Spring 2021: "Black at Lakeside"

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Black

at Lakeside

Stories of excellence, resilience, and hope — and a school’s work to become a place where all students feel they fully belong.

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F O R T H E B I R D S An unusual collaboration among Lakeside students may give a boost to vulnerable bird species in the Puget Sound region. Students in David Joneschild ’90’s advanced ecology class spent part of last fall researching cavity-nesting habitat. They incorporated their findings in “obituaries” they wrote for individual birds, which they shared with students in Mike Town’s advanced physics and engineering class. In turn, the engineering students — working from home with tools and instruction provided by Dr. Town — designed and built wooden birdhouses tailored specifically for the birds in their environments. Early in the new year, with help from local volunteers, the birdhouses made their way into Seattle-area neighborhoods, parks, and wetlands, giving hope, in a small but meaningful way, of making the obituaries academic. Here, on the shore of Canoe Island in the Union Bay Natural Area, two wood ducks inspect a box built by junior Andy S. ’22.

lakeside magazine staff E D I T O R Jim Collins A L U M N I R E L AT I O N S N E W S

Kelly Poort W R I T E R S Amanda Darling, , Jim Collins,

Leslie Schuyler, Ari Worthman, Chris Hartley A R T D I R E C T O R Carol Nakagawa CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Tom Reese, Clayton Christy, Katie M. Simmons C O P Y E D I T O R Mark Watanabe

You can see a description and video documentary of the project at bitly.com/lakesidebirds

Lakeside magazine is published twice yearly by the communications office of Lakeside School. Views presented in the magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the school.

Photographed by Matt D’Alessio on March 27, 2021

Black

contents COVER STORY

Black at Lakeside 1 6

By Selin Thomas

In Our Own Words 2 6

@ Lakeside

Lora-Ellen McKinney ’73 • Isiah Brown ’16 • Ashley Ellis ’04 • Jamari Torrence ’10 • Takiyah Jackson ’95 • Malika Fisher ’88 Klingler • Jazmyn Scott ’97

Remembering T.J. 3 6

By Asha Vassar ’89 Youmans

Our Work Together 3 8

By Amanda Darling

Isiah Brown ’16, page 28

A L U M N I N E W S

TA L K T O U S

Campus Briefs 6

Class Connections 49

New Head of School Announced 7

Alumni Events 60

We welcome your suggestions and letters. Reach us at magazine@lakesideschool. org; via social media; or Lakeside Magazine, 14050 1st Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98125-3099.

Editor’s Note 2

I N S I D E L A K E S I D E

Contributors 3 Head Note 4 Poetry: “ode to blues” 68

By Storme Webber ’77

College Admissions 8

2020-2021 Calendar, Alumni Board 62

Lakeside Sketchbook 9

In Memoriam 63

Syllabus 10 Student Showcase 11

On the cover:

From the Archives 12

“Metamorphosis,” painting

by Elena Coby ’96 Jenkins

Farewells 13 Athletics 14

Photo: Zorn B. Taylor (Isiah Brown)

Logo lettering

by Fred Birchman

FIND US Facebook: facebook.com/ lakesideschool Twitter: twitter.com/ lakesideschool Instagram: @Lakeside.Lions

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e d i t o r's n o t e

Celebrating Stories and Community

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N T H E S U M M E R O F 2 0 2 0 — during a time of national reckoning with truth, violence, and systemic racism — those of us who work here committed ourselves to listening and learning more deeply about the experiences of Lakeside community members who identify as Black, African American, or African. Lakeside has long been engaged in efforts to make the school a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place; but, through listening, we came away with some new understandings and set newly prioritized goals. For Lakeside to take an active role in the national movement against racism, we agreed that we must start by looking at ourselves and systemic and institutionalized biases and racism at Lakeside. One of our key goals: To nurture a culture that acknowledges and honors difference, leading to an increasingly inclusive school where every individual is listened to, respected, and valued.

This issue of Lakeside magazine, which highlights the stories and reflections of Black students and alumni at Lakeside, comes out of that goal. We wanted to document and amplify the experiences of alumni whose stories have often been left out of Lakeside’s history. We wanted to engage in important conversations about belonging, and who, historically, has not felt fully welcomed on our campus. We wanted to share perspectives from people with a wide range of identities and backgrounds, and showcase stories not only of oppression and challenge, but of excellence and achievement. We wanted the content to be honest and authentic, while at the same time contribute positively to the equity and inclusion work to which the school is committed. We wanted to get it right.

To help us plan and shape the issue, we convened an advisory committee whose judgment, suggestions, contacts, and feedback were invaluable. I’d like to acknowledge their contribution and thank them, warmly: Parents and Guardians Association President April Joseph P ’14, 18, 21; Lakeside Trustee Brandon Vaughan ’06; Jazmyn Scott ’97; Khatsini Simani ’10; Paul Johnson ’84; and former Lakeside teacher Phyllis Byrdwell. Their influence is felt through the entire issue. Being in conversation with this group was a special part of my work these past several months.

On a professional level, the experience of producing this issue has been profound. One example: In making assignments, I consciously turned away from my stable of long-time contributors to find new partners in Black-owned businesses and Black

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April Joseph

Brandon Vaughan ’06

Jazmyn Scott ’97

Khatsini Simani ’10

Paul Johnson ’84

Phyllis Byrdwell

creatives. Expanding my network has enlarged my world. You can get a sense of my excitement on the facing page. The contributors’ work in this issue speaks for itself. I’m eagerly looking forward to working with many of them again. In making future assignments for this magazine and in my other communications roles, I’ll intentionally be adding new filters to identify talented contributors whose work deserves larger platforms and wider audiences. It will take more time and effort — and will be richly, refreshingly rewarding.

Another example: Over three decades of creating magazine issues centered around special topics, I’ve always imagined the content as a suite of related but separate articles, individual facets reflecting different light on a common subject. The articles in this issue refused to stay separate from each other.

Questions raised in Selin Thomas’s feature “Black at Lakeside” (page 16) get answered in Amanda Darling’s “Our Work Together” (page 38). The announcement of Lakeside’s next head of school, Kai Bynum, (page 7) introduces themes that reappear in Asha Vassar Youman ’89’s essay “Remembering T.J.” (page 36). The individual memories in the gallery “In Our Own Words” (page 26) blur the years, filling in the school’s history while adding resonance to the school’s ongoing work today. The two student service stories (page 11) foreshadow the alumni gallery “Working for Justice” (pages 57-59).

It’s as if the entire issue were a braided conversation, the articles echoing and amplifying each other. As a package — these stories and voices, this exploration and celebration of community — the whole is more powerful than the sum of its parts.

At the same time, this issue is part of the larger work in which the school is engaged. With our colleagues across the institution, on a variety of projects, the communications office is asking questions like: How do the characteristics of white supremacy culture play out in the work of our office? How does the dominant culture affect how we choose to share information, who we choose to feature, what topics we cover? How can we contribute to this being a school where every student and family feels included, respected, and valued?

These conversations are not limited to this magazine, and are ongoing.

Please let us know what you think. Wherever you are in this journey, whatever your place in the larger Lakeside community, we’d love to add your voice to the conversation.

— Jim Collins, Editor Jim.Collins@lakesideschool.org

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CO N T R I BU TO R S

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7

Zorn B. Taylor (1)

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3

4

8

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Seattle-based photographer Zorn Taylor shot the portraits of the Seattle-based alumni in our gallery of firstperson stories, “In Our Own Words” (page 26). The assignment was right up his alley: “I make portraits that build community by celebrating the stories of the human beings that comprise it,” he says. “I tell stories a little bit with words, a lot with photographs but mostly with love.” Recent projects include the photo essay “The Summer of Black Healing,” which appeared in South Seattle Emerald in the summer of 2020.

Elena Coby ’96 Jenkins (5)

Jessica Rycheal (2)

Originally from Philadelphia, freelance writer Selin Thomas (“Black at Lakeside,” page 16) received a degree in journalism from Boston University and a Master’s in politics and global affairs at Columbia University Journalism School. Her Master’s thesis investigated the technological and economic causes of the persecution — ultimately genocide — of Burma’s Rohingya. She writes about race and identity in America.

Jessica “J.” Rycheal, a photographer, writer, and creative director, shot the on-campus portraits of many of the Lakesiders driving the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (“Our Work Together,” page 38).

For her colorful, culturally diverse backdrops, J. used fabric made in Ghana along with African-, Asian-, and Latin American-inflected quilts created by fiber artists Brenetta Ward and Lakeside’s own Zinda K. Foster (3), whose quilts have appeared in museum exhibitions around the country. Part of Zinda’s artist’s statement reads: “I only share work that makes me proud, that is tied to a piece of my life story, and I hope 2 others appreciate what I create. But at the end of the day, it’s personal.

It’s art and it’s for you to consume in a way that makes you think about your own life journey.”

Eliaichi Kimaro P ’24 (4) Activist/artist/filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro (illustration, page 4) is a Lakeside parent and multitalented director of 9elephants productions, a company that uses art and video to tell stories of struggle, resistance, and survival.

The painting for this issue’s cover was created by St. Louis-based artist and Lakeside alumna Elena Coby (a portraitin-progress of her oldest daughter). You can see more of Elena’s work in this issue’s Class Connections feature, “The Artist” (page 47) and at cobygallery.net

Selin Thomas (6)

Brandon Ruffin (7) Brandon Ruffin (“In Our Own Words,” page 32) is an editorial, commercial, and documentary photographer working out of Oakland, Calif.

Jerry Mettellus (8) The irrepressible Jerry Mettellus (“In Our Own Words,” page 29) has shot fashion and celebrity photography for national publications, ad agencies, and “most of the Las Vegas hotels and casinos.”

Chloe Collyer (9) Fifth-generation Seattle native Chloe Collyer (“Working for Justice,” page 59) is a photojournalist whose work has appeared in NPR, the New York Times, and Bloomberg Business.

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he ad note

Becoming a Truly Inclusive School I H O P E T H I S S U M M E R I S S U E of Lakeside magazine finds all of you

doing well and looking forward to adapting your family’s summer traditions to accommodate the remaining restrictions of the pandemic. This has been a very challenging year, and many in our nation have suffered the sickness or loss of loved ones, or the economic dislocation of losing a job, or struggled to meet the continuous demands of working and parenting simultaneously at home or working in isolation. At Lakeside we supported one another through these ups and downs, and I am very proud of the work the faculty, staff, and administrators have done to continue offering our students a great education with first-rate classes, whether in remote or blended format.

We have spent a lot of time at school this year asking ourselves questions such as: Do we serve all of our students equally well at Lakeside? Do all of our students see themselves in the curriculum and traditions of the school? Do all our students gain an understanding of our nation’s systems and institutions that benefit some groups over others? Whose stories do we tell at the school? Who gets recognized and celebrated? Do our policies and practices equally embrace all of our students?

We are learning from and acting on the answers.

Diversity and inclusion leaders like T.J. Vassar ’68 and Jamie Asaka ‘96, and many members of the faculty, staff, and administration have worked hard to increase both student and employee diversity at Lakeside.

With grace, humility, and resolve, T.J. and Jamie have pushed us and taught us, and we are steadily moving toward being a school that is more inclusive of all of our students.

This year we entered a new, deeper phase of our diversity and inclusion work: the work of making certain that all of our traditions, policies, and practices are equally inclu- "Where Justice Meets Joy," Oil & Cold Wax sive and representative of all students at the school. Lakeside was founded in 1919 as a school for vibrant, multicultural community of educators and learners. boys, became coed in 1971, and, with few exceptions, To be clear, we have made important changes over the past was an entirely white school until 1965. Much of the quarter-century. We have done a lot of training to become culture of the school that was established during more inclusive trustees, teachers, coaches, and staff memthese roughly 50 foundational years remained until bers, and we have changed our policies. We have the robust Lakeside successfully developed a coed culture in the all-school student affinity program and the new parent and decades after 1971. Now we need to do the same in deguardian education program. And events such as the Indeveloping a culture of inclusivity, one that reflects our pendent School Diversity Career Fair, PRIDE night in athlet4 L AKESIDE

Illustration: Eliaichi Kimaro P '24

ics, Middle School Community Night, and Upper School Fall Festival are traditions now. The Parents and Guardians Association has created affinity groups and inclusion opportunities for new families. We have new opportunities for engagement with our alumni of color, such as the Black, African, African American mentoring program created by Latasia Lanier ’90 (LEEP director, family support liaison, and Upper School student equity programs coordinator) and the Black Family Reunion events co-hosted by Latasia and trustee Brandon Vaughan ’06.

In summary, all across the school we are working in new and creative ways to build a more inclusive community. In my 22 years at Lakeside, I am most proud that we have become a more diverse and inclusive community.

And, more than ever before, I understand how much work there is to do to become a truly inclusive school.

Along with a number of my administrative colleagues, I had meetings this year with our Black students and our Black parents and guardians. What we heard, still, were experiences of racial aggressions and the need for more faculty of color and for students to see themselves represented in the curriculum of the school. This school year, in response to the experiences and reflections shared in these conversations, we are reviewing and revising our hiring policies and practices, our curriculum, and various aspects of student life at the school. I am proud that work is progressing well and look forward to sharing many of the outcomes with our students next year.

Everyone who works at Lakeside believes in the goal of becoming a profoundly inclusive school community and is committed to further transforming the school toward this end until inclusion is embedded in the culture of the school. Lakeside will be a place where all students, regardless of background and culture, feel that Lakeside is their school and where all individuals representing diverse cultures instruct one another in the meaning and value of community.

Thanks for reading, everyone. This issue’s stories represent the rich diversity of voices and experiences within our community and the deepening of our school’s ongoing conversations around the subjects of race and racial justice.

I am grateful to everyone who contributed their experiences and observations to this issue. Thank you all.

BERNIE NOE HEAD OF SCHOOL

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single quote

“

Lakeside Remote” was

Campus Briefs R E M OT E & B L E N D E D

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fter a frustrating fall during which COVID-19 numbers remained stubbornly high in King County, Lakeside welcomed students — cautiously, two grades at a time — back to campus during the week of Jan. 11. From then on, Lakeside followed a “blended” learning model, with classes conducted in person and remotely at the same time.

Masks, open windows, and social distancing became regular parts of the new school day. Athletics teams practiced and then competed in compressed seasons throughout the spring semester. Other events, including the spring musicals, drama showcases, and Arts Fest, were entirely virtual. The school plans on a full return to campus — with all eligible students vaccinated — starting in September.

NOE NEWS

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n Jan. 5, Bernie Noe publicly announced he would be stepping down in July 2022 after his 23rd year as head of Lakeside School.

He had informed board chair Carey Crutcher ’77 Smith of his decision a few months prior, giving the board ample time to begin to implement his succession plan and start an inclusive, deliberate, worldwide search — the first steps in a smooth transition in the school’s leadership. In a letter to the Lakeside community, Noe made it clear that the transition, for him, is not to retirement: He plans to play an active role in the changes to come in the world of independent school education.

Noe will be celebrated in a series of events during the coming school year.

specifically not a place, but it was still a place of learning. When our oval tables were taken away from us, the engagement, the dialogue, and the learning from one another remained a constant.

