid at my college five-year who made sure everyone knew he’d founded a startup and made his 10th million. It’s dispiriting to watch so many people so strenuously proving something. It’s a lot like Facebook, that most precise method for publicly quantifying popularity.

(Now that we have Facebook do we even need reunions?)

At my last college reunion I found myself unable to distinguish the people I knew from the people I knew of. My college class was small enough for everyone to know a little something about everyone else. So there I stood in the crowded hotel ballroom, the lightbulb over my head flashing on with every incoming name tag, but like someone on the autism spectrum I found I lacked all facility for discerning the appropriate social response. Do I remember all your pickup lines because you used them on every girl I knew—or did I date you myself? Were we friends or were you just famous? Is a screech and a fawning hug called for here, or a polite introduction?

I am chided in my circle for my abysmal recall—even of things that should loom kind of large, like the name of my senior prom date. I call my childhood friend Sheryl whenever I need to know something about my past. (Me: “Why didn’t we have a Senior Skip Day?” Sheryl: “We did. You skipped it because you didn’t want to get in trouble.”) I’ve often pondered why I’m so lame at remembering what’s gone before, and I’ve come to this.

Those things happened to a different person.

Honestly, the protagonist of my past makes me twitchy. She was a beta version of me, and, for all she didn’t know but thought she did, I am awash in pity for her. I don’t even much like to look at her: her naive bravado, her self-fulfilling self-doubt, her failures and her successes—many of which I now
understand, for their misguided standards, were themselves failures. My heart bleeds for that young woman. I’m not sure I really need to keep seeing those who were acquainted with her. Some of them wanted to be her friend, and those relationships have followed natural progressions as beta me morphed into current me in real time, like the frog in the heating water that boils to death gradually.

Reunited acquaintances, by contrast, are forced into an incoherent liaison with a person who doesn’t exist. They are interacting with the me of their memory; I am interacting as the me I have become. Sure, meeting new people can be great. But let’s not pretend it’s a reunion.

I used to go to every one of these things. I really tried to enjoy them. But with every passing five years reunions just got to feeling more alienating, crashing old selves into new ones with more and more emotional force.

Why so many people enjoy this, I can’t imagine. Remeeting your past self in the recollections of your old acquaintances is painful. Sad memories are hard; happy ones oddly harder. But ongoing reminders of the selves we’ve transcended and shed?

Root canal convention.

High Schools

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0700

78 Public and 50 Private Schools Graded

Mean Kids

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Michael Clinard

First person to call Brandon Christensen a “faggot”? That’d be me.

Nineteen eighty-four. In the Afton Elementary boys room. I can still smell the piss that had nearly crested the rim of the backed up toilet, the acrid yellow pool for which Brandon’s blond head was destined. I watched Charlie Jensen, his face split by a jagged, chipped-tooth grin, and two of his toadies drag Brandon by the arms toward the site of what was going to be the grossest swirly in the history of Star Valley. Brandon struggled to break free, squirmed until his shirt was pulled nearly over his shoulders before he blurted the five words that would change both of our lives. “Charlie. No. I love you.”

That’s when I went in for the kill.

I figured it was either him or me. I was the smallest kid in my sixth grade class, but I had a couple things going for me that had so far kept me off the radar of guys like Charlie*. My family had recently moved from Northern California, and everyone in Afton, Wyoming, it seemed at the time, wanted to be from California. My dad had just bought the biggest house in town, a gambit made possible solely through the sale of our home on the coast and the relative real estate values in each market. So in sixth grade I hung out with some of the most popular kids in my class, and because of that, despite my size, no one messed with me.

But it was a fragile order. Afton, population 2,000, is a rugged logging and agriculture town founded in the 1880s by Mormon settlers—including my great-great-grandfather—and it doesn’t suffer wimps. As a young male, you were strong or good at sports, or you were nobody. The only truly famous person to hail from Afton is Rulon Gardner, the Greco-Roman wrestler and Olympic gold medalist.

Rulon’s my cousin. It’s safe to say, though, that he and I share very few genetic traits. Rulon’s built like André the Giant. I’m built like Urkel on a crash diet. So I always felt like I was one bully’s bad afternoon away from getting my ass handed to me. It seemed a miracle that I was able to stave off beatings and hang with the cool kids.

A guy like Brandon Christensen though was never going to fit in. And not just because he was small. A transplant from Logan, Utah, Brandon had few, if any, friends. Who knows why some kids get ostracized? Multiple cowlicks battled for command of the straw mop of hair above his pink, murine face. And I remember he rarely made eye contact, but that hardly explains it.

In the restroom, when Brandon told Charlie he loved him, Charlie and his friends stepped back, shocked. A beat of silence. Then, before they could train their focus somewhere else—maybe on me, as their replacement sacrifice to the urine-filled porcelain bowl—I said it. “Brandon’s gay? He loves boys. Brandon’s a faggot!”

That’s all it took. From then on Brandon was the gay guy at school. And in Afton, Wyoming, in the 1980s, there was nothing worse you could be than gay.