— William Murray ’21, Student Government President, in his remarks to graduating seniors on June 10. The event marked two significant milestones: completion of high school for the 145 members of the Class of 2021, and the past year’s first, long-awaited, in-person gathering of the broader Lakeside community.

W I L K S TO L E A D S P E N C E

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ssistant Head of School/Upper School Director Felicia Wilks will assume a new role at the end of next year: head of school of The Spence School in New York City. Spence is an all-girls K-12 school with a national reputation for strong academics. Wilks joined Lakeside as Upper School director in 2017 and in 2019 was named assistant head of school, with all-school responsibility for athletics and experiential education. Among her accomplishments, she strengthened the school’s harassment and sexual assault policy and created our new department of experiential education. A national search has begun for her successor.

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Photo: Tom Reese (Wilks),; Paul Dudley (Murray)

M AT H T E A M

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akeside’s math team set a school Math League record with a perfect season, achieving a team score of 30 at all six events.

Team members Annabel G. ’24 and Raina W. ’24 earned perfect individual scores for the season.

Six Lakeside students qualified for the national USA Math Olympiad and USA Junior Math Olympiad competitions, all finishing in the top half of their respective groups.

Alex Z. ’24 scored a perfect 42 out of 42 in the Junior Olympiad — one of only two perfect scores on this exam in the entire country this year, and the second perfect USAJMO score in Lakeside history.

CHESS TEAM

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fter Lakeside’s chess team won the Metro League’s annual tournament, Sophie T. ’23, Sophie S. ’24, and Felicity W. ’26 went on to compete at the Washington State Girls Chess tournament. Sophie T. became the Washington State Girls Chess Champion — defeating the defending state champion — while Sophie S. and Felicity finished in third and fourth place, respectively.

PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLAR

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enior William Murray ’21 was named a 2021 U.S. Presidential Scholar, one of two winners from Washington state and one of 161 American high school seniors who were honored for having demonstrated outstanding academic achievement, artistic excellence, leadership, citizenship, service, and contribution to school and community. Of the 3.6 million students who graduated from high school this year, more than 6,000 candidates qualified for the prestigious 2021 awards determined by outstanding performance on the College Board SAT and ACT exams and through nominations from school officers and partner organizations.

Photo: Tom Reese

Kai Bynum Announced as Lakeside’s Next Head of School

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N J U N E , the Lakeside Board of Trustees announced the selection of Kai Bynum as the leader who will succeed Bernie Noe as Lakeside’s head of school. A scholar of 19thcentury literature, Bynum is currently head of Connecticut’s Hopkins School, the third-oldest independent school in the nation.

In their letter announcing Bynum to the Lakeside community, trustees Carey Crutcher ’77 Smith and Bert Valdman wrote, “In our pool of outstanding educational leaders, Kai was very much ahead of the group in the depth of his educational vision and his experience as an administrator in executing on that vision.”

Bynum’s rise in the national landscape of independent school leaders comes from years of classroom and on-the-ground experience: He’s taught middle schoolers, high school students, and graduate students. He’s been a coach. An advisor and dorm parent. A director of academics and strategic initiatives. A diversity, equity, and inclusion professional. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches a doctoral course in the Graduate School of Education — the same program in which he earned a doctorate and published his thesis on spirituality and emotional intelligence in teenagers. And he’s done this while serving at some of the nation’s most highly regarded independent schools.

Bynum feels a powerful sense of homecoming in his selection. He spent his formative years in Olympia,

where he was a standout scholar and athlete at Capital High School. He majored in history at the University of Washington, where he also played for the Husky football team. (“I’m afraid I’m one of those alums who bleeds purple and gold,” he said, during an ice cream social event at the Middle School where he met and talked with students a few days after his announcement.) In high school, Bynum fell in love with theater and poetry — but was told by his music director that he had to make a choice between playing football and playing music. He later told a reporter, “I realized then, as a sophomore, I wanted to be part of a school that allowed kids to find a way to do as much as they wanted to do.”

He begins his term at Lakeside in July 2022. Learn more about Bynum, his educational leadership, and the head of school selection process at lakesideschool.org/head-of-schoolsearch S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 7

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Advantages in the College Admissions Race “You don’t have to worry about getting into college, because you’re Black.”

“You got into college because you’re Latinx.”

“It’s so hard for white students to get into college.”

These are microaggressions that our Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students encounter from some classmates. Born from the erroneous assumption that colleges’ commitment to building racially diverse student communities advantages racially underrepresented students over their white counterparts, these comments further marginalize and inflict pain on our most vulnerable students.

Each winter, in our introduction to the college process for families of juniors, the college counselors are asked why these underlying assumptions are incorrect. To build an inclusive community, it’s important that all Lakeside constituents grasp how the current college admissions system advantages white applicants.

The system was designed in the 1930s with the intent to prioritize white evangelical men. As the population of immigrants, Jews, and other underrepresented groups grew and scored highly on the SAT — then the primary determinant of admission — college leaders developed “holistic admissions” where applicants’ character, values, and personal qualities were assessed alongside academic achievement.

This subjectivity enabled colleges to admit white evangelical men in higher numbers under the guise that they possessed stronger personal traits.

While colleges have modified “holistic admissions” over the years, it’s still the system used today.

As colleges and universities have refined the system, they’ve developed other preferential categories: legacies 8 L AKESIDE

(children of alumni), development cases (applicants from families with the potential to contribute significant financial resources), recruited athletes, highprofile cases (children of the famous), among others. In the vocabulary of the admissions landscape, students who meet these definitions are considered “hooked.” Across all these categories, there’s a common thread, even today: the overwhelming number of hooked applicants are white. While colleges adopted another preferential category in response to the civil rights movement — racially underrepresented students (which then included Asians) — it is the only category that doesn’t give preference to white students.

This is why at most selective colleges, white students make up more than half the student body. At those where it’s less than half, white students remain the largest racial group.

Because selective college applicant pools remain predominantly white, colleges can achieve racial diversity only by admitting underrepresented students at higher rates. So it’s true that the process is less selective for underrepresented students once they’ve applied. Yet concluding that these students are “advantaged” incorrectly assumes that all students have had equal opportunities growing up. Research overwhelmingly shows that white students have greater access to quality education and extracurricular opportunities, substantially increasing the likelihood they’ll apply to selective colleges and present stronger academic credentials (grades, scores, rigorous curricula). Believing, therefore, that everyone is equal when applying to college is like entering a mile-long race in which the finish line is admission to college, yet the starting line for white applicants is substantially ahead of their nonwhite peers’.

Building a culture of inclusivity at Lakeside means upending these erroneous assumptions about racial preferences in college admissions. If we hear them, it’s our responsibility to challenge and correct them to ensure that the true beneficiaries of our current admissions system — white applicants — recognize their privilege.

— Ari Worthman, director of college counseling Illustration: Sydney Y. ‘22

LAKESIDE SKETCHBOOK

“Prom, 2021” Artwork by David Orrin Smith '04 davidosmithartist.com

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inside l ake side SYLLABUS

Who am I, in community?

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H I S Q U E S T I O N guides 8th grade Personal Development.

An anchoring idea of the course is eloquently described in the TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story,”

by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie. How can we expand beyond our “single stories,” Adichie asks, for the greater good of our community?

Her recorded talk is part of the eclectic, multimedia resource list for this class.

Students begin with a unit on mental and emotional health. The California-based campaign Walk in Our Shoes provides a foundation of defini-

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tions, specific mental health challenges, and personal stories. From Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos’s lecture, “Happiness Homeroom: Science-Backed Strategies for Well-Being,” students learn “pro tips” for maximizing their wellness, including topics like social media awareness and incorporating gratitude and compassion as daily practices.

Next, we explore leadership and advocacy — excellent topics for the “big fish” of Middle School! Students investigate personality and leadership models, including the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and Daniel Goleman’s Lead-

ership Styles. They then hear from a range of leader guests and apply their leadership skills and interest to the SPARC advocacy project: Student Passion Applied to Real Causes.

During our gender unit, National Geographic’s Gender Revolution issue provides a range of meaningful articles and infographics from a global lens. Students also clarify terminology using the Human Rights Campaign’s glossary, among other sources. It’s powerful for students to unpack their assumptions and influences about gender, and in turn become influencers of others.

When we investigate healthy relationships (including friendships, family relationships, and romantic relationships), key topics include communication, listening, conflict resolution and consent. Students differentiate healthy versus unhealthy relationship traits through resources from The Gottman Institute and the One Love Foundation.

Students finish the year by crafting their “Personal Credo” a statement that captures their core beliefs. As preparation for this assignment, students analyze spoken word pieces by artists such as Amanda Gorman, Sarah Kay, and Phil Kaye. Students revel in the opportunity to share and witness one another’s truths, acknowledging — if all goes well — each individual as a uniquely textured thread in the 8th grade class tapestry.

— Meera Patankar, Middle School Personal Development teacher and Global Service Learning Program manager.

Illustration: Fred Birchman

ST U D E N T S H OWC AS E

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M P T Y B O W L S is a program run by the North Helpline Organization. North Helpline aims to “reduce hunger and increase access to nutritious food by distributing food to our most vulnerable neighbors” through rescuing food from grocery stores and restaurants that is still edible, but has been deemed not worth selling. That food is processed and donated to food banks all across Seattle. Empty Bowls — an annual event culminating in a dinner and fundraiser — gives local artists an opportunity to create handmade bowls to support the program. At the fundraiser, these bowls are auctioned off and soup is served! The proceeds go entirely to North Helpline. This year, Lakeside students created more than 100 ceramic bowls for this worthwhile cause. Twenty of them are shown here.

— Dylan T. ’22 and Sidney Y. ’22

T H E C O L O R I Z AT I O N C O L L E C T I V E

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O Z E N S O F Lakeside students find creative ways to provide high-value community service. In 2019, Anya Shukla ’21 and Kathryn Lau ’21 founded a nonprofit to support teenage artists of color. The Colorization Collective provides showcase opportunities and mentoring for emerging and aspiring artists of all kinds — painters, makeup artists, pastry designers, dancers — while creating forums and events for them to share and learn among themselves.

Painting by teen artist Clement Kammwamba

The two friends launched the organization with a long view, knowing the power of a positive feedback loop: if more artists of color see themselves in the arts, they are more likely to continue in the arts as practitioners and patrons, which in turn will lead to increased productions, exhibitions, and performances

of diverse, inclusive art. Their model has received local press coverage and the kind of rave reviews that make a difference: At the time of this writing, their success has spawned chapters in New Jersey, Colorado, and California. Anya and Kathryn plan to remain involved with the organization and help it mature into a national nonprofit with adults serving on its board of directors.

For information visit colorizationcollective.org.

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inside l ake side FROM THE ARCHIVES

In the Company of Covenants I F Y O U ’ V E R E A D the history book that Lakeside commissioned for the centennial, you probably remember that in 1930, the school moved from Madison Park to its current location at the far northern tip of the city.

Why did the trustees move the campus from its location in Madison Park? In fact, the school was following the advice of East Coast educational consultant Henry Carr Pearson, formerly the head of Horace Mann School in New York. Pearson conducted a detailed study of Lakeside in the spring of 1929. His report concluded that in order for Lakeside to thrive (survive, even), it needed to expand. The buildings and size of campus in Madison Park wouldn’t do. He wrote, “the so called ‘country day school’ type would best meet the needs of a large and growing city like Seattle because it would enable its boys to have their school and athletic activities outside the populated city and yet return to their homes each night and week end.”

Pearson didn’t know the area well enough to suggest specific locations for a new campus, but urged the board to convene a committee to do just that. Minutes from a September ’29 board meeting mention an option to buy “the 30-acre Holt tract,” but the price was too high; minutes from the November 12 meeting recorded “A motion by Mr. Whitcomb seconded by Mr. Hewitt that the site committee be authorized to purchase the sixteen-acre West & Wheeler tract for the best price and on the best terms and conditions possible not to exceed a maximum of $14,500 was unanimously passed."

So Lakeside moved north to expand its campus, allowing more students to attend, upping the school’s revenue, enabling it to thrive. The decisions and reasoning seem straightforward.

It was not until I began researching

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A c. 1940 brochure advertises the exclusive Blue Ridge development, not far from Lakeside.

the history of redlining and racial covenants in Seattle that I started to wonder about the philosophies underlying the country day school movement of the early 20th century. Nothing I have found in the records explicitly states that Lakeside’s move to the far north of the city was racially motivated. The original land deed, tracked down by Aaron Z. ’23 and Estelle L. ’24 in their research for a two-part series in Tatler, contains no racist language. However, the houses in “Golfcrest” — the neighborhood development that abuts Lakeside’s Upper School campus to the south and includes what is now Lakeside Middle School — came with deeds that carried the chilling language: “No race or nationality other than those of the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any dwelling or lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race or nationality employed by an owner or tenant.”

Many neighborhood covenants all over Seattle, especially those for developments in the northern part of the city, contained similar language. Although hard to digest, it’s important

to read these and understand their impact, to understand how a policy of racist restrictions — sanctioned by the federal government — shaped our neighborhoods, our schools, our lives.

Who created covenants like these?

Seattle radio station KUOW produced a story on the subject in 2017 and explained that in Seattle in the early 20th century, it was the very wealthy who could guarantee bank loans for the development of entire neighborhoods. In fact, a man well known in Seattle history was behind several neighborhood developments (called “restricted residential communities”) with notoriously racist covenants attached: William Boeing.

Boeing started platting his subdivisions for sale in 1930, the same year Lakeside made its move. Soon after the new land was purchased, trustees invited him to join the school’s board.

Boeing provided much of the funding for construction of the headmaster’s house and the school’s original gymnasium. He continued to develop subdivisions in surrounding areas, ensuring, with racist covenants, that they be for whites only. Pamphlets The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project

FA R E W E L L S

like the one pictured here from the 1940s successfully advertised neighborhoods in the north end for decades. By the time the first Black students began attending Lakeside in the mid-‘60s, the city’s defacto segregation was firmly established.

T.J. Vassar '68 talks candidly about this in an oral history interview conducted in 2010, during which he explains how foreign north Seattle had felt to him when he came to campus for the first LEEP session in the summer of 1965. Vassar’s family, like so many of the city’s Black residents, were confined to the Central District due, in large part, to restrictive covenants and the real estate practice of “redlining” — outlining areas with large Black populations on maps with red ink as a warning to mortgage lenders. Vassar called the Lake Washington Ship Canal Seattle’s “Mason Dixon line.” There may not have been official laws on the books segregating the city, but police enforced what were called “Sundown” zones, arresting non-white people who were in whiteonly neighborhoods after dark.

I don’t think we can move forward with equity work until we understand how deeply the roots of racism go.

Where we learn and come to work each day — our beloved campus at the northern tip of the city — is as far from our “Mason-Dixon line” as one can get and still be in Seattle. Even if we can’t establish a clear racist motivation for the decision to place our campus here; even if the trustees themselves didn’t see the move as having anything to do with race, we still need to acknowledge the context in which that decision was made. Our work toward equity is not just about planting new perspectives and policies, it’s also about uprooting old ones and examining them in new light.