The thing is, I know—I knew then —that Brandon just stammered “I love you” to stop the violence of the moment, that what he really meant was, Hey Charlie, I got nothing against you, why are you doing this? Gay and faggot were just words I’d picked up somewhere, from my older brother or from kids on the school bus. I didn’t fully grasp the concept of homosexuality. None of us did.

That didn’t stop anyone. Brandon was a “fag” and a “homo” and he “liked boys.” It was as if we all knew something was off about him and these new labels focused what was indescribable into a single detestable notion. And I didn’t just contribute that one initial observation. No, I fed the fire, reminding my classmates every few days what I’d witnessed in the boys room.

After a while the flames spread beyond my control. Soon there were claims. “Brandon keeps staring at my dick,” you’d hear in the hallway. Or, “Hey look, Brandon’s got a boner. He wants to fuck Mark in the ass.”

Don’t worry. I got mine. Verbal taunting. Bruises. It all eventually spilled my way. But first I would rob Brandon Christensen of what little hope he had of escaping the nightmare alive.

I hadn’t talked about those events for more than a decade, not until this past spring when, spurred by two high-profile teen suicides, I started to look into the bullying problem here in Washington state. In Cashmere, on the night of Sunday, January 29, 2012, Rafael Morelos, 14, told his mom he was going outside to play with the family dog. His brother found his body about an hour later, hanging from a bridge. In the days leading up to the suicide, Rafael, openly gay, had endured physical abuse in the gym locker room and harassment on Facebook, his friends told local newspapers.

On March 7, halfway across the state in Vancouver, Eden Wormer, also 14, told her family good night and, sometime before dawn, hanged herself. The eighth grader’s family told reporters that she too had been the victim of bullies. The trouble began in sixth grade, when a group of girls singled her out for not looking right, and intensified throughout middle school. In one of her last Facebook posts, Eden wrote: “I love all my friends n family n that includes all my haterz.”

When the State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction asked Washington students about bullying in 2010, 30 percent of sixth and eighth graders reported being victims, a rate that had steadily climbed since 2006. The students said that the abuse, both physical and verbal, significantly impacted their academic performance.

Few people know the toll like Diana Stadden. In 2006, her son David attended Hunt Middle School in Tacoma. Teachers would later tell her that it was the worst year of bullying they’d ever seen at the school. David, who is autistic, became an instant target. For sport, students fired spit wads at his face during class. In the hallway, one kid made a fist, took a swing, and stopped just short of David’s face. “He knew that that kind of move would get a great reaction out of David, which it did,” Stadden told me. David reacted by repeatedly banging his head on a doorjamb. Blood sprayed all over the hallway. “That’s when he started to get suicidal.”

Days later, in the middle of a conversation with a teacher, David stepped away. He ran outside the single-story, green-trim and brick school building, across the baseball field, past Jack in the Box, and right into four lanes of traffic on Sixth Ave. “He wanted to get hit by a car,” Stadden said. But he was unsuccessful.

In 2009, David Stadden’s mother, by then working at Arc of Washington State, an advocacy group for individuals with developmental disabilities, received a phone call from the office of state representative Marko Liias. He was sponsoring an antibullying measure and asked if Stadden would be willing to testify in front of a legislative committee.

Who knows why some kids get ostracized? Multiple cowlicks battled for command of the straw mop of hair above his pink, murine face. And I remember he rarely made eye contact, but that hardly explains it.

No one at the state capitol had talked seriously about bullying in seven years. A 2002 measure written to address the problem passed, but not before then governor Gary Locke vetoed a section that held school districts responsible. So armed with a Washington State University study that deemed the previous law useless, Liias, a freshman representing Mukilteo, introduced House Bill 2801 (a revamp of a bill that had passed a year earlier).

HB 2801 required accountability from schools. “Despite a recognized law prohibiting harassment, intimidation, and bullying of students in public schools,” Liias wrote, “and despite widespread adoption of antiharassment policies by school districts, harassment of students continues and has not declined since the law was enacted. Furthermore, students and parents continue to seek assistance against harassment, and schools need to disseminate more widely their antiharassment policies and procedures.”

Remember, in 2010 bullying, particularly antigay bullying, was at the center of the media universe. Several teen suicides dominated national headlines, and in Seattle, sex advice columnist Dan Savage was about to launch the It Gets Better Project, in which everyone from professional athletes to President Obama recorded video messages of encouragement to bullied gay and lesbian teens. When the bill went to a vote in the Senate and the House no one grumbled, and it passed unanimously.

Governor Christine Gregoire signed the measure into law on March 29. School administrators had until August 1, 2011, to put bullying policies in place, assign a district compliance officer, and consult a state-mandated checklist whenever bullying was reported at their schools. Legislators, educators, and parents thought the bullying situation would show improvement. They soon learned, as I had 25 years earlier, that bullies aren’t that easy to beat.

When we entered Star Valley Junior High in the fall of 1985 there was a chance to reset the social order. As graduates of Afton Elementary we joined students from two other elementary schools in the 60-mile-long valley that runs along the Idaho and Wyoming border. So two-thirds of the new seventh grade class knew nothing about Brandon Christensen or what he had said to Charlie Jensen.

I fixed that. In the first few weeks of school, I’d be sitting across a lunch table from a former student of Holdaway Elementary, for example, and announce, “Hey, that kid over there is gay.” “Where?” I’d point to Brandon, seated with a friend he’d just made.

“Bullshit.”

“I swear. Go ask him and he won’t deny it. He’ll just tell you to shut up.”

“Yeah, right,” the doubter would say. Then, thinking he was calling my bluff, he’d walk over to Brandon. When he got back: “Holy shit, all he said was ‘shut up.’ He’s really a fag.”

“Told you.”

Just as before, news of Brandon spread. Someone drew a large penis in permanent marker above his locker. Another student cut out a photo of a naked, muscular man from a porn mag—don’t ask me where he got it—and slipped it inside the locker.

I didn’t engage in those pranks. Aside from telling a few of our new classmates about Brandon, I stopped harassing him. By then I had my own problems.

Obsessed with comics (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern) and skateboarding, I hadn’t even tried to get better at team sports. Plus, I was still one of the smallest kids in my grade. That meant that every day in PE class, after Coach Hillstead picked team captains, who then picked players for basketball, football, or baseball, I was always one of the last to be chosen. During the course of the game no one on my team would let me handle the ball, making it impossible for me to improve at the sport. During baseball, members of the opposing team would yell to their batter, “Hit it to Gardner, he won’t catch it.”

Still, the other kids were relatively kind to me. Everyone except Lane Johnson. A skilled athlete, Lane constantly pointed out my failures on the field and court. “Gardner sucks.” “Gardner’s an idiot.” He was also in my band class—I played drums—where he regaled his fellow trombone players with the details of, say, the air ball I’d shot earlier that morning.

What was strange, and I thought this even at the time, was that Lane didn’t harass anyone else. He singled me out. I remember Sundays, watching TV alone in my parents’ bedroom, sick at the thought of going to school the next day. One night a cable channel played Duel, Steven Spielberg’s 1971 directorial debut. In the film a semitruck murderously stalks Dennis Weaver’s character. The audience never sees the truck driver and never learns why he wants to kill Weaver. More unsettling, the truck driver has no beef with anyone else on the road and at one point even helps a stalled school bus. It is Weaver alone the trucker wants to annihilate. Just as Lane wanted to destroy only me. My only escape was to not go to school at all. So come Monday morning I’d fake a stomachache; I missed more than 30 days of school during the seventh grade.

Things took a turn for the worse in band class the day Mr. Matthews grew impatient with my inability to read the notes and keep rhythm on a particular song. The other snare drummers could do it, why couldn’t I? The teacher grabbed my hand, which still clutched a drumstick, and ordered the rest of the class to start playing the song. Every time I was supposed to hit the drum,  Mr. Matthews brought my hand down on it. He called on another student, someone from the trumpet section, maybe, handed him my drumsticks, and had him play my part. “Gardner, everyone can do this but you! What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Matthews yelled. “Are you a space cadet?” I shot a glance toward the trombone section. Lane looked back with a grin.

In one of her last Facebook posts, Eden wrote: “I love all my friends n family n that includes all my haterz.”

He and I both knew the bus ride after school would be hell for me, as he’d have a lot to share with our fellow passengers. So rather than catch the bus, I set out on foot through the fields, toward my house a mile and a half away. I wondered, as I climbed over barbed wire fence after barbed wire fence, speeding through cow pastures as quickly as I could, if this was the price for what I’d done to Brandon the year before. Maybe Lane was an avenging angel.

But in the eighth grade he lost interest, partly because our schedules never crossed. Tony Thompson took his place. Tony was a bully in the classic sense. Bigger than nearly everyone in the school and reeking of cigarette smoke, Tony tortured multiple victims. He idolized Hulk Hogan and other World Wrestling Federation stars. During lunch hour he practiced moves. Sleeper holds. Piledrivers. Clotheslines. If he’d seen it on WrestleMania, he tried it on us. My body was covered with bruises that I, ashamed, hid from my parents. After a while I stopped running from the guy. My confidence was shot, and the popularity I’d acquired during sixth grade was all but depleted.

In Mr. Allred’s social studies class Tony grabbed my yellow Mead notebook and turned to Eric Burton, my best friend, and, with the threat of an ass kicking after school, made him write: “I love James.” Below that he forced me to write: “I love Eric.” He said, “I’m going to check this everyday and if it’s scribbled out, I’m going to fuck you up.” Fearing my parents would see the notebook, I didn’t bring my social studies homework home for weeks. Maybe Tony was the avenging angel.