Leaving Their Marks T W E N T Y Y E A R S is a long time to leave a mark. At the end of this past school year, four Lakeside teachers with at least that amount of tenure retired, having left their marks on hundreds of Lakeside students. Latin teacher Terry Northrup (top, right) was legendary at the Middle School for her teaching of Roman history and her advisory’s domination of the annual Halloween pumpkincarving competition. Her teaching made a persuasive case for why Latin should be taught at the middle school level.

During a varied Lakeside career that started in 1979, Al Snapp (right) taught history for 20 years, served as arts department head for 35 years, taught the yearbook class, created the school’s digital media class, and taught drama and theater production. He loved supporting Lakeside’s international program, and for years provided instrumental support for the school’s exchange program with Yoshida High School in Japan and School #20 in Moscow.

Nancy Canino (bottom) spent more than 25 years teaching science and math to Lakeside Middle School students. Known for her high standards in the classroom and her selfproclaimed “freakish” ability with calendars and schedules, Nancy was a member of Lakeside’s calendar committee from the time of its inception. She designed a perpetual calendar that Lakeside continues to use to figure out when the school’s start dates and holidays should fall. “The anti-racism workshops, readings, and conversations I’ve had over the last 10 years,” she says, “have changed so much about how I interact with the Math and science teacher Nancy Canino had a way with numbers.

For two decades, Latin teacher Terry Northrup brought a dead language to life.

Over a 35-year career, Upper School faculty member Al Snapp wore many hats.

world. I’m interested in spending some of my retirement time pursuing social justice.”

“Lakeside has been my home for most of my adult life,” says Doug Porter ’80 (bottom, right). “It has been a place where I have experienced so many wonderful moments, as a student and later as a PE teacher and coach. I have had a love affair with this place since 1975, when I first stepped foot on campus.”

P.E. teacher and coach Doug Porter ’80 redefined “Lakeside lifer.”

— Leslie Schuyler, archivist for the Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives. Visit the archives webpage: lakesideschool.org/about-us/history-archives Photos by Tom Reese

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 13

inside l ake side AT H L E T I C S

Meet Student-Athletes Where They Are L AT E L A S T A U G U S T, it was clear that bringing our student-athletes on campus

to practice or compete would not be possible for several months. That, however, did not mean that the coaches and athletics staff went on vacation. We used the time to look deeply at how we approach our work with student-athletes. My first email to the department to introduce the work we would do together included this excerpt: There are no students on campus, and the fields and athletics center are empty. The sense of loss I feel is strong.

I am frustrated. I am sad. I miss you. I miss our athletes. It is our time to use this odd break in participation to become better coaches … better people. To be truly impactful coaches, we must be aware of how each of our athletes feels about the world they live in. We must build personal relationships with each athlete. We must look and listen. We must better understand which athletes feel most comfortable, which feel like they need to hide a part of themselves, which feel powerful, and which feel silenced or invisible. I challenge all of us to become better leaders, better listeners, better role models, better advocates, and better coaches for ALL (each and every one) of our athletes.

Weekly emails to coaches asked them to watch videos and read articles that focused on topics like allyship, anti-racist approaches to teaching, and understanding the true history of the United States. Coaches also attended three workshops. The first focused on what systemic racism looks like, using the criminal justice system as an example. Next, coaches heard from and asked questions of a panel of coaches and athletes whose identity included at least one from a marginalized group. Last, the coaches read Isabel Dickerson’s “Caste”

14 L AKESIDE

Follow Lakeside Athletics on Facebook or on Twitter at @LakesideLions

tions with groups of coaches from different teams, different lived experiences, and different stages in their careers allow each participant the opportunity to grow and learn, ultimately allowing for better coaching and better leadership.

One of my weekly emails focused on the importance of inclusivity and equity in building a positive team culture for every athlete. This is where Lakeside athletics is heading:

and participated in a book discussion. I am proud of the investment of our coaches to become better able to work with, welcome, and support all their athletes.

This is not simple work and is not work that will ever be complete.

This is work that will continue to be a focus of our professional development workshops year after year. My philosophy around coaching is that you coach just as you were coached until someone or something disrupts that model. Helping coaches see and think about their own biases helps to start that disruption. Conversa-

Equity starts with understanding the challenges that each athlete has in meeting expectations and then helping them find solutions to ensure they meet expectations. It is through equity that athletes can feel completely comfortable showing their authentic self because they know that you are invested in what makes them unique and in supporting them in areas where they struggle. If anyone does not feel safe, they won’t bring their full self to the work. And, if we want to exceed potential, every person in a program must be celebrated for who they are and what they bring to the team.

When practices and competitions eventually picked up again, our coaches had new models and new tools to draw on in their roles as educators.

Go Lions!

– Chris Hartley is director of athletics at Lakeside School.

Black @ Lakeside

Q U I LT S BY Z I N DA K . F O ST E R

Lakeside School began as an all-white, all-male institution based on the private boarding school models of the East Coast. It gradually came to see itself as different from those schools in its progressive West Coast embrace of innovation and willingness to change and continually try to do better. In the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the school’s half-century of efforts have been earnest and well-intentioned, but with notable struggles. The events of the past year have sharply focused the urgent need to do better. To listen harder. To look more deeply. To change.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 15

Black at Lakeside For students outside the school’s historically white culture, an education — by necessity — included coming to terms with identity and what it means to belong.

T

BY SELIN THOMAS

H E R E V. Dr. Samuel McKinney was not a violent man. Leader of Seattle’s Mount Zion Baptist Church from 1958 to 1998, McKinney was a third-generation minister and a prominent civil rights activist during the most heated decades of the movement. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King’s only visit to Seattle, in 1961, had been

by McKinney’s invitation. His work and his word were peace, even as Black Panthers in Madrona pointed rifles at his family’s door, even as his friend and fellow activist Edwin Pratt was murdered at the tail end of the tumultuous 1960s and anonymous callers told McKinney’s daughter that he would be next.

“They can kill a person,” he’d said, “but they can’t stop a movement.”

But on a day in 1969 when his daughter, Lora-

16 L AKESIDE

Ellen, was brought to the office of St. Nicholas headmaster Frank MacKeith, the Rev. McKinney found cause for violence, if just the threat of it.

Lora-Ellen was then 9, a 4th-grader at St. Nicholas in the years leading into its merger with Lakeside School. The only Black girl in the student body, Lora-Ellen was summoned from class at MacKeith’s request. She walked past a silent, seated secretary. The door closed; sunlight shone across a burnished wooden desk. For the next eight hours, a little Black girl and her headmaster were made to listen in that small room to the rantings of Aaron Dixon, the 20-year-old leader of the Seattle Black Panthers, whose posture, Lora-Ellen would recognize later, emulated Huey Newton and

Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives (LEEP); Jimi Lott /Seattle Times (McKinney)

Lora-Ellen McKinney ’73 told me this story early in 2021, when the country was still in the grips of the global pandemic. I had accepted an invitation from this magazine to interview Black alumni and describe their Lakeside experiences.

I took the assignment — remote, complex — to see if I could surface a small part of the Black American story, which to paraphrase James Baldwin is the American story.

There’s much about Seattle and its Black community that is unique from the history of the nation, and these geographic, sociocultural, economic, and racial subtleties are meaningfully intertwined. But so too are there parallels, which develop into patterns. In Seattle, as elsewhere, the story is an old one, marked by violence perceived and actualized, by oppression, harm, power, struggle, resistance, fortitude, and deep questions of identity. And it’s changing, constantly shifting underfoot as the tide of our national

Courtesy of Lora-Ellen McKinney ’73 (background photo)

ences played a significant role in how comfortable students felt and did not feel at Lakeside, regardless of race. Many — male, female, staff or student — considered the female experience to be more challenging in terms of social acceptance and expectation. One alum reflected that, yes, America happened to Black students, and Lakeside happened to Black students, but those students at the same time displayed tenacity and agency in making connections, creating joy in their experiences, thriving as artists, musicians, athletes, scholars.

Even the societal context of those individual experiences was inextricably layered — such as when Black Panther Aaron Dixon held a minister’s daughter at gunpoint in the headmaster’s office of an elite private school. “They would not have brought a white girl into there,” Dr. Lora-Ellen McKinney, now a pediatric psychologist, recalled recently.

“That’s a very complicated layer of racism there.”

Lora-Ellen would finish at St. Nicholas and go on to become Lakeside’s first Black female graduate, in 1973, two years after the schools merged. Her school memories are littered with aggressions. A girl in the St. Nick library once came up behind her and repeatedly whispered the N-word and refused to stop. (Lora-Ellen grabbed a reference dictionary and hit the girl over the head with it, saying, “Find. A Different. Word.”) A teacher rapped her on the knuckles with silver at lunch for bad manners — though Lora-Ellen’s mother was training her “to eat with kings and queens” — and made Lora-Ellen sit on her hands in class for gesturing too enthusiastically when she spoke.

“This teacher had problems with my Black body,” she told me. She didn’t share these and other incidents with her mother or father, who lived daily with more serious aggressions, including death threats. At home, she spent most of

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whose rifle gleamed as he waved it and railed against the injustice and unacceptability of private schools.

When the Rev. McKinney picked up his daughter at the end of the day, he asked why she stank. LoraEllen had urinated herself in the headmaster’s office. Her sweat had dried. She had been terrified. That evening, McKinney got a gun and went to the Black Panthers’ headquarters at 34th and Union. “I am not a violent man,” he intoned, “but if you come near my daughter or my family again, I’m going to kill you.”

and civic character goes in and out and back again.

Against that backdrop, as spring came on, I had conversations with alumni spanning a half-century. I spoke at length with former faculty members and current staff and administrators. By the time I started writing, my notes covered some 30 interviews’ worth of experiences and stories that overlapped and intersected in unexpected ways. Almost none of them, I was told, had become part of Lakeside’s accepted or received narrative.

From the school’s point of view, I suspected the assignment was meant to address a key demand of an open letter signed in the heated summer of 2020 by some 450 Lakesiders (many of them not people of color): “In order for this moment in history to catalyze enduring changes to the structures upholding systemic racism in our country,” the letter read, “we all must take it upon ourselves to speak out and engage in important dialogue, as Lakeside encouraged us to do when we were students.... The first steps in this process will involve listening to marginalized students, staff, and faculty and encouraging open responses to this call to action. Reaching out to alumni, previous employees, and current members of the Lakeside community, it is time to make sure that their voices are heard.”

What emerged in the voices I heard is an incomplete piece of the Lakeside story. It is fragmented because it has never been systematically written down or tied together, allowing a keen isolation to persist among the Black alumni community. Many of them feel their stories have never been taken seriously by their alma mater, whose founding 1919 motto, little used today, warns: As You Sow, So Shall You Reap.

What primarily emerged was the depth of layers underlying the seemingly disparate stories, over decades. More than one alum mentioned that socioeconomic differ-

Black

Fits and starts. The Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program (LEEP) was an early, visionary step towards a more diverse school. Left: LEEP students pose for a group photo, 1974. Lora-Ellen McKinney ’73, below, Lakeside’s first female Black graduate and daughter of the Rev. Samuel B. McKinney (inset, opposite), encountered violence inside and outside the school’s walls.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 17

Seattle backdrops. A 1936 real estate map (left) underlaid the city’s practice of racial “red-lining” and restrictive covenants. In 1968, an issue of Seattle magazine featured Black Panther captain Aaron Dixon (above), who mixed a militant approach to civil rights with free breakfasts for children and a free medical clinic.

her time reading under the stairs, between a Persian rug and an old teddy bear. She struggled to understand the conflicting versions of peaceful and violent resistance — the conflict at the heart of the Black American identity — that she saw all around her.

At Lakeside, as she had at St. Nicholas, Lora-Ellen grew uncomfortable in history classes that glossed over slavery and ignored the contributions of Black Americans that she learned about at home. “That’s us,” she remembers thinking. “You have people who love this country, and they kill us.” She told her father, who came to an understanding with the head of school, Dan Ayrault: Lora-Ellen would guest-teach a one-week unit on Black history, using techniques she’d learned in the classroom, armed with “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and the WPA slave narratives as her texts.

These formative experiences — repressing her humiliation; compartmentalizing her fear; being disciplined in ways her white classmates were not; loving to learn but detesting what passed for African American history in the classroom — prompted in Lora-Ellen an acute self-doubt that 18 L AKESIDE

she carries, in one form or another, to this day. “Who am I?” McKinney asked herself as she matriculated to Spelman College. “Who am I?”

Who am I? asked Hamlet, King Lear, David in the Old Testament. Who am I? we ask. When Black Americans ask this, we do so with a vague, intangible knowledge that our ancestors were brought here against their will, and their relatives have long suffered for their lot. It’s as if we’re asking what we owe them. And for the Black alumni of Lakeside I spoke with, the question is further refracted, because this school is one of privilege. Black people in the midst of privilege are between worlds.

Lakeside School: a place so simply and serenely named and positioned that it immediately — almost imperceptibly — whispers This was not made for you.

It was made, in fact, for the bright, white Seattle boy, lucky in his ancestors and bolstered with expectation. When Lakeside welcomed him through its ornate doors and onto its well-groomed quad, the boy had

no reason to doubt that he belonged there. When it taught him to lead, he did not question why. If he felt unsure of his abilities, all he had to do was look around, or forward. The history of Lakeside School showed him — almost guaranteed — his future.

When three young Black men first crossed Lakeside’s threshold in 1965, Lakeside did not change to meet them. The presumption, understood and described to me by the Black students who followed, was that they were chosen and expected to fit the model. That doing so was their opportunity to ascend beyond their lot.

Herein lies the inherent conflict, the heart of Lora-Ellen’s self-doubt, the irresolvable tension of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts nationwide, regardless of tragic catalysts, good intentions, even institutional acknowledgement of racism: The playing field is not even. So when those first Black boys were invited to join this august school, their history, their identity, their families, cultures, and experiences were not equally valued.

It’s the old story, of race and of racism, which marked the experience of every Black alum I talked to. Perhaps

Seattle Public Library Special Collections (Map); Courtesy Seattle Magazine (Aaron Dixon)

@ Lakeside

Black Historic visit. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses a crowd of 2,000 students at the University of Washington in November 1961. King’s three-and-a-half-day trip — which also included a speech at Garfield High School — marked the only time the civil rights leader visited the city of Seattle. In his talks, King stressed creative, nonviolent protests to break down racial segregation and discrimination.

now, for the first time in the school’s history, that story will become broadly known.

“There was a clear ‘us’ and ‘them,’” recalled Stephanie Harris ’78. “And the polarizations weren’t necessarily like you would find in the deep South, but they were definitely borne out of, ‘You’re not a white person born into this model of the point-zero-zero-five percent.’”

Harris’s voice is fast and grainy, like a singer’s. She said her father grew up in 1940s North Carolina.

“He went to Seattle for one reason only, and that was to escape poverty.” In 1951, he was one of the first Black engineers at Boeing, taking rare advantage of the GI bill, which was routinely withheld from Black servicemen.

“He represented the culmination of opportunity and work,” Harris said. “The government hadn’t started the labor department, hadn’t started analyzing the metrics of minority hiring relative to government con-

tracts — that came later — but basically Boeing was, like, ‘We got all these Black guys who are double engineers, many of them with military experience, and they can help us.’

And so that was my basic tenet: I’m part of history because my dad is super smart, and Boeing wanted him.”