On Christmas morning, 1986, I splashed my sister’s new talking Alf doll with the disappearing ink I’d found in my stocking. When the ink left a watermark, my mom exploded, telling me I’d ruined Christmas for my sister and sent me to my room. I ran outside instead. Wearing just snow boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt, I trudged through the snow in the 27-degree cold toward the bank of Swift Creek, the aptly named waterway that flowed past our backyard. Slabs of ice stood in all directions along the creek’s edge, like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

I stared into the half-frozen water. My chin shook uncontrollably. Tears slipped down my cheeks. The scolding from my mom had set me off, but what I was really upset about was that Christmas break would soon end. If I jumped into the creek I would likely drown or freeze to death, I thought, and I wouldn’t have to go back to school.

Now I consider myself lucky. For the kids Stephanie Thomas talks to, holiday breaks, weekends, or nights at home offer no escape from torment. “The harassment is 24-7,” said Thomas, a member of the Seattle Police Department’s eight-person cybercrime division. Over the past two years she has given more than 300 presentations at schools around the city, educating students on the perils of cyberbullying. “Multiple times, I’ve had girls come up to me afterwards, lift their wrists, and show me the cut marks where they’ve tried to kill themselves.”

Nearly all the bullying takes the form of sexually based name calling. “Slut, whore, bitch—it’s brutal,” Thomas told me. “At school things blow up because everyone’s gossiping about what happened online the night before. And at home it just starts up again because everybody’s on Facebook, everybody’s texting, everybody’s gaming, and they’re all chitchatting, they’re all spreading rumors, they’re all gossiping, and it’s just this endless cycle.”

The state antibullying law passed in 2010 does address fbullying that occurs via electronic means. And per superintendent of public instruction regulations, written in response to the new law, if a student harasses another student, even off school property, it’s the school’s problem.

The results, however, have been unimpressive. Adie Simmons, director of the Office of the Education Ombudsman, which answers directly to the governor’s office, is only supposed to hear from students and parents if the reporting process at the district level fails. Yet during the 2011–12 school year, Simmons’s office was asked to intervene in 143 cases of bullying from around the state. “The most common reasons for parents to contact our office regarding bullying,” Simmons told me, “were inadequate response by the school district, lack of a safety plan for the victim, lack of a prevention plan, and [schools] not following their own policy and procedures.”

Seattle Public Schools had the highest number of incidents—nine—referred to the ombudsman, with the Federal Way school district, at four, a close second. And at Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, well, that’s where Eden Wormer was reportedly harassed for two years by all her “haterz.”

I called that district’s designated antiharassment compliance officer to ask about the Wormer case. He passed me along to the district spokesperson, Carol Fenstermacher, who told me that, yes, there was an investigation after Wormer’s suicide, “but nothing could be substantiated” after the fact. “There’s all these laws,” Fenstermacher said, “but if students don’t talk to anyone about being bullied, then we can’t do anything about it.”

The compliance officer at Wenatchee School District, where Rafael Morelos was reportedly bullied before he hung himself on the bridge near his house, didn’t even return my call.

“Those incidents were not reported to my office,” said Simmons, the ombudsman. Setting the new law into effect, she explained, “has been a slow process.”

The man—white T-shirt, faded denim, cigarette—looked at me from halfway across the city park. In Jackson Hole, it’s actually more of a town square than a park. Tourists stalled at the corner entrance, hypnotized at the sight of an arch made of elk antlers, the bones of hundreds of ungulates dead for decades. A drum circle, its members dreadlocked and patchouli-soaked, filled another corner of the square. The boardwalk scrolled beneath me as I stepped toward the smoking man, Brandon Christensen.

It was summer of 1991, and I’d just finished high school. It’s cliche to say that punk rock saved my life, but that’s basically what happened. After eighth grade I doubled down on my obsession with skateboarding, learned tricks on the quarter pipe my dad had built for me at the end of our driveway, and pored over the pages of Thrasher magazine. My heroes, the guys catching air or grinding on curbs in Thrasher, listened to Black Flag and the Misfits.

In high school I made friends with Garren Stauffer, a fellow hardcore punk fan, and he introduced me to his older brother Geoffrey (also into punk) and, more importantly, to the Dead Kennedys. The singer, Jello Biafra, celebrated not fitting in. His songs mocked the jock-down social order that dominated high schools. But more than that, Biafra preached tolerance. I was awakened to how idiotic my treatment of Brandon had been. It was unconscionable that I’d ever singled out someone I perceived as gay—because now I didn’t see anything wrong with being gay. Garren and I liked girls and tried like hell to lose our virginity to them, but we didn’t care when the cowboys or jocks called us “faggots.” We laughed at it. And beyond the verbal barbs, which we accepted like trophies, no one messed with us. Tony Thompson had apologized to me for all his WWF antics. And Lane Johnson, still popular, still a star athlete, became, to us, little more than a caricature in a Dead Kennedys song.

I’d lost track of Brandon. High school yearbook photos reveal that he was enrolled for a while. There’s a photo of him from sophomore year, suited up for the marching band. And in a head shot from our junior year he’s sporting a mullet and an Anthrax T-shirt. Senior year, no trace. I think he dropped out.

So I was happy to spot him, now 18, leaning against a rail in a park 70 miles north of Afton, in Jackson Hole, where a lot of us worked during the summer. I was with Garren and I think I approached Brandon as a kind of celebration. He was alive and I was no longer an asshole! Maybe I would tell him I was sorry, I thought, as Garren and I inched closer.

Instead I asked if he had any drugs. We were looking for pot. Brandon stared at me. I doubt he and I had ever made eye contact before. His eyes blazed an intense blue. His face, almost catatonically relaxed. He seemed to hold no ill will toward me whatsoever. Without a single trace of annoyance or frustration he said, “I don’t do that shit.”

I wish I could tell you that’s how the story ends. I wish I could add that, years later, Brandon and I connected on Facebook. That photos of his kids now appear in my news feed. That I comment on pics of his family vacation to Yellowstone. Or that I “liked” the status he posted, live from the Anthrax reunion tour.

But a year later, in the fall of 1992, during a phone conversation, my sister said, casually, as an aside, “Heard about Brandon Christensen? Shot himself. It was in the paper.”

Christopher Borth wanted to kill himself, too. He never went as far as acquiring a gun or tying a noose, but after class each day at Mount Spokane High School, where he was a freshman, he’d sit at home alone and think of ways to get the job done. It was 2009, and Christopher was being called “faggot” every day. The bullies targeted him because of the way he dressed, he told me. Skinny jeans, long hair, spiked belts, maybe a Rancid T-shirt—a neopunk in not-so-punk-loving Spokane, Washington.

The abuse escalated. His tormentors shoved him in the hallway and when he was half naked in the gym locker room. Had nothing changed soon, Borth believes, he would have ended his life.

The solution didn’t come in the form of a new state-mandated policy. No compliance officer pled Borth’s case. Instead, Borth’s father, aware that his son was struggling, pulled him out of public school and enrolled him in Insight School of Washington, an online program that allows students to do their course work from the comfort of a laptop at home.

Borth says with Insight he could finally concentrate. “My grades went through the roof.” He used to pull Cs and Ds. Now he belongs to the National Honor Society. He graduated in June and didn’t experience a minute of bullying in the three years he was enrolled in the school.

After I talked to Borth, I went online, not to look up Insight—yes, it sounds fantastic—but to see what I could learn about what happened to Brandon after I saw him in the park in Jackson. All I found was a scan of his newspaper obituary. I saw that he’d married and had a daughter—two events that must have happened shortly after he left school—and that before he died he was a custodian and student at a tiny community college. The description of his demise surprised me: “Died of an accidental gunshot wound.” I’d always thought his cause of death was unambiguous. It was assumed among my friends in Afton that he committed suicide, though honestly the wording in the obit hardly rules it out. In the religious culture that Brandon and I grew up in, being suicidal was almost as bad as being gay.

Of everyone I talked to about bullying, Christopher Borth gave me the most hope. But it’s disheartening to learn that one of the most successful ways to deal with bullies in school is to simply leave the school. That’s not an option for everyone. Not now. Not 25 years ago. There was nothing like Insight for Brandon and me.

Maybe the new law in Washington is a step in the right direction, since, in theory, bullying won’t go unreported. But noncompliance rates are high and kids are hanging themselves. And I’m not sure paperwork does much to solve it, anyway. The teachers in my world back in Wyoming seemed oblivious to the savagery unfolding right in front of them—kids belittled and physically tortured just feet away.

For years I blamed myself for Brandon’s death. To an extent, I still do. But now I recognize that in that situation, in all these situations, the adults should have stepped in.

If parents, teachers, administrators—all leaders, in fact—stare the problem in its mean, pimply face, there’s hope. Dan Savage’s It Gets Better comes closest. But more than it gets better, it’s not okay. What if every adult drilled that idea into every child in his or her life? It’s not okay. It’s not okay to single people out because they’re different. It’s not okay to do nothing while kids who haven’t even hit puberty are mocked for their sexuality, or perceived sexuality. It’s not okay to let the assholes win.

While working on this story in late May, during one of those Seattle afternoons so sunny it’s criminal to sit at a desk, I left the office early. I opened all the windows in my house, and then opened my storage closet. I dug through boxes of school notebooks and photos and letters from ex-girlfriends—stuff I hadn’t eyed in at least a decade. As I excavated through the years, I came across a box containing a thin, 24-page booklet: my seventh grade yearbook from Star Valley Junior High. It’s saddle stitched and all the photos are black and white. I turned immediately to the photo of Brandon. He’s smiling at the camera, a puckish, mischievous smile. He looks happy. I look happy in my head shot, too. So does Lane Johnson. And Tony Thompson. We’re all smiling, as if nothing could possibly be wrong.

I flipped to the back inside cover, where on the last day of the school year my classmates had left signatures. People mostly just signed their names. A few scribbled, “Stay cool James.” One person wrote more. I had to read it a couple times to believe it.

“Have a good summer. Brandon Christensen.”

*Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Public v. Private Education

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Image: Adam Hancher

I’M STARING AT the envelope that just arrived. The poor mailman looked terrified when I barreled toward him in the street, arms flailing. “What do you have for me?” I bellowed. “Is it big?”