Harris’s parents made immense sacrifices to send her to Lakeside and encouraged her to create her own world. But the social realities couldn’t be ignored when white boys started showing interest in her but wouldn’t let her into the house after tennis, or when a photo taken of her and her date at a dance caused the boy’s mother “to go ballistic.” “I remember telling someone at some point, ‘I get it. If there’s someone even remotely interested in me, it ain’t going to go anywhere,’” she said. “I just left it at that.”

The summer before her senior year, Harris went to New York and “became, for lack of a better word, a soul sister the summer of ’77,”

Samuel J. Smith Papers, Washington State Archives (M.L. King)

she told me, laughing. “The music, the hair, the whole thing. I just did me. And it didn’t create a conflict [back at Lakeside] because as Black people who go in and out of other environments, where the dominant culture is set for us, we’re used to being chameleons.”

Paul Johnson ’84, a standout musician and athlete, was torn between attending Franklin and Garfield High when he jumped on the LEEP bus one summer morning because his neighborhood friends were attending Lakeside’s summer enrichment program. He was quickly identified as a student of “potential,” chosen for what he described as not quite an “assimilation test,” but something akin to it, an echo of the code switch required of Jackie Robinson to integrate Major League Baseball. (“He was maybe not the best, but he was the right baseball player for what they were trying to do,” said Johnson.)

As a Black student at Lakeside, S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 19

Johnson felt he was viewed first as an athlete, then a student, an expectation, or lack thereof, that he knew was racially motivated. He described his experience as wearing a mask that, after some time, was not easy to remove.

It was difficult to maintain his sense of self, Johnson said, especially as he got more distant from his neighborhood friends. “You don’t want to lose touch with who you are,” he said.

His Black friends at Lakeside had been recruited in a wave of diversification efforts, but didn’t feel supported, and some ended up leaving. “They tried to adapt to a new world. They got eaten up,” he said. The memory still pains him, causing him to question his own son’s trajectory in the independent school world.

“There was a lot of race theory in class,” echoed Khatsini Simani ’10.

“But there weren’t many people who really understood the experience of navigating the world in brown skin.

That is not just theoretical; that is dayto-day, and there are nuances,” she said.

“Lakeside was an assumption-laden environment. Assumptions were being made about my ability. The baseline wasn’t always a high one. It was not always expected that I would do well in the classroom.” She went from loving math 20 L AKESIDE

to hating it, invisibility to hypervisibility, all the while struggling to reconcile her inward and outward perceptions of herself as a young Black woman. As she tried to find her voice, Simani went on stage, stepped behind a camera, and competed in poetry contests. The arts became a means of empowerment, a valve by which Simani could gain control over seeing and being seen, reconcile who she was with who she was perceived to be. “I had more power than I thought I did,” she said, but few people at Lakeside encouraged her to bring that power to bear at the school. She found sources of affirmation in her local community and teachers and staff who supported her individuality, but the effort was one of the most isolating experiences of her life.

Years later, Simani is gingerly finding her way back into the school’s fold, reconnecting with alumni through the recent Black Family Reunion events and serving as a mentor to Black students.

“Everything I did at Lakeside was an act of resistance,” said Amerra Sheckles ’14, who is Black and Native American. At Lakeside she was particularly frustrated, she said, with the narrow depictions of social activism in the Black community. Acknowledging that

she “absolutely benefited” from lightskinned privilege in the white-dominant campus, she and her older brother entered the same year with different results; his age made it more difficult for her brother socially. Sheckles herself remembered a sense of isolation, a disconnection from who she was for the privilege of a Lakeside education. “The closer I felt to the school,” she said, “the further I felt from home culture.”

One of Sheckles’s memories — the interview she did for Bob Henry’s 1968 history class with Elmer Dixon, Aaron’s brother and co-founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panthers — reveals another layer of this story’s complexity, and progress.

“Black teachers were critical to my survival,” said Ericka Ward ’08. Ward was also inspired by Lupe Fisch and Kim-An Lieberman, “who had a deep commitment to critical theory,” and

by Lindsay Aegerter, a white South African woman who taught African American literature “with humility.”

Aegerter advised Ward in an independent study concerning her family history and the works of Toni Morrison.

“I recognized that I was a resource.

I’m an asset; I make this place better by being here,” Ward said. “The teachers who created space for me to stand in Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives

that confidence started to feel like a community.” She asked herself how she could create more of the kind of community she wanted to see at the school, and got involved. She joined the Assembly Committee and organized the school’s first assembly in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. She discovered Joy DeGruy, a scholar on the subject of Black trauma, and her professional ambitions began to take shape. Ward is now an early childhood educator for the Raphah Institute in Tennessee.

Among those faculty members whose names surfaced time and again in the recollections of former students who sought support and guidance is Phyllis Byrdwell, whom one former colleague called “something of a national treasure.”

Byrdwell started at Lakeside in 1983 as a substitute teacher. She had moved from California with her husband for his new work as a minister of education at Mount Zion Baptist, led by the Rev. McKinney. The oldest of eight, Byrdwell had been inspired in high school to become a music teacher. She became Lakeside’s choir teacher for more than 30 years.

“For a while I was the only Black teacher at the Middle School,” she Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives

said, “and it was important for the kids to see somebody who looked like them. I did feel like I was in the minority but tried real hard not to make that the way I operated.”

To students, day in and day out for three decades, the sight of Ms. Byrdwell (“There is a quiet strength about her. A tall, beautiful presence, a regal presence,” said a former student.) was enough to make them straighten their shoulders, quit their jostling, hurry to class and live up to themselves.

“I got to the place where all I had to do was clear my throat and make sure they saw my eyeballs,” Byrdwell recalled.

To the Black students in particular, Ms. Byrdwell represented comfort, a home. “A lot of them were scared,” she said. “They were in the minority. I wanted them to be students. I wanted them to be able to focus.”

Among them was Brandi Williams ’96, a Lakeside “lifer” who found Ms. Byrdwell and then her path through music. She took every class Ms. Byrdwell taught. When Williams’s tape jammed at her graduation rehearsal, Ms. Byrdwell jumped on the piano. People listening were so floored that they kept

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Black

Role models. Generations of Black students found support and guidance from individuals such as music teacher Phyllis Byrdwell (opposite page, at left) and history teacher Bob Henry (left). For years, Henry hung a poster in his classroom that quoted the Nigerian novelist and poet, Chinua Achebe: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

the duet intact for the official commencement performance.

As Williams’s Upper School advisor, Byrdwell recommended her to the Berklee College of Music, telling her parents she didn’t have to be an academic person — a notable shift from the school’s norms. “She can sing,” Byrdwell put it simply.

After college, Williams toured Europe and worked in the music and television industry before becoming a music and performing arts teacher herself at independent schools in California. “Ms. Byrdwell,” Williams said, “is the epitome of the music teacher I am today.”

I spoke with Brandi, now WilliamsMoore, on the 10th anniversary of her father’s passing. Willie Williams taught history at Lakeside before his daughter matriculated and while she was a student there. Williams-Moore said she’d found solidarity with a solid cohort of Black classmates, sharing a vital space and advocating for inclusion and introspection through the Brotherhood-Sisterhood affinity group, a precursor to today’s BSU. For a time, Williams-Moore took a Black name at Lakeside: Shaquanna X. Her friends joked about her militancy. Yet this shift was important S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 21

School support. Middle School director Harry Finks (top photo, at center) was an energetic proponent of diversifying the school’s student body — and a trusted figure among students. The Brotherhood-Sisterhood affinity group (above) gathers for its yearbook photo, 1993.

in the formation of her identity in a white-dominant culture, an exclamation of pride still considered taboo.

Williams-Moore was widely respected by her classmates, and was voted most secretly admired her senior year. Why her classmates didn’t tell that to her to her face is your guess.

She fell out of touch with Lakeside after graduating, finding herself angry about the experience she’d had there “because of the arrogance.” Now, as a teacher and mentor herself, as her students share their stories and feelings that are reminiscent of her own, she’s slowly turning back. “It has been my experience at Lakeside that drives and pushes me,” she said.

“I felt like everyone at Lakeside has their own experience that no one else 22 L AKESIDE

can really relate to, because the beauty of Lakeside is there’s no ‘in-crowd,’” said Tramaine Isabell ’14, whose mother drove Lakeside students on the 987 and hoped her son could attend. “But I always felt there was an asterisk next to my name.” He had been welcomed by the school for his basketball talent, and he got Lakeside to the state championships. But his home life was tough, and he did not receive enough academic support. He struggled to fit in. He described the feeling of being dismissed as student and a person, of wearing a “scarlet letter.”

“I felt deep down in my heart that Lakeside is a great place, but a kid like me, who had never seen anything like it before, it had almost the opposite effect on me,” he said. “Who am

I?” he remembers asking himself at the time, as he shuffled exhaustedly between school and the court, then went to live in his coach’s house on Lake Washington while his mother still woke at the crack of dawn in the Central District.

For Isabell, basketball was not merely recreation or competition. “It was my ticket out,” he said. He got out, attended universities on basketball scholarships, played in the NBA summer league, and is now touring Europe. His struggle at Lakeside still dogs him. Still, he attributes much of his professional playing ability to his Lakeside experience. “Lakeside allows you to do your thing in your own space. Whether that’s science or music or dance. And they allowed me to be that,” he said. “That made me the competitor that I am.”

Black alumni echoed versions of these sentiments again and again, the tide rolling forth and away. However they came to the school, and whatever happened to them there, they hadn’t quite fit; they’d experienced harm. But many adapted and excelled. Their closest friends to this day are people they met at Lakeside. They spoke highly of the school’s community orientation, of faculty members white and Black and otherwise who eased their path or encouraged them to carve one out. They spoke of Lakeside’s incredible capacity to develop individual talent into formidable character. Their education was stellar.

One after another, I heard them explain how their adaptation became their mold and, in turn, shaped who they turned out to be. Their Lakeside experience, good, bad, defined them.

In them all, there was reserved in their minds a space occupied by this school, where community, good intentions, and atmospheric excellence sufficed somehow, even if not directly applied to them. Lakeside got them where they are, made them who they are. Most, in the end, were grateful for their experience.

The mistake Lakeside risks repeating is further isolating these individuals, who did what they needed to do — revised, amended, compartmentalized — so that they could convert their Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives

tives. They didn’t know anything about independent schools… and they read our mission statement — which looks great, it makes it look like we were more evolved than we actually were — and they came in here trying to change things and doing all this stuff. It was just a big clash of differences that didn’t work.”

“There was no direction,” Henry said.

The good work continued in fits and starts throughout the following years, as the school sought and failed to not only diversify its community, but to sustain a culture built upon diversity’s value, namely, retaining students and faculty of color.

In 1992, after serving on the board of the Seattle Public Schools, Vassar was hired to direct the same program through which he’d matriculated three decades earlier.

He hadn’t applied for the LEEP job, but had been involved with the summer program, part time, for 14 years. In a single action, LEEP became a fully-funded, year-round program for three years, thanks to a donation from the Nintendo Corporation.

“They didn’t know about all these other community organizations in Seattle,” Vassar recalled in that 2010 interview. “Obviously, there wasn’t a trust developed between them. But they knew Lakeside. So they gave this money to LEEP.” Vassar, described by many as a man of impeccable grace, occupies an almost mythic place in Lakeside history. But he was a more complex person than many realize, and the tension that existed in him — between who he was and what Lakeside meant to him — is among the revealing aspects of this story.

His parents had fled Oklahoma and Mississippi, respectively, among tens of thousands of Black people in the Great Migration, and landed in Seattle to take up work at the Bremerton Shipyards and Bethlehem Steel Mill. His father was eventually employed by Boeing, as many of Seattle’s newly arrived Black residents were, a mo-

@ Lakeside

Lakeside’s vein of diversity and equity initiatives could weakly, but arguably, be traced back to the 1950s, when the head of school, Dexter K. Strong, admitted the school’s first Asian students. In 1965, the school established the Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program (LEEP), which was designed to expose underprivileged kids to a summer of academic resources. This program, a kind of day camp with doses of science and literature, sports and outdoorsmanship, was to be good for them, to show how the other half learns.

Lakeside’s Upper School director, Dan Ayrault, became the program’s first director. The first three Black students to enroll at Lakeside — Thomas Jefferson Vassar Jr., Floyd

Gossett, and Fred Mitchell — came out of that inaugural LEEP cohort to join the Class of 1968.

In the years that followed, other than plucking two or three promising students from LEEP each summer, diversifying the campus was not much of a priority, at least not a formal one. In the late 1980s, though, the Middle School head, Harry Finks, dedicated himself to multicultural assessments and the work that went into structuring the culture of the school around it.

“Mr. Finks was the integrity of the Middle School,” said L’Erin Asantewaa ’97, who described her Middle School years as empowering, as having shaped her understanding of the world, harnessed by diversity of thought and a tight group of friends. “We were safe and seen because of Mr. Finks.”

In 1988, Finks brought Bob Henry on board to assist in what Henry called “the good work.” Henry’s patchwork contract divided his time between teaching and building the school’s diversity. “It was a hotly disputed experience; it was hard work,” recalled Henry. “Harry was fiercely committed to this business. He wanted to make sure if his kids came to a school like this, they would be welcome.” Finks is white, and his children are Black.

Finks and Henry actively enrolled more students of color, especially Black students. They devised a global curriculum, intentionally moving away from a singular Western lens. They hired more Black faculty, more Asian faculty, and pushed to expand the financial aid program.

They conducted interviews and surveys with students.

Henry described the effort as exhausting.

“Harry’s intentions were good,” said T.J. Vassar ’68 in an oral history interview recorded in 2010, nearly two decades after he had returned to Lakeside to jump-start the school’s diversity work. “But, man, that was a tough thing. We ran out and found these adults of color, and brought them all in here, and they had all kinds of different perspec-

Black

Lakeside experience into will, success, even power.

That, at the heart, may be what this story is about. Power. Who has it, who doesn’t, how it is attained or maintained, how it’s used. Historically, it’s been elusive to Black people because of the nature of our country and the systems it is built upon, starting with slavery. Now, it seems, we as a country are on the precipice of extraordinary systemic change, of actually addressing the web of advantage and disadvantage afforded by skin color, what Peggy McIntosh coined in 1989 as “white privilege,” which this school knows something about.

“Are people willing to give up their power and privilege?” asked Jamie Asaka ’96, Lakeside’s director of student and family support and outgoing director of equity and inclusion. “The things that make them comfortable, so that someone else can have a better experience?”

“Ty” Wyckoff ’78 Cramer, a former chair of Lakeside’s board of trustees, a close friend and classmate of Stephanie Harris, and a white woman, said, “There is nothing more important than this in the context of this country.”

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 23

Singular. From his days as a student (above, wearing a too-big jacket he needed to borrow from his father, and far right, in the classroom) T.J. Vassar was a unique presence at the school. For a 2010 photo in Lakeside magazine, Vassar got together with ’68 classmate Floyd Gossett, Jr. (center).

bile class who uprooted themselves in search of opportunity, oriented Northwest, where they could think long enough and breathe deeply enough to set their families in motion.