He had the envelope, of a size that tells me nothing about its contents, and now it and I are trying to peacefully coexist until my daughter gets home to open it. In it is her acceptance or rejection to the private high school she applied to this winter. We knew the envelope would arrive today—hence the mailman ambush—just like we knew exactly when to sign up for the closest public school, her fallback choice.

Or, maybe…her first choice.

For two years we’ve been touring schools, talking to parents, and assessing options; the dance Seattleites do in this city of such widely disparate educational choices. We winnowed the field to two: our neighborhood public high school, a solid academic player as publics go, and a private high school with a stellar educational reputation.

Of course, being private, it also has another reputation.

“Ugh…the privilege,” sneered a neighbor over Christmas. “Aren’t you afraid that if she goes there your daughter will become…I don’t know….you know…”

What? Successful?

Now on my third round of applying to private schools for my daughter—elementary, middle school, now high school—I’ve been fielding remarks like this for over a decade. I understand them. Not every child has the opportunity to attend one of these pricey institutions. Though the best of them have widened access through diversity outreach and financial aid, these schools remain the very definition of exclusive: They have the power to exclude.

That’s why attending them has become synonymous with privilege, a word which in other places might carry cachet. In Seattle it does not. We have no culture of ostentatious wealth, few enclaves of tacky nouveaux riches; our most exclusive gated communities fly so soundlessly under the radar, most Seattleites have never heard of them. (Broadmoor maybe…but the Reed Estate?) Indeed our millionaires seem almost embarrassed about their condition. Our royal families are modest environmentalists like the Bullitts, quietly improving the city in their jeans; some of our wealthiest citizens never stopped looking like the Amazon stock boys they recently were. As the economy slid, bringing with it the New Normal, this regional reluctance to flaunt privilege only increased.

My wealthiest friend, the wife of a business whiz, recently confessed with some embarrassment how alienating it can be in Seattle to live in a huge house. “The Seattle thing is to live in a small bungalow in an urban neighborhood—all our friends do,” she said. “If you don’t, maybe you don’t compost or support public transportation. Maybe you don’t vote Democrat!”

There’s the nonproblem of the decade. Still, her very real self-consciousness reveals something unique about this place in time: Privilege of the sort that propels kids to private school feels out of step with Seattle’s civic values of humility and liberal guilt. My grandparents, of course, would be confounded by this. To them and those of their generation, there was nothing wrong with grabbing the brass ring for the betterment of their children. To them, this was the goal.

The question forms, however, as I and that maddening envelope stare each other down: Which school offers the brass ring? The one with the smaller class sizes, handpicked students, and top-of-the-line facilities? Or the one that looks and behaves more like, well…like the world?

My husband and I are plainly conflicted on this issue, given the way we’ve split the difference: Our daughter went to an academically rigorous public elementary school with the financial extras and homogeneous student body of a private, then an academically rigorous private middle school with the down-to-earth values and racial/socioeconomic diversity of a public. Educationally, she has tasted both populism and privilege—not always in the expected places.

Privilege brings real benefit; only a fool would argue otherwise. It’s just that maybe populism is the new privilege. The teeming halls of our public high school, bright with students of all backgrounds and colors, reflects the globalization that’s shrinking the world; the multiculturalism that will render whites the minority in this country by the time our daughter sends her own kids to school. Maybe experience navigating that very real world is the biggest advantage I can give my kid. In New York City, where the vast majority of American-born wealthy send their kids to private high schools, census data shows that foreign-born wealthy are increasingly and overwhelmingly choosing public. Their world is big; why shouldn’t their kids’ be?

All of which rattled around my head as my daughter exploded through the door, knowing as I did what today’s mail promised. She obliterated the envelope and read the letter, and as I scanned her expression for signs of good news I realized—I had no idea which outcome promised it.

826 Seattle’s Meron Kasahun is a Comeback Kid

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Michael Clinard

LAST SUMMER Teri Hein—executive director of 826 Seattle, an after-school tutoring center for children—learned she could take one of her students to the White House in November to accept the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from First Lady Michelle Obama. Hein knew instantly who to invite. Meron Kasahun, the youngest daughter of an Ethiopian emigre, was an easily distracted eighth grader at Whitman Middle School four years ago when she started coming to 826 for help with her math and science homework. Now she has a 3.5 GPA and is president of the black student union at Ballard High School and writes for the school newspaper and mentors other kids at 826 and… Just take it from Hein: “She’s a role model.”

• • • • •

There’s this one tutor at 826, Doug. He was the one who put me in line. He told me, “No one else is going to do your work for you.” Part of the reason that worked was because my mom is uneducated and ever since I was little I told myself I didn’t want to live her life. I love my mom, but she works way too hard for way too little. When I was in elementary school she would have to work at night, and she’d come home at, like, 4 in the morning. I was seven and my sister was 12, and she had to babysit me. It was scary in a way because we didn’t have a dad to take care of us. I guess my brother should have been the guy to do that. But he’s been in prison, so that didn’t work out.

I hugged Michelle Obama. We had an orientation the night before the award presentation, and they told us, “Do not reach in for a hug, because security will attack you.” They said to reach for a handshake, because that’s the safe zone. So I was standing there on the stage, and I had my right hand ready if she wanted it. But then she put her arms out, so I was like, Oh, hey. Hug time.

To have lived through the experience of Barack Obama being elected, that means something to me. So many people, like Sojourner Truth and MLK, wanted to see this kind of change in the country and weren’t able to, but I was. So what can I do with that? How can I take what people before me have worked so hard to do and apply it to the world?

My mom is extremely happy about where I am. That’s another incentive behind everything I do. The whole reason she came to this country in the first place was to give my sister and me and my brother a chance to have a decent education and a decent lifestyle. For me to make sure that that happens and to make sure that I’m staying out of trouble, that’s the reason she came here. Why would I put myself in a situation where I’m doing something wrong when she’s doing everything possible so that I can do something right?

A lot of people say I’m weird. Probably because I am. I know how to unicycle. I knit myself hats all the time. What else? I don’t like red bell peppers.

Before 826, my world was my school and my bedroom. I’ve been here four years now, and I don’t feel like I’m even the same person. I’m a lot more confident with who I am and what I do and what I say. This is who I am. I’m not embarrassed to say that my mom doesn’t make $100,000 a year. I was born into this life, you know? There’s no reason you should be afraid of or embarrassed by anything about yourself. You didn’t choose that for yourself. That’s who you are.

In my neighborhood, most of the kids are white, and their parents make a lot of money, and that’s just the way it is. But here, because we’re in the middle of not the richest part of the city, we have all of these different kinds of kids coming to learn. And diversity is such an important part of learning, because it’s how you function as an adult. In school, you’re learning the same way as everyone else in your class, but there are so many different ways to learn. And all of that happens under this roof.

I’m not even saying this just to say it: When I’m with a student and I’m trying to teach them something and they’re not learning it, and then finally they’re like, “Oh, I get it now!”—that makes me so happy. Ten years from now, that person is going to know how to multiply, and I caused that. I put that in their mind. It’s a good feeling.

What bums me out? I don’t know. Missing the bus.

There are so many things that make me think, When I’m old enough, I want to change that. I want to be a person who changes the way people think. I want to fix something that’s wrong with the world.

Apple for the Teacher

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:00:00 -0700

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, Seattle Public Schools has used stimulus funds to pay for an “educational technologist”—kind of a tech-savvy teacher’s aide—for each of its schools. But when the district found out earlier this year that the federal program was ending and that remaining monies had to be spent by August 31, its IT department got creative. Rather than let the cash go to waste, it invested in 90 iPod Touches and more than 100 iPads, to be distributed this fall at 10 schools that applied for a tech grant. Students will use the devices for everything from collecting and analyzing data to creating multimedia presentations.

“It was like Christmas for the teachers,” says SPS IT director, Eric Caldwell. “At a time when we’re cutting budgets and a lot of the news is gloomy, they had the opportunity to have some resources that were really exciting.”

High Schools

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Charlie Schuck

Stylist Ashley Helvey; hair and makeup by Megan Dodge.

The New School Plan
School enrollment in Seattle just got simpler.

One Size Fits Some
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Talk Supe
A Q&A with Seattle Public Schools superintendent Maria Goodloe–Johnson.

Geek Boot Camp
Cleveland High reboots with a new tech–heavy curriculum.

Smart and Smarter
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6 Ways for Seattle Schools to Score Higher
Save Seattle Schools bloggers Melissa Westbrook and Charlie Mas weigh in.

Parents As Search Engines
When the goal is private school, start the search early.

Private Lives
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Grading Our High Schools
A guide to secondary education in the Seattle area.

The New School Plan

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: James Yang

SARAH BOWEN plays a mean violin. For three years at Eckstein Middle School, she was her grade’s concert master, a desirable designation bestowed upon the top violinist in the entire orchestra. In other words, her path to higher learning is paved in half notes and treble clefs. Or it was until she found out last winter that, based on nothing more than her address, she’d been assigned to Nathan Hale High School, which didn’t even have an orchestra program. “We became very active last year in trying to have a reasonable discussion about this with the district,” says Sarah’s dad, Keith Bowen. “And basically we got snubbed each time.”

The neighborhood-school concept is so accepted—and entrenched—in most cities not named Seattle that it’s practically passe: If you live within the boundaries for Clark Kent Middle School, you’re going to Clark Kent Middle School. What that system lacks in options it presumably makes up for by encouraging neighborhood ownership of the school.

On the other hand, Seattle Public Schools’ decades-old open-choice program has given picky parents the power to apply, on their kids’ behalf, to any school in the district. And what that plan lacked in community building, it presumably made up for by encouraging niche curricula: Don’t think the science program at West Seattle High is challenging enough for your overachieving teen? See if you can get her into Ballard High—and the district will pick up the crosstown transportation tab.