But Vassar carried the weight of perceived racial inferiority: “Lakeside exacerbated some of that, too. Because when I came here, I really enjoyed my experience, and everything here was the best. The best curriculum, the best school, the best teachers, the best books. And virtually everything was white. And so I began to speak more like the people out here. I tried to take on more of a white persona out here, even told my parents — my mom almost killed me — I didn’t believe in God anymore. It was this Lakeside science, logic, don’t use religion as a crutch. My mom almost yanked me out of here.” He feared being seen as an “imposter,” for a time choosing not to identify as Black, which he and his friends called each other as a pejorative.

Then he heard Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther, speak at Garfield High School, and it changed him.

“Stokely said ‘If the man puts his hand on my neck, I’ll break it to get it off me.’ I thought, I understand!

That feels right! Turn the cheek when somebody’s kicking your butt? No way! ‘Black is beautiful,’ he talked about. He was black, he was darkskinned, too. He was so articulate.

When he said, ‘Black is beautiful,’ oh my God, I said, ‘What have we been doing to ourselves?’”

Vassar dedicated much of his pro24 L AKESIDE

fessional career to making Lakeside a more diverse and inclusive place, working to reconcile the kinds of estrangement and conflicting emotions that he knew Black students shared.

In a speech he made in 2012, the year before he died, he looked back on two decades of good work and said, “the school was so steeped in the culture of wealth and privilege that I never even considered a time when the school would have a global curriculum, instead of a Eurocentric curriculum, or that nearly half the student body would be nonwhite, or that nearly a third of the students would be on financial aid.”

That T.J. Vassar, among Lakeside’s first Black students, returned to serve as director of diversity and continued there as an educator and an advocate until his death is arguably the lasting legacy of this place. He started a tradition that is finally being realized, of Black alumni returning to the community to not only build on the imperfect trials of inclusion, but to ensure representative and systemic change.

Jamie Asaka ’96, whose father, Gary, had been a classmate of Vassar’s, took up T.J.’s mantle, returning to Lakeside to teach and coach and — since 2017 — direct the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. She is the most candid and invested person I spoke to about leveling Lakeside’s playing field, and it stems from her father’s experiences and her own as students, as well as her privilege.

“I thought I was crazy, and I realized

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, MOHAI (Stokely Carmichael)

I wasn’t, and people listened to me,” she said. “Every student should have access to opportunities in formative years for that exploration to occur.”

That access, Asaka acknowledged, requires a blueprint that Lakeside still hasn’t perfectly drawn. According to Lakeside’s records, the school has become progressively more diverse since the end of the 1960s, when 2% of students were Asian American and 2% were African American. “Lakeside is now more racially diverse than the Puget Sound region,” an article in the centennial issue of the alumni magazine noted. “Only 36% of Lakeside students identify as European American.” This is surely impressive progress toward racial and ethnic diversity — and a serious effort has been made to increase socioeconomic diversity Black is beautiful. Black Panther and activist Stokely Carmichael gives a speech at Garfield High School, 1967. Inspired by Malcolm X, Carmichael’s talk of Black power deeply moved T.J. Vassar and others.

to inclusion at the school. Some of this core group are former students, most are people of color. Still, their individual work at this school is insufficient in the face of our contemporary American reality, because it has not yet been successfully and enduringly systematized; it still depends on a handful of dedicated individuals working mostly through a collection of co-curricular programs.

As recent articles in The Atlantic and elsewhere have noted, repair, reform, and reconciliation in the independent school setting are necessary parts of the blueprint for actual equity, but they are complicated. At schools across the nation, there are conversations about moral obligations and financial realities and incentives that cut both ways. In the midst of these entanglements of morality and money, there are children of all stripes and passions, who first reflect their households, then reflect their peers, then their education.

Ultimately, they’ll merge into an embattled American society. Because of the gifts this school gave them, they will breathe rarefied air.

It’s those who choose to drop the ladder back down to engage and educate and advocate for social justice, those who work in the civic sphere to level the playing field — those students and alumni are perhaps the most powerful reflection of this school and the community that frames it. Their work is testa-

Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives (top left, top right); Tom Reese (center)

ment to Lakeside’s ability to carry out its mission.

Many of the Black alumni I spoke with lead in these areas not because Lakeside told them they could, but because it didn’t. Because dominant expectations and standards of success weren’t applied to them, and they were altered by the alienation.

The work they do is to ensure that no other child of color is made to feel like they, themselves, had been made to feel at Lakeside.

This is as strong a rebuke of the school as there is, and as strong an endorsement.

Success at Lakeside remains to be seen. The good work ahead will need to be transformative. Every member of the community must be on board. The ongoing work of many at the school, the dedication of the school’s trustees, the leadership of Bernie Noe, and the choice of its next head of school, Kai Bynum, a leader with deep experience in equity and inclusion work, all signal a commitment to change that could catalyze enduring, structural equity. The work of dedicated individuals alone, as Lakeside’s history has shown, will not be enough. The benefits are many, and lead to the right side of history. The cost is privilege. As you sow, so shall you reap.

@ Lakeside

Black

through financial aid. Tracking racial categories over time, though, is not straightforward. Beginning in 2000, the U.S. Census began offering respondents the option to choose more than one race, including a possible “multiracial” category. Lakeside has moved in a similar direction to refine its statistical record-keeping over time, making year-over-year comparisons somewhat misleading. Still, the broadening makeup of the student body has clearly not been driven by the number of Black students. The percentage of Lakeside’s students today who identify as Black is approximately 9%; about 3 points greater than the percentage of Black Seattleites and 5% less than Black America. The number at Lakeside hasn’t climbed above its peak of 11%, which was reached back in 2010. On the ground, this means that there is often just a handful of Black students in any given graduating class; in the class of 2020, there were only 4 Black students out of 143.

These demographics are the patchwork legacy of a handful of Lakeside leaders over the past halfcentury, including Head of School Bernie Noe, who has led critical efforts in fundraising and committed significant resources toward initiatives focused on DEI. A core group of current administrators, faculty, and staff — including Asaka, Latasia Lanier ’90, Zinda Foster, and others — have dedicated their efforts

Selin Thomas is a journalist based in New York. Her work has been featured in the Village Voice, the Paris Review online, the Delacorte Review, and other publications.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 25

O R A L H I STO R I E S

In Our Own Words Black alumni reflect on their Lakeside experiences.

LORA-ELLEN MCKINNEY ’73

W

H I L E I H A D N O T W A N T E D to be a St. Nick girl, I loved learning there. I loved the library. It was an intimate space. I would study among its wood-paneled walls from the time school ended until my father picked me up at 6:30 p.m. The school’s method was Socratic and focused on thematic teaching.

If we were learning about Greece, we read Greek literature, learned Greek math equations, and put on Greek theater. Or we spent months learning about utopias. We read Thomas More’s Utopia, Walden Two, Plato’s Republic. We had to create our own utopias, from form of government to sanitation, infrastructure, education, and other systems. We took architecture, drafting, and mechanical drawing classes so that our city plans would be excellent. This was a remarkable way to learn.

Racism at St. Nicholas showed up in interesting ways. My body, though fairly European, has a very small African genetic endowment upon which I sit. Miss Marmot, the physical education and biology teacher, made fun of my form. In PE class, she insisted that good posture meant flattening oneself against the gym wall with no space into which she could wedge her ruler. My gluteus minimus pushed me out an inch from the wall. I got lambasted for poor posture. I would walk my dancer’s body away from the wall, while flat rear ends would get lauded for good posture as they slouched away.

I THOUGHT I WOULD JOIN THE ST. NICHOLAS

TENNIS TEAM.

NOPE.

THE TEAM PLAYED AT THE SEATTLE TENNIS CLUB, WHICH

DID NOT

ALLOW BLACKS OR JEWS ENTRY ONTO THEIR COURTS.

26 L AKESIDE

In biology, Miss Marmot was distracted when I talked with my hands and insisted that I sit on them. She would “tsk tsk” me if they came out from under my cheeks and, if her ruler was near, might hit my hands, asking me if I thought I was Italian.

In Mrs. Schafer’s American history class, the only mention of African Americans in our text focused on slavery, which was presented as a tense but not terrible circumstance for Negroes.

They had public housing, after all. And jobs.

I was not happy with the two paragraphs that misrepresented and underrepresented slavery, nor with a text that did not acknowledge the contributions of Black people to America. That we built this joint for free. I mentioned it to Mrs. Schafer. She told me to teach the class. I was 11 years old. I taught the class for a week, using William Styron’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner as my text. I wanted to teach why ministers have been historically important to the Black community, how they had led more than 300 slave revolts. Ministers could typically read and write, though that was illegal and punishable by death, and were able, as a result, to inspire people to seek their freedom.

That made sense to me. I knew about ministers who led revolutions.

My mother, a great tennis player, was ranked in the city. I’d often hit balls with her at Madrona Park. She had just bought me a new racket. I thought I would join the St. Nicholas tennis team. Nope. The team played at the Seattle Tennis Club, which did not allow Blacks or Jews entry onto their courts.

Four of the five of us who had been in the top track at St. Nick and had finished high school requirements in two years transferred to Lakeside when the schools merged in 1971. At Lakeside, I took an odd assortment of classes.

Physics. Psychology. Dance. Various English and French classes. Mainly, though, I wasn’t on campus. I worked at Harborview in laboratory medicine, drawing blood, running blood tests, and assisting the pathologist with autopsies. I was the first African American page for the first Chinese American representative in the House of Representatives in Olympia.

And I was sick a lot.

Though we did not know what diseases I had at that point, we knew that I was terribly ill all of the time. I recently found my old grade reports.

They were peculiar for a student who knew her IQ, knew the grades she got on papers, but had never seen the report cards sent home to her parents. The reports said that I was sick a Photo: Zorn B. Taylor

@ Lakeside

Black I N T E RV I E W S CO N D U C T E D & EDI TED BY JIM COLLINS P H O T O S B Y Z O R N B . TAY L O R * J E R R Y M E T E L L U S * B E N TA N K E R S L E Y * BRANDON RUFFIN

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 27

lot, but did not ask how the school could be helpful. The reports said that I had been out for a semester, and could not be expected to catch up, so should probably not try. It was not mentioned that I didn’t even need to be in school.

Though my mother would not let me graduate until I was 16, I had fulfilled my requirements when I was 13.

No teacher gave me work to do while I was out sick.

When I returned to class, there was an assumption that it would take me months to catch up, so I could not possibly do the work I missed and also manage the classes to which I had returned. I completed the semester’s missed work in about two weeks. Then the teachers complained that my work was fine but not up to its regular standards.

Not a single person helped me. No one asked about me.

No one cared.

I would talk to headmaster Dan Ayrault from time to time. I liked him a lot. His office was open to me any time, just to chat. I thought he found me intelligent and charming. One day I told him that I wanted the school to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. That turned out to be the end of our relationship. He told me to get signatures from 50 percent of the student body. I got signatures from 90 percent of the students and faculty. He told me that I would have to wait until the state acknowledged the holiday. Before that happened, he told me that it would have to be a federal holiday for Lakeside to acknowledge the day. I had been excited about planning an event that would have included my father, who was the only person anyone in Seattle would ever likely meet who had been Dr. King’s lifelong friend. Mr. Ayrault kept moving the goalposts. I realized that he didn’t value me in any way that was meaningful to me. He did what white people do: set up tasks they think a Black person will find impossible, then when you do the impossible, change the rules.

Here’s to Lakeside’s first African American female graduate. A toast to the racism inherent in the system that I experienced and survived. No one noted my landmark role in a celebratory way. That was fine. I did not want to be celebrated. I wanted to have been acknowledged and supported and protected while a student. When my parents allowed me to graduate at age 16, I marched across the gym stage in a sunshine yellow dress. Our art teacher, the Rev. Robert Fulgham, gave a marvelous speech about Franny and Zooey. We were given cans of Consecrated Campbell’s Chicken Soup. Rev. Fulgham told us that these cans were to remind us of the need to be nourished, protected, and blessed. It represented everything I wanted and didn’t get at Lakeside.

Dr. Lora-Ellen McKinney is the daughter of the Rev. Samuel B. McKinney, the noted civil rights leader and pastor of the Seattle’s Mount Zion Baptist Church for four decades. An author and pediatric psychologist specializing in treating underserved populations, Lora-Ellen currently runs a consulting firm, Cedar River Creative Productions in Renton, where she supports artists of color. She received a bachelor’s degree from Vassar, a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University.

She held on to her consecrated can of chicken soup for 20 years.

This piece was excerpted and adapted from a longer memoir, which has been added to the “Contributed Histories” in Lakeside’s Jane Carlson Williams ’60 Archives.

Find her fuller story here: lakesideschool.org/archives/contributed histories.

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ISIAH BROWN ’16

I

A LW AY S F E LT I was a part of a larger group of kids who were doing extraordinary things. So many of my friends were accomplishing incredible feats, whether it was athletic or academic, maybe something in science.... My thing happened to be basketball, but I was just adding to the table. I think that was one of the unique things about the school environment. We were surrounded by so much talent.

My senior spring, I was taking a theater production class with Al Snapp. I had been taking classes with him for two or three years. He would let me go into the digital media studio in the Pigott arts building during class and give me credit if I could go in there and make something. I had already committed to college and wasn’t traveling or playing club basketball. So for the first time, really, I had a bunch of free time, and I took full advantage. I would go into the studio by myself and be in there for hours and hours, just messing around, making music, rapping, having fun, and passing time.

And then my friends joined me, and we started making music and putting it out, and there was a pretty good response to it. I started taking it a little more seriously.

Around that time I met Royce David Pearson ’17, who is like my brother. We had a history class together third period every day, and we both had free periods right before assembly. The two of us used to sit in class, and he would show me stuff on his computer, and then we’d go straight to this digital media studio that we had to ourselves. That’s how my first album came about, just me and him sitting in that studio for hours.

We always used to say it was good mojo to be in there. It was right near the computer lab where Bill Gates and Paul Allen and those guys created Microsoft. We’d think, “There’s no way we can go in there and make something that isn’t legendary.”

In 2016, Isiah Brown become the Metro League’s all-time career scoring leader in basketball and was named Gatorade Player of the Year in the state of Washington — and released “Nineteen,” his first album as professional rapper Zay Wonder. He has since released additional EPs and singles while working toward a Master of Arts degree in English from Weber State University and preparing for the 2021 NBA draft.

Photo: Zorn B. Taylor (Isiah Brown)

I

DIFFERENT KNOWLEDGE SETS AND BACKGROUNDS

AND EXPERIENCES TO THE CLASSROOM. Photo: Jerry Metellus (Ashley Ellis)

G R E W U P in Bellevue on Lake Sammamish, and there weren’t a lot of people at that time who were going to Lakeside from that far away.

It was something like a 40-minute drive for my mom and me, though the visceral memory I have is just traveling a long way, through the various landscapes of Seattle and parts of the city that I hadn’t seen before. I had the feeling of going to this faraway place.

It felt special.

I remember starting 6th grade and sensing right away that I was amongst serious academic classmates who had a love of learning. Before that, I had gone to other small private schools, so aspects of being at Lakeside weren’t unfamiliar to me. But I was coming from a school community with learners who represented more of a range, I suppose, in terms of how seriously they took their studies. And to be frank, I was a huge nerd. I was inspired by what I found at Lakeside: a healthy, competitive academic environment where young people were already bringing different knowledge sets and backgrounds and experiences to the classroom. The teachers really challenged us, not just in terms of workload and curriculum, but challenged our imaginations.

Feeling comfortable socially at Lakeside was a process of adjustment.

I was shy and nervous about how I was going to fit in. I didn’t know a single other kid who went there.

But my mom, especially, was adamant that I needed to go to a school that would be academically rigorous.

Looking back, I can see where she was coming from. Neither she nor my dad was from Seattle — my mother is from California; my father is from Georgia — and they were young. My mom had me when she was 25. They moved to Bellevue because my dad was a professional basketball player for the Sonics. He’d been traded to Seattle from Dallas. We moved when I was nine months old. In Bellevue we were really isolated. That had to be a hard time for them.

Both of my parents are of the first generation in their families to obtain a college degree. My mother went on to

@ Lakeside

“I WAS INSPIRED BY WHAT I FOUND AT LAKESIDE: A HEALTHY, COMPETITIVE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT WHERE YOUNG PEOPLE WERE ALREADY BRINGING

Black

ASHLEY ELLIS ’04

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 29

get her master’s. And they both became very successful, my father at an elite level that few people ever reach professionally. They both wanted to give me opportunities that they had never had. But with those opportunities came the requirement for me to step into spaces that nobody else in my immediate family had firsthand experience with. I didn’t have siblings to show me the way. I couldn’t lean on relatives who understood what I was going through. I think my mom was aware of that. I was really fearful about going to Lakeside. I’d say things like, “What if nobody likes me?” She talked to me. She gave me the self-assuredness that not everyone has to like you — that there are times when you have to make difficult choices for a bigger purpose and for your own self-development. She didn’t say it to me as a 6th grader in that language, but that was the message.

And she was so encouraging. She told me that I was going to be with my intellectual peers and that everything would be okay.

When I got to Lakeside, I entered a much warmer climate than I was expecting. Even though I was one of the few Black children in my class, I always had … I don’t know, I suppose it was easier for me to find social acceptance with word on the street that my dad played basketball. That was the conversation starter that allowed this nerdy, shy kid to have an open opportunity to get to know people and to make friends. And I realized that people were really nice. The staff and teachers were really passionate about education, and I loved that. I later had all kinds of complicated thoughts about Lakeside and intersectionality and my experiences there, about issues of class and culture and privilege and fairness. That first year, though, I knew I was in a great place where I would be able to blossom and thrive.

Ashley Ellis has devoted her adult life to sharing the stories of people whose voices need to be heard. She is a founder of Emerald City Arts, a mission-focused media and film production company, and of Liberating Cinema, a South Africa-based production workshop and studio that brings training, equipment, and online technology to aspiring young filmmakers in resource-poor communities. She is currently earning her Ph.D. in film and media studies and education at the University of Cape Town.

30 L AKESIDE

JA M A R I TO R R E N C E ’10

I

W A S B O R N and raised in South Seattle in a single-parent household on Beacon Hill. I have three siblings, but I was an only child until I was 11. Seattle is a very white city, but Beacon Hill is one of the most diverse ZIP codes in the entire country. The middle school I attended, Aki Kurose, was something like 40% Black, 40% Asian, and most of the rest Hispanic. Most of my schooling and interactions were with people of color. I think the only white people I came into contact with on a daily basis were probably teachers.

I started in the Rainier Scholars program in the 5th grade. In that program, you do two summers of intensive academic work. During the school year, you have academic work on Saturdays and Wednesdays after school. At Aki Kurose, schoolwork came naturally for me. I for-

get what they were called then, but most of my classes were like honors classes. English, language arts, social studies, math — I took the same classes with all the same students because we were all in the “honors” track. I remember some of the work being challenging, but none of it was super difficult. I was a pretty lazy student. Most of my issues were just doing the work. I actually applied to Lakeside in my 7th-grade year, and didn’t get in.

Prior to Rainier Scholars, my big problem was that I was always the smartest kid in the class. At Rainier Scholars, everyone was the smartest kid in the class. That helped me not rest on my laurels. I tried for Lakeside again for high school and got in. When I got there, I discovered there were something like eight Rainier Scholars in my class.

I could get away with laziness at Photo: Ben Tankersley (Jamari Torrence)

WE COULD BE OURSELVES THERE. Aki Kurose, but at Lakeside I couldn’t.

That was just not possible. I was put on academic probation my second semester. I always say the transition from middle school to high school for me was bigger than high school to college. The expectations and the level of work at Lakeside were so much higher than at Aki. Socially, the transition was tough.

like, “Hi, I’m tired. I just want to be by myself.” We could be ourselves there.

I’m very much an introvert. I kind of like to lie low. It’s very hard for me to put myself out there and be outgoing. But a big part of Lakeside is having discussionbased classes and debating with your classmates, for instance, what you think about a book that you’re reading. The teachers I had — Ms. Aegerter and Mr. Doelger in English, my French teacher Mr. Kranwinkle — encouraged me to speak up, be voiceful, defend my position. I forced myself to learn how to do that. My Lakeside experience helped me learn how to advocate for myself.

I never ran for student government at Lakeside, but I was always into politics. The first political rally I attended was for Al Gore in 2000, when I was 9 years old. I remember how disappointed I was in the result of the 2004 election. I majored in political science at Howard University. I was a member of the College Democrats there and was a campus organizer for Obama. I interned on the first Inslee campaign in 2012 and then came back and was a field organizer for Inslee in 2015. I think everyone who works in politics should have experience doing a cycle as an organizer. You’re on the ground, interacting with voters and serving as the public face of the campaign. You have to be resourceful, and you have to be willing to put yourself out there.

You have to be willing to get up in front of a room and advocate for your position or your candidate. I learned those skill sets at Lakeside.

@ Lakeside

INSIDE JOKE, WE CALLED IT “THE COLORED BUS.”

Black

I TOOK THE 987. THAT’S THE METRO BUS THAT GOES TO THE SOUTH END, AND MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO RIDE IT ARE STUDENTS OF COLOR. AS AN

Lakeside, I think, is a very clubby and tribal place. A lot of my classmates had been together there since 5th grade. They had their own social groups already, and in that culture I didn’t know what to do. Going in, I thought, “Who are the other people of color that I can be friends with who are probably going through a similar culture shock?” I met one of my first friends at the orientation for the incoming freshmen who hadn’t gone to Lakeside Middle School. He was Black.

And I was like, “We are probably going to be friends because we are the only Black males here.”

We’re still friends to this day.

One of my other best friends at Lakeside had been a LEEP student. He’s Hispanic, but we had a kind of similar experience of being fish out of water plucked from our public schools to come to this elite private school.

It took me three years to figure it out. Toward the later part of my time at Lakeside, I started to go outside of my small circle and become friends with a wider number of people. It wasn’t until my senior year that I realized there were subcommunities. I belonged to something like five of those, and that made it comfortable being in the larger culture.

For me, at least, it wasn’t difficult moving back and forth each day between Lakeside and my neighborhood on Beacon Hill. I took the 987. That’s the Metro bus that goes to the south end, and most of the people who ride it are students of color. As an inside joke, we called it “the colored bus.” It was kind of rough and jovial. There was a lot of music. Kids played games. It was fun. The back-of-the-bus talk was about what happened at school, or we’d talk about other students.

It was similar to the lunchroom atmosphere at the refectory in that way. But there were parts of the bus toward the front where people could just sit there and be,

Jamari Torrence served as the “body man” for the Rev. Raphael Warnock in the run-up to the special January 2020 U.S. Senate election in Georgia. (“That’s part personal assistant and part political assistant,” Jamari says.) He’s now a legislative correspondent for Sen. Warnock focused on areas involving banking, housing, small business, and taxation.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 31

TA K I YA H J A C K S O N ’ 9 5

I

T H O U G H T I T was cool the way the Middle School day was structured, the way we could move from class to class and have free periods. When I started, I was like, “What is a free period? You mean, at this age, I have a period where I don’t have to go anywhere?” It was just the whole college prep mentality — I felt right away that I was being given trust. Being an educator now and having worked with 5th and 6th graders, I’m not sure as an adult that I would say, “Sure.

Let’s give them autonomy to do whatever they want for an hour.” I think it can be done, but it really needs to be carefully managed. The whole idea that very young students need time to relax, or need extra time for homework, and that they need to learn how to manage their time… I think that was a really progressive idea back when Lakeside started that schedule in the Middle School, and they knew how to manage it.

My mom helped me with the process.

She said, “OK, as far as time management, we need to be very intentional

32 L AKESIDE

about your schedule. Because legend has it that Lakeside has about three hours of homework a night.” (I was like, “What?

For 5th grade? Why?”) The schedule helped students be strategic about our free time. If I had two free periods in one day, I would try to knock out at least 50 minutes of homework before I got home.

My friends say that I missed out on some of the stories they tell about what they did during free time. They say, “You were always doing your homework, because you were busy playing sports after school.”

And it was true. I was diligent about doing my homework, even in 5th grade. But I learned how to manage my time.

My friends and I liked that the snack bar was open all day. Before a free period, I always grabbed three cookies and a milk — that was my thing. I looked forward to doing that every day. That was a piece of wellness for me. And I remember there was a couch in the big lunch area, on a stage. We would go up and hang out on the couch, and just take a breather that helped us recharge and be present for the next subject.

PEOPLE WERE LIKE, “OH, YOU MUST’VE GONE TO LAKESIDE BECAUSE YOU WERE

SO GOOD IN BASKETBALL.

THEY PROBABLY RECRUITED YOU.” I’D TELL THEM, “FOR YOUR INFORMATION, LAKESIDE WAS NOT RECRUITING BASKETBALL PLAYERS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL.” Photo: Brandon Ruffin (Takiyah Jackson)

Black

Takiyah Jackson is the director of African American student development at Berkeley. She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UCLA and a master’s in education from Seattle Pacific University. For nearly two decades she has worked in education, counseling, professional development, and advocacy. From 2012 to 2016, she was a governor-appointed member of the Washington State Professional Educator Standards Board, where she helped shape regulation and oversight of Washington’s system of educator preparation, certification, continuing education, and implementation of state-mandated programs.

MALIKA FISHER ’88 KLINGLER

M

Y M O T H E R , Patricia Fisher, was a journalist during the time I was at Lakeside. She was the first Black and the first woman to be on the editorial board of The Seattle Times. She broke a lot of barriers there and was well-known in the city. My father was also very well-known.

He had played basketball at Garfield High School and then the University of Washington. So I had these two parents whom everyone knew or knew of, and I really couldn’t get away from that.

A lot of Monday mornings I’d come to school, and a teacher would say, “Oh, I read about you in your mother’s column yesterday,” which was always a little embarrassing. And for a while, I felt like, “My mother’s this professional, well-known journalist. I should also be this amazing writer.” But I got over that, fortunately, at some point in high school.

Photo: Zorn B. Taylor (Malika Klingler)

@ Lakeside

In high school, Lakeside was known for being excellent for women’s basketball.

My junior year we went undefeated and won the state championship, and that’s how people started to know me. People were like, “Oh, you must’ve gone to Lakeside because you were so good in basketball. They probably recruited you.” I’d tell them, “For your information, Lakeside was not recruiting basketball players in middle school.” And it’s interesting because I actually never played basketball during middle school. My friends played on the Middle School team, and I would go to their games and watch. (I was a skier. I had aspirations to be in the Olympics.) But I started to get into basketball then. I started going to the gym during some of my free periods to work on basketball skills. I ended up being one of the top-ranked high school players in the country and went to UCLA to play basketball.

I always attributed some of my growth in that sport to the free periods at Lakeside.

In a lot of her writing, my mom focused on social justice and being an advocate for children. She was a great example for me. I grew up having that focus on justice and equity in the home and was taught to think in that way. She taught me to advocate for myself and fight for the rights for others.

Lakeside had a big influence on me in that way, too. Going to a school where service was such a priority gave me opportunities that I would not have gotten anywhere else. I worked on Ron Sims’s first campaign, when he was running for King County Council. I volunteered as a junior counselor at the East Madison YMCA, which was a very different neighborhood back in the ’80s than it is now. I backpacked through Kenya with Bob Mazelow and his wife, Kathleen Sears, and a group of 16 students.

The two of them had actually lived in Kenya for many years before coming here and teaching at Lakeside. Mr. Mazelow had a huge impact on a lot of us Black students.

He’s white, but he came from a different position than a lot of other teachers who didn’t have that experience of being, frankly, a white person in the minority, as he had for so many years in Kenya. He created this welcoming space for us.

He took an interest in us. He had studied Masai cattle herders and Swahili fisherman on the Kenyan coast. He taught an elective class on Africa, which I took my senior year, and showed us there could be this other history we could learn about and relate to.

I feel so very privileged that I had the opportunity to go to Lakeside. I can’t think of any other school where I would have the same experiences.

Malika Klingler is managing principal of PRR, a mission-driven communications firm with offices in Seattle and on the East Coast with expertise in three core public sectors: transportation, environment, and health. It assists government agencies in a range of communications, from marketing to market research, from community engagement work to creative digital and video design and production.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 33

JA Z M Y N S COT T ’97

I

C A M E T O L A K E S I D E in the 6th grade. One of the things that helped me and other Black students adjust to this new and very unique environment was the support we got from a few important adults. Zinda Foster was in the library when we were there, and I loved her. She comes from a huge family and community. Black folks, especially in a city like Seattle, were all connected in one way or another, and I felt I had an added familial connection through her.

Ms. Byrdwell was amazing and was also someone I was familiar with through community and extended family. Harry Finks, the Middle School principal, I love him to this day. He was just a great human being. He had a mild manner and warm demeanor. He always checked in on us. “How are you doing? Is there anything you need? How can I support you?”

And Katy Olweiler made her office available to us, so we could have a space just to be together and be ourselves and shut out the rest of the Lakeside noise.

Many of the Black girls spent most of our lunchtime in Katy’s office. That was our space to eat lunch and chill, be silly, just do whatever. Sometimes Katy would be there, sometimes she wouldn’t. She just gave us the space that we needed and checked in on us. Looking back as an adult, I think it’s great to know that there was someone who was intentional about recognizing the needs of young people who were very underrepresented in that environment. Katy did that without being blatant. She did it in a very natural and authentic way. That’s always stuck with me.

Aside from those certain individuals, though, the concerns I brought up — about how we were treated or the microaggressions we felt from some of our classmates or faculty — for the most part fell on deaf ears. I didn’t feel like I was in a place that was open to changing, to make me feel like I belonged there.

There was no culture of “Let’s better understand people from different backgrounds.” Nothing anywhere that said, “These are the changes that we’re making as an institution to ensure that we’re serving everybody.”

My mom got it. She has always been a very involved parent, and, of course, she

34 L AKESIDE

had made this investment in me to attend this school. The administrators would invite parents to come and talk to them, but when my mom raised concerns, or had some contribution that she wanted to make, she’d hear, “Well, this is how we do it here.” Her voice wasn’t heard. She sensed the same thing I was feeling as a student: You need to figure out what you can do to fit in this space, rather than us doing what we can to accommodate you.

To this day, she calls that sense of not being valued “the Lakeside stain” — those minor instances or microaggressions that left a lasting impact.

It makes me think about just how hard change is. At Lakeside, you’ve got students who are feeling peer pressure.

And then you’ve got the faculty and staff and the administration, and then you’ve got the parent community and the families. And for real change to happen, that whole culture needs, in some sense, to move together.

By the time I hit 8th grade, I was honestly just over it. It was pretty clear to me who was a priority in that environment.

When it was getting close to our 8thgrade graduation, I thought long and hard about what I felt I needed and what I knew I wasn’t going to get. I gave a speech at graduation that was honest and clear about my experience. I said, “These are the reasons why I cannot stay here.” I attempted to hold a mirror up to the school and challenge it to do better. I committed to doing one more year. I wanted to experience the Upper School, but then I knew, after that, I was going to come back to my community and graduate from Garfield, my mom and my brother’s alma mater.

And that’s what I did.

I don’t regret leaving Lakeside. And at the same time, I’m really glad that I went there. I believe that being able to experience a variety of different things throughout your life really contributes to the wholeness of a person. Being exposed to the different people at Lakeside helped me to become more comfortable around anybody, and to connect with and relate to all kinds of people.

And I’ve stayed connected with a lot of the friends I made there. Just last night, actually, I happened to be scrolling through some old Instagram posts online

"I GAVE A SPEECH AT GRADUATION THAT WAS HONEST AND CLEAR ABOUT MY EXPERIENCE. I SAID,

“THESE ARE THE REASONS WHY I CANNOT STAY HERE.”

@ Lakeside

Black

and came across the Lakeside 20year reunion I went to, and had such a fond memory seeing those friends from that time in my life. And I’m talking about not just my Black friends, but everybody. Regardless of “the stain,” as I’ll put it, what I experienced at Lakeside didn’t stop me from building amazing relationships. It’s super-super-special that I’m able to still be connected with so many of those people to this day.

Jamie Asaka ’96 was one of my best friends. Jamie and I caused a bunch of trouble over the years.

We’ve always stayed in touch. When she came back to Seattle after college, I would go check her out when she was teaching at Meany Middle

Photo: Zorn B. Taylor

School. She told me, “I think I’m going to go back to Lakeside,” and I was, like, “Great! Do it!” I guessed that what I felt was the same for her and a bunch of people — that enough of us see the potential in Lakeside that we want to stay connected and support it getting to that place.

My goddaughter, Nacole Abram, was considering Lakeside after elementary school. Her dad came to me with a list and said, “These are the schools.” And I said, “Well, I’m going to advocate for Lakeside.”

Nacole got in with the Class of 2016.

I immediately called Jamie and said, “My goddaughter is coming through. Please put an eye on her.”

A lifelong champion of the arts and of Seattle’s historic Central District, Jazmyn Scott serves as program manager of LANGSTON, a nonprofit established in 2016 within the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute as an advocate, organizer, and hub for the city’s Black arts and culture. In 2012 Scott co-founded 50 Next: Seattle Hip-Hop Worldwide, a digital time capsule showcasing hiphop from Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

She curated the Legacy of Seattle Hip-Hop exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry, which won the 2016 American Association for State & Local History Leadership in History Award.

To read transcripts of the full interviews, go to lakesideschool.org/ magazine

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 35

e s s ay

Remembering T.J. He had a crucial talent for making people feel seen and valued, which made his children feel proud about sharing him with so many others.

BY ASHA VASSAR ’89 YOUMANS

I

R E C E N T LY S P O K E with Lake-

side’s T.J. Vassar Diversity Community Committee to give some background on the person for whom the committee is named: my dad. I shared the history of my family, from documented shipping records of our enslaved ancestors, to the story of my grandmother as a World War II “Rosie the Riveter,” to the impressive accomplishments of my Navy veteran grandfather who had attended school only to the 5th grade, to my parents sending all their children to college. Family pride was emphasized in our home as greatly as learning to walk and talk, as essential as learning to read. As an adult I came across a passage from Maya Angelou that encapsulates what my elders intended to impress upon me: “Stand up straight and realize who you are, that you tower over your circumstances.”

After speaking that night, a startling thought hit me: Someday there will be members of the Lakeside community who never personally knew T.J. Vassar.

I’ve lived my entire life in this city believing that every single person in the Seattle metro area knew my father. Over time, I’ve seen countless descriptions and reflections that offer insight into the source of what so many have remarked about him in his professional and personal capacities: his sincere willingness to 36 L AKESIDE

connect to people, the power of his positivity, his booming laughter. As his daughter, I remember how hard he worked for his family and his community. I have an ever-present and comforting feeling of my duty to continue to spread his legacy.

Most of all I have thousands of vivid memories of how much fun he was.

I recall as a kid that it would take us an hour to run an errand at the local grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread because Dad would talk to every person we came across. I’d often complain, “Really, Dad? We have to stop and talk to Brenda in the bakery department?!” He would usually have some explanation like he went to elementary school with her uncle, so, yes, we did have to stop and talk with her. There was the time he was late to pick me up from a dance at

the old Lakeside refectory. When I got tired of waiting in the cold, I returned to the dance to find a dense circle of students hyping someone in the middle of the dance floor. It was my dad doing the James Brown to the excited hoots and hollers of a hundred of my schoolmates. One of my favorite memories is the time he attended a softball game where my sister and I faced off on different teams — she played for Rainier Beach and I played for Lakeside.

Dad managed to jeer and cheer both teams throughout the entire game, and the fans watched him more than the action on the field. I can’t count the times he acted as a spotter for me while I did tumbling practice for my traveling circus team. (Yes... I was a member of a kids circus.) I still have the knots on my head from his professed “gymnastic expertise.”

Photo: Tom Reese

My mother, Lynda, was the love of his entire heart, and his seven grandchildren were the light at the end of his days.

T.J. never believed in getting credit for something as fundamental as being a good parent or grandparent. To fathers who claimed they couldn’t hang out with friends on a Friday night because they had to “babysit”

My family has received heartfelt testimonials over the years from folks we know and most we have never met, including former students, advisees, and LEEP alumni. A recurring theme makes clear that T.J. had a way of making people feel seen, heard, and valued. Many remember his kindness. Some keep photos of him in their offices. All say how much they miss him. One of the most poignant messages came to me over social media from a white female alumna I was familiar with. On the outside, she had always seemed to me the embodiment of privilege, the definition of the American beauty standard, from a family with plenty of money to afford her the absolute best things in life. She revealed to me how lonely and insecure she had been as a young person until she came across T.J. She said my dad made her feel like she mattered, that she was worth something, that her presence was more than tolerated, it was welcome.

As kids, my siblings and I were aware that Dad was away from home a lot, off doing important work, attending school sporting events and art shows for kids who were not us, making Seattle a better place. We accepted it because we sensed how special a person he was, and we sensed he was needed elsewhere. Now that we are adults with our own kids, it’s knowing that

he was a trusted adult to so many other kids — there as a beacon of love and hope, of high expectation and deep acceptance — that makes us glad we got to share him for so many years.

Dad could have chosen to embark on a political career at the highest level or work for some international corporation. He once told me he stayed at Lakeside because there he could be witness to the small effects he had on students he was sure would make big changes in the world.

@ Lakeside

Proof of the power of his positivity came at the most devastating time in my life, when he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Our entire family of five went to doctors to find one to treat him. The first several advised him to get his affairs in order, that he had three to five months to live. We all walked out of each of those offices and didn’t stop until we met one physician who told Dad, “I will fight along with you all as long as you do.” Dad’s response: “Ha! This is my guy!” We enjoyed three additional years with him after that day.

their kids, Dad’s response would be, “Uh, no. That's your job.”

Black

We had a mutual obsession with comic books. We both read voraciously and bonded over urban fantasy and sci-fi novels. I clearly recall the lessons he gave my brother on how to behave when, inevitably, my brother encountered law enforcement. I sent my sons to him for the very same lessons. When his first grandchild was born, T.J. wrote an extended superhero series especially for him titled, “Jared the G.” It is brilliant and touching.

It is T.J.’s students who are the living legacy of the work he did and the person he was. It is they who should tell his story. To me he was just doing his job ... as the world’s greatest dad.

I am reminded of the final stanza of another piece by Maya Angelou: And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed. They existed.

We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

Asha Vassar ’89 Youmans P ’16 is a writer and former elementary school teacher. As a child, she was part of a two-time city champion Double Dutch team and among the first wave of girls to integrate Little League baseball in Seattle. She still lives in Seattle, along with (in her words) “her white husband, two ethnically ambiguous sons, and a dog that is part Yorkie and part who-theheck-knows.”

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 37

Our Work Together Diversity, equity, and inclusion at Lakeside: A hopeful report.

I

BY A M A N DA DA R L I N G • P H OTO S BY J E S S I CA RYC H E A L

N M Y R O L E A S C O M M U N I C AT I O N S D I R E C T O R , I can’t remember how many times I’ve written some version of how Lakeside “has a longstanding commitment” to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But words — and commitment — don’t always equal action. While Lakeside has made progress in making the school more inclusive and equitable, it’s stalled in some key areas. Some things have simply not changed. We still have very few teachers who identify as Black, Latinx, or Asian American, and none that identify as Indigenous. A significant percentage of Black students still leave before graduating. And students still report racial aggressions that come from their peers, parents and guardians of other students, and sometimes even their teachers.

There’s something else I often write versions of: Lakeside is made up of community made up of individuals.

We don’t all have to believe in the same things, but we do need to support some shared, core values: Academic excellence. Global citizenship.

Ethical behavior. And equity and inclusion.

At Lakeside today, more and more individuals — students, alumni, parents and guardians, faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees — are embracing an equity and inclusion mindset and working to strengthen that core value of our community. We’re attempting to make Lakeside (its policies, procedures, and norms) into a place where all members of our community feel a sense of belonging. In meetings, texts, affinity groups, and late-night phone calls, those of us involved in Lakeside’s DEI work have been laboring, planning, commiserating, celebrating, and sometimes crying as we try to enact change.

Particularly in the last year, many of us have the growing sense that our efforts may finally be resulting in systemic change.

“Optimism for me has never been an option. Because there’s too much suffering in the world,” said philosopher Cornel West in an interview last summer. “But hope is something else, you see, because hope is not spectatorial. It’s participatory. You’re already in the mess. You’re in the funk. What 38 L AKESIDE

“THE ‘OUR’ PART OF OUR WORK TOGETHER HAS BECOME MORE THAN A WORD — MORE PEOPLE THAN EVER BEFORE WERE

WILLING TO STEP UP AND BE ACTIVELY ENGAGED.”

— Jamie Asaka ’96

are you going to do? Hope is a verb as much as a virtue. Hope is as much a consequence of your action as it is a source of your action, as Roberto Unger always said. So that hope is something that you find in your immersion. And you decide you’re going to fight till the end. No matter what.”

As we approached the end of the 2020-2021 academic calendar, I asked some colleagues and students: “As you think back on the last year and look toward the future, what is one reason you’re hopeful about Lakeside’s capacity to be a place where every person feels like they belong?”

DEBBIE BENSADON Director of Equity and Inclusion

“The people. This is a community where all hands are on deck; we have support from board members, administrators, faculty, staff, parents and guardians, and of course, student leader-

ship. The momentum we have right now is a result of all these people coming together with their commitment and passion to create a school where every student feels seen, valued, and heard. It’s the people in our community that make belonging an accessible goal.”

The collective effort that Bensadon references didn’t happen by accident: it is an outcome of Lakeside’s most recent equity and inclusion initiative, Our Work Together: Inclusion, Multiculturalism, Respect. When it launched in 2018, Our Work Together was the fourth DEI initiative at Lakeside in 20 years. Some of its goals were carryovers from previous initiatives.

Other pieces of it were new, including examining the root causes of inequality and exploring the impacts of systemic racism and monoculturalism on our community.

The biggest change was a focus on the racial awareness and actions of white individuals at the school. The

@ Lakeside

Black Director of Student and Family Support Jamie Asaka ’96 (left) with Debbie Bensadon, who takes over from Asaka this summer as Lakeside’s director of equity and inclusion.

initiative was crafted with knowledge that all individuals have implicit biases: unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that affect how we understand and act. It also addressed the fact that racism is a system of oppression, which occurs at individual, cultural, and institutional levels. No person or group is immune from the negative effects of racism.

Unlike other initiatives at Lakeside, there was no opting out of Our Work Together. Every employee was expected to participate and grow their understanding — something made abundantly clear by Head of School Bernie Noe and Director of Student and Family Support Jamie Asaka ’96, who served as Lakeside’s director of equity and inclusion from 2018 until June 2021. “We should all anticipate bumps… We just need to keep moving the needle

on this, each of us,” remarked Asaka at the initiative’s launch.

“To do this work will require a high level of mutual trust,” wrote Noe, when he introduced the initiative. “It will also require grace: the understanding that none of us is perfect and we will not always say exactly the right thing at the right time, and that both of those truths are OK. We all have our baggage and are in different places in our understanding of the world and each other, and that is where we will begin our discussions.”

“One of the things that has held back progress, institutionally, is the lack of people actively working on DEI,” shares Asaka. Too often the burden fell on people of color. “But the ‘Our’ part of Our Work Together has become more than a word — more people than ever before were willing to step up and be actively en-

gaged.” As time went on, employees who had leaned into DEI work — or who had joined the school community with DEI expertise — stepped into leadership roles.

At the same time that white community members were advancing in their understanding and abilities, the administrative leadership group at the school was becoming more racially diverse (one of the outcomes of Our Work Together’s priorities). Upper School Director Felicia Wilks joined Lakeside in 2017 (and was named assistant head of school in 2019); chemistry teacher Betty Benson was named Upper School assistant director in 2018; Middle School Assistant Director Rob Blackwell came to Lakeside in 2019; in 2020, Wellesley L. Wilson and Reem Abu Rahmeh joined Lakeside as, respectively, the director of admissions and financial aid S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 39

and the Middle School director; and this summer, Bensadon takes on the role as director of equity and inclusion.

In June 2021, half of the members of Lakeside’s directors group identify as people of color, and four of the six senior administrators at the school identify as people of color.

These two things — white community members taking a more active role in DEI and the growing racial diversity in the leadership group — has helped contribute to a shift.

Gradually, Lakeside’s adult community is engaging in more regular and more honest conversations about racial aggressions, problematic school policies, personal responsibility, and how to repair harm.

REEM ABU RAHMEH

Middle School Director

“The very first meeting I had at Lakeside with students was a listening session with the Black Student Union. [Bernie Noe, Felicia Wilks, Jamie Asaka, and I] had met with parents and guardians and then we met with students. There was a lot in those conversations; it was heavy. There was a yearning to see things done differently. I had seen Lakeside’s commitment to DEI through my interview process, but as a newcomer, I didn’t realize how much need there was for this work. Hearing an authentic voice — as difficult as it was for the families and students — has impacted how I approached the work and the urgency of making it actually happen. If this year is any indicator of the kind of work Lakeside can do, this is where I want to be. I think our students and families put their trust in us as a school and I feel like Lakeside will not let them down.”

In the last year, members of the Lakeside community who identify as Black have been sharing their experiences and stories in public and private forums. This conversation is part of a larger one, nationally, about racial violence, discrimination, and harassment against Black Americans.

The stories and information shared by Lakesiders were not surprising to many—particularly to those administrators, teachers, and trustees who have firsthand knowledge of what people with marginalized identities routinely confront in our culture. But this was the first time that many of these stories had been shared outside of friends, families, and trusted adults.

On July 7, 2020, the first post appeared on the @black atlakeside Instagram account: “One day in assembly, I was passed a note that read ‘nobody likes you blackie chan.’ I never found out who it was from.” In the following weeks, 29 more stories were posted, sharing individuals’ experiences with racism, prejudices, or biases at Lakeside. The @nbpocatlakeside account shared similar stories from non-Black people of color at the school. These two accounts, founded by Lakeside alumni, were part of a widely reported movement on social media in which Black students and alumni at high schools and colleges took to social media to share their experiences of being Black at predominantly white institutions.

Lakeside alumni likewise called for change in an August 2020 letter sent to administrators and trustees. Signed by 40 L AKESIDE

“ IF THIS YEAR IS ANY INDICATOR OF THE KIND OF WORK LAKESIDE CAN DO,

THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO BE.” — Middle School Director Reem Abu Rahmeh

over 450 people, mostly current students and alumni from the classes of 2015 through 2019, the letter addressed concerns regarding racial justice, diversity, and inclusion at the school. “We call upon the administration of the school to acknowledge the myriad ways in which our institution too has been complicit in upholding white supremacy and to invest in anti-racism education,” wrote the authors. “We write this letter with the hopes of improving the institution that we love and that has served a very formative role in all of our lives.”

As students, alumni, and families talked and wrote about their experiences, Lakeside’s administrators renewed their commitment to listen, seek understanding, and to help members of our community understand the perspectives on our school. Before the start of the 2020-2021 school year, Noe, Wilks, Abu Rahmeh, and Asaka began meeting on Zoom with students from the Upper School Black Student Union and, separately, with members and guests of the Parents and Guardians Association (PGA) affinity group for parents and guardians of African, African American, and Caribbean students — the meetings Abu Rahmeh references above. In these listening sessions, which occurred regularly throughout the year, Black community members talked about their experiences and shared their ideas about how to make Lakeside a more equitable learning environment for Black students. “It gave me new insights into what their experiences were,” says Abu Rahmeh.

In a community-wide October 2020 update to Our Work Together, Asaka, Noe, Wilks, and Abu Rahmeh shared four takeaways from what they’d read and heard from Black members of the community.

There are persistent racial aggressions in the Lakeside community, and community members are not able to report them or have somebody else stand up for them or interfere on their behalf.

Students need to have more teachers who share their racial identity.

Black and African American students need to see themselves accurately and fully represented in Lakeside’s curriculum. Stories of oppression and struggle need to be balanced with stories of Black success in philosophy, politics, the arts, in every area of life.

It’s important for our Black, Latinx, and Indigenous alumni to feel like they’re connected with current stu-

@ Lakeside

Black Middle School Director Reem Abu Rahmeh (left), who moved to Seattle from Jordan during the pandemic, with Assistant Head of School / Upper School Director Felicia Wilks.

Thomas-Smith photo by Tom Reese

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 41

Upper School Associate Director Betty Benson (left) and Middle School Assistant Director Robert Blackwell.

dents, and for our students to connect with them.

Those takeaways helped refocus Lakeside’s DEI efforts. Based on the unfolding events of 2020 and ongoing feedback, Asaka and Bensadon revised and added strategies to Our Work Together that zeroed in on systemic issues and used anti-racist and social justice filters to design new approaches. They also began to build a coalition of allies: administrators, faculty, and staff who would join them in leading the work. If Lakeside was truly committed to eliminating institutional racism, leadership needed 42 L AKESIDE

to change seemingly entrenched systems, policies, and practices that were holding us back.

Abu Rahmeh, starting her first year as Lakeside’s Middle School director, stepped forward to lead. She and Assistant Head of School/Chief Financial Officer Birage Tandon took on the task of formalizing an employee evaluation system of DEI feedback, support, and oversight. Listening to students’ experiences with and concerns about racial aggressions helped Abu Rahmeh understand the stakes and the need for immediate action. “We were given an open slate,”

she says. “What were the areas that needed to change? What reporting system will work here, and how will it work for middle and high school students?” This process of making concrete and active steps to improve students’ experiences gives her hope, she says. Things will happen and harm should be reported. The new system that Abu Rahmeh and Tandon will roll out in the next school year will make reporting easier.

Abu Rahmeh stresses what we all feel: “Nobody here should be patting themselves on the back.” But the commitment to keeping students at the

FELICIA WILKS

Assistant Head of School / Upper School Director

Wilks and Human Resources Director Sara Skinner led a second workstream: using antiracist and social justice filters to design new approaches to hiring and retaining faculty of color.

“An array of research shows that students of color benefit academically and socially from having teachers who share their racial backgrounds” reported the Seattle Times in 2019.

A diverse adult community brings a variety of perspectives to the table and provides students with role models who represent a broad range of backgrounds and experiences.

For more than a decade, Lakeside had been stressing the importance of students having teachers who share their racial identity. The first goal of Our Work Together is “Increase the racial/ethnic diversity of the faculty, administrators, and trustees through focused recruitment, hiring, and retention strategies.” But in 2021, when Lakeside’s student body is the most diverse in the school’s history, that diversity is not reflected in the faculty. Over the past ten hiring cycles, the school has seen a net gain of five faculty and staff members who identify as people of color, bringing the 2020-2021 total at the school to just 18 out of 249.

The school has been making slow but steady progress in recruiting candidates of color to apply for open teaching positions. We are being more strategic in how we craft job descriptions and where we post them. We hosted our first annual diversity career fair in February 2020, and administrators attend diversity hir-

ing fairs around the country.

As Wilks and Skinner quickly realized, issues lay in hiring and retaining faculty of color. Despite instituting consistent hiring practices and training school leadership on inclusive hiring practices, the majority of faculty hires from the last few years identified as white. And in notable cases where a faculty member of color was hired, they left within a short period of time.

Solving this problem will require a dedicated, long-term commitment. One strategy is changing the role of academic department heads in hiring and retention. “We’re revising the department head job description to incorporate DEI as part of their work, and to emphasize their role in onboarding faculty,” says Wilks.

Despite Lakeside’s much-discussed tradition of embracing change, the school’s academic departments have traditionally prioritized continuity over new ideas. “We say you have to understand what we’re doing here. But there needs to be a balance. This emphasis on learning ‘the Lakeside way’ comes from a good place but the impact is harder on people of color, who don’t feel trusted by their colleagues.

New faculty do need to be onboarded — but we also need to be explicit how people can contribute their own ideas.”

Administrators and department heads also need to play a role in protecting employees of color. “We have families who question or push employees of color in a way they don’t white employees,” says Wilks. We see this particularly with how parents and guardians treat employees who are young women of color. School leadership can be a buffer. “We want to make sure faculty and staff feel supported and that their department head and manager have their back.”

More research is needed, she says. Exit interviews will continue to be important, as will “stay interviews,” regular meetings to check in, hear about a faculty member’s experience, see what they need for professional development, and learn how the school can support them in their career aspirations. This type of opendoor policy benefits everyone.

@ Lakeside

“There are two things [that give me hope]: One is the work Debbie [Bensadon] did around finding candidates for open [teaching] positions. We had much broader pools than we’d seen before and we’re learning new ways to connect with people to bring them to Lakeside. The second thing is being more aware of how we treat people during hiring and being more intentional in creating a welcoming and inclusive process. Something as small as saying ‘We’re really glad you’re here, we’re impressed with you, and we want to learn what you have to share’ — you see people’s shoulders go down. Even if they don’t come to work here, we want candidates to have a good experience learning about the school. I don’t want people to feel that Lakeside’s hiring process is telling them that they don’t belong.”

Black

center, to working together toward change, keeps her, and others, hopeful.

ROBERT BLACKWELL

Middle School Assistant Director

“I’m hopeful because we’ve moved beyond people talking about what we need to do and have started jumping into how to change. Through research, through working with consultants, through having small committees (with internal and external people) that help us, we’re formuS p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 43

lating a plan that will help us recreate our systems. Our work addresses how students join us and how we keep them – how they are part of our community.

This school is their school; they’re coming here to be part of the community.”

BETTY BENSON

Upper School Associate Director

“It seems like enough time has passed for us to move past an intellectualization of issues to an internalization of issues and events — a move from head to heart. This internalization has motivated the action we are now seeing in our community.

There’s more momentum given where we are in terms of national dialogue, the reckoning around race. There’s an understanding, a desire, and a willingness to do better on behalf of students.”

Benson and Blackwell led a third workstream this year: employing a DEI mindset to audit Lakeside’s discipline practices, policies, advisory programs, and community expectations. “Our goal is to ensure that our policies, practices, and external and internal communications are in full alignment with our mission and foster interactions that enable all voices in our community to be heard, especially those that have historically been marginalized,” says Blackwell.

They started with the Statement of Community Expectations and the school’s advisory program: pillars of Lakeside’s infrastructure. “They’re both integral pieces of how we shape our community,” says Benson. Every student, employee, and family engages with the Statement of Community Expectations, every year, before they set foot on campus. And every student goes through the school’s advisory program. Blackwell likens them to straws that stir the drink: they are the pathway by which students, and families, experience the school.

“It’s codified that everyone should be held to the same rules,” says Benson. But when the workgroup began to look at the Statement of Community Expectations, there was quickly consensus that language was vague and unhelpful. The committee evaluating the document recommended a 44 L AKESIDE

shift toward more inclusive language and an emphasis on all community members being held to the same expectations. There was acknowledgment that a framework of shared responsibility promotes a sense of belonging and builds a foundation for accountability.

The recast Statement of Community Expectations essentially outlines the same “rules” as before but refocuses on how Lakeside is welcoming people, representing the school, and identifying our community. There is more clarity about being responsible for the school’s mission, shared values, and beliefs. “The expectations that follow reflect the commitment each member of the Lakeside community makes to themselves, to each other, and to supporting and living the mission of Lakeside School.”

The new document will be fully rolled out to the community this August. With this new version, “we want people to find themselves — for them to feel buy-in, and a responsibility and a willingness to uphold that community,” said Benson and Blackwell in their presentation to trustees. “We have to embrace and celebrate and recognize ALL and lead with that.”

You can find Lakeside’s new Statement of Community Expectations online at lakesideschool.org/aboutus/mission-and-values Heading into the summer, Benson and Blackwell are making final updates to the advisory program. “If we’re saying we want people to buy in to community, all of our advisors have to be equipped with the tools that foster that community,” says Benson.

“Advisors can shape and influence who is included. If we want ‘all’ to feel a sense of belonging, we need to be constantly finding out more, learning more, celebrating more as we learn about who we are. All of the richness we can benefit from.”

Winston Yeung P’23 ’25 has served two years as PGA Vice President of Community, Equity, and Inclusion.

W I N STO N Y E U N G

can’t shift culture with only one or two events or a few emails. Trying to create an environment where all parents and guardians feel like they truly belong takes a sustained and measured effort over a period of months and years. There is a lot more work to be done, but the increased willingness of so many parents and guardians to learn more about equity and inclusion and to join the journey that their students have been on have been so positive and bodes well for the future of the Lakeside community.”

“Trying to change the culture of an institution is long-term work; you

Advances in Lakeside’s DEI work has been due to individuals building coalitions to enact change. These coalitions have been years in the making, often starting informally and then, in

Outgoing Parents and Guardians Association (PGA) Vice President of Community, Equity, and Inclusion

@ Lakeside

Black

recent years, taking on more structure and visibility.

Parents and guardians have been a critical part of Our Work Together and Lakeside’s path to becoming a more inclusive and equitable environment. The strength of the parent and guardian affinity and alliance groups are part of the reason. Now finishing its fifth year, the PGA’s affinity group program sponsors seven affinity groups for parents and guardians.

The PGA’s T.J. Vassar Diversity and Community Committee also has grown in numbers and scope — every member of the Lakeside parent and guardian community is welcome to

participate in this alliance group, which is focused on supporting the school community in its efforts to understand, embrace, and promote diversity and inclusion. This year, the PGA added another alliance group, Active Allies, a group of parents and guardians actively learning about allyship and anti-racism.

“In the past two years, there has been a strategic push to expand the audience engaging in DEI from just those who attend the affinity and alliance groups to include all parents and guardians,” says Yeung. “There is recognition that we can’t really change the culture of the institution with just a smaller subset of partici-

pants; it’s something we have to all be willing to do together.”

The effort to increase parents’ and guardians’ understanding of and commitment to DEI is part of Our Work Together. This past year, the PGA launched a DEI resources webpage and a lending library for parents and guardians: materials represent a variety of perspectives, tools, and vehicles to help community members develop an equity and inclusion mindset. (You can find a link to the full set of resources from the magazine webpage.) And a significant number of Lakeside parents and guardians participated in the 2020-2021 Virtual Equity & S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 45

Inclusion Speaker Series, which featured speakers who focus on different aspects of anti-racism work.

In February 2021, the PGA launched the We Are Lakeside project, in which all parents and guardians were asked to commit to “actively engage at home in learning about equity, inclusion, and anti-racism” — the same learning journey as students and school employees. “Inclusion is one of the core values of Lakeside School,” read the commitment form. “While each family has its own set of values, we can only be successful as a community when we have some shared values that bring us together.”

K ALKIDANE YESHAK ’21 Black Student Union, co-leader

“With everything that has been difficult over the past year — the pandemic and racial issues — it’s made me realize how much Lakeside has done with their DEI work. For example, the administrators meeting with BSU to listen to us and receive what we have to say about our experiences was amazing. I saw how fortunate I was as a leader of BSU to have these meetings. When I attended the Student Diversity Leadership Conference, I saw students who didn’t even have a DEI team at their school or people who really cared about this work. During my time at Lakeside, I’ve seen how much the school cares about students of color having a voice and being heard.”

D A N I E L L E TAY L O R ’ 2 1

Black Student Union, co-leader

“As a facilitator of the Black Middle School affinity group, I’ve recently heard about several instances in which Middle School students spoke up to combat ignorance and inequity on campus. This makes me very hopeful and excited for Lakeside’s future in the DEI sphere. It shows that Lakeside is fostering an environment where students are beginning to feel empowered… I believe Lakeside is headed in the right direction.”

N AT H A L I E B L A C K W E L L ’ 2 1 Black Student Union, co-leader

“I am confident and hopeful that 46 L AKESIDE

Lakeside is not only capable but will be a place where everyone belongs… This past year Lakeside has made the notable shift from just talking about change to effectively and actively changing.

One example is that administrators have met with the Black Student Union a couple of times to listen to us about why we don’t feel a sense of belonging…

The fact that the school is taking input from students, staff, and other members of the community makes me hopeful that sometime in the future Lakeside will be a place of belonging for all, no questions asked.”

Two defining aspects of Lakeside are the strong relationships among students and between students and their teachers. The school’s affinity and alliance groups are, in many ways, an amping up of both — forging sustaining connections between students

and the adults who advise them.

“The groups are an important part of students’ learning and community experience,” says Latasia Lanier ’90, who serves as the Upper School student equity programs coordinator in addition to her roles