At least that’s how it worked until the 2010–11 school year: From now on, all incoming kindergartners and sixth and ninth graders are assigned to their neighborhood school. At its core, it was a change jump-started in 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down SPS’s method of integrating schools. But the district prefers to focus on the positive, pointing out that the new student assignment plan excises the complexities inherent to the open-choice system, which included tiebreakers for students who fought for spots at in-demand schools. “In the past, you had every choice except predictability,” says SPS enrollment manager Tracy Libros. But Sarah Bowen’s less-than-desirable school-assignment sitch underscores the ways in which the new plan is testing some families’ ability to adapt to change—and the district’s ability to meet every student’s educational needs.

Image: Charlie Schuck

iPad illustration by Benjamen Purvis

In theory, the neighborhood-school plan wouldn’t be a problem if parents believed the educational offerings were comparable at every SPS high school. And although superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson says the district is trying to level the academic playing field across the city, it’s a work in progress. In Bowen’s case, it wasn’t until other parents like hers complained that administrators at Nathan Hale tuned up an orchestra there. But faced with the prospect of languishing in a fledgling program, Bowen decided her only choice was to go private and attend Bishop Blanchet.

Now, the neighborhood-school system hasn’t stripped parents and students of all of their options. In fact, this year 10 percent of the seats at each high school were left open for students who live outside their preferred school’s attendance-area boundaries. But unless they had an older sibling already there, they landed in a random lottery. And there’s no guarantee that the district will be that flexible in the future. The new student assignment plan mandates that each high school offer open-choice seats, but it doesn’t specify how many. A subsequent transition plan approved by the school board set the 10 percent target for this year, but even Libros isn’t sure what will happen next year. “The percentage of open-choice seats may decrease and it may increase.”

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Even more troubling for parents whose kids were assigned to schools they wanted to attend is the potential for overcrowding. Contrary to district projections that enrollment at SPS high schools would drop this year, the incoming freshman class at every high school except Ballard and option school Nova was actually higher than the average enrollment of the other three classes. According to enrollment figures released in mid-October, this year’s sophomore, junior, and senior classes at Garfield each average just over 400 students, while the freshman class has ballooned to nearly 550. The crowding was so extreme earlier this year that students struggled to get through the cafeteria line before their lunch period was over. It’s hard to say for sure why enrollment spiked. The economy may have hit parents’ budgets for private school. But it’s not a stretch to presume that kids who went private in the past are going public now because they’re guaranteed entrance to desirable public schools. The very thing that the district was striving for—namely, predictability—may be what’s choking its schools’ hallways.

Of course, it’s not all bad. In fact, it’s mostly good. School-choice applications at all grade levels dropped from more than 13,000 last year to less than 6,000 this year, which means that instead of spending money busing kids all over the city, the district can devote more funds to classrooms. And those students who applied to schools outside of their ’hood had a considerably less complex system to navigate: After receiving their assignment in February, they could opt for open enrollment, choose their preferred schools, and wait until May to hear if they got into one of them. Even the educational offerings are expanding. For the first time ever, every SPS high school offers some Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. “And that’s the promise of the new student assignment plan,” says Goodloe-Johnson.

As for violin virtuoso Bowen? She’d requested a seat at Roosevelt, but because it’s an in-demand school she’d resigned herself to attending Blanchet—and her parents had paid the $500 deposit. But then last summer she got a call: She’d been accepted to Roosevelt. “We put in a whole lot of time and energy and money,” says Keith, “and really, the only thing it came down to was that we won the lottery.”

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High Schools

The New School PlanSchool enrollment in Seattle just got simpler.

One Size Fits SomeWhen all students learn the same thing, will they be smarter?

Talk SupeA Q&A with Seattle Public Schools superintendent Maria Goodloe–Johnson.

Geek Boot CampCleveland High reboots with a new tech–heavy curriculum.

Smart and SmarterHow one West Seattle mom challenged Chief Sealth to be more challenging.

6 Ways for Seattle Schools to Score HigherSave Seattle Schools bloggers Melissa Westbrook and Charlie Mas weigh in.

Parents As Search EnginesWhen the goal is private school, start the search early.

Private LivesA crash course in private school programs.

Grading Our High SchoolsA guide to secondary education in the Seattle area.

The New School Plan

GROWING PAINS

The New School Plan
School enrollment in Seattle just got simpler.

One Size Fits Some
When all students learn the same thing, will they be smarter?

Talk Supe
A Q&A with Seattle Public Schools superintendent Maria Goodloe–Johnson.

Geek Boot Camp
Cleveland High reboots with a new tech–heavy curriculum.

Smart and Smarter
How one West Seattle mom challenged Chief Sealth to be more challenging.

6 Ways for Seattle Schools to Score Higher
Save Seattle Schools bloggers Melissa Westbrook and Charlie Mas weigh in.

Parents As Search Engines
When the goal is private school, start the search early.

Private Lives
A crash course in private school programs.

Grading Our High Schools
A guide to secondary education in the Seattle area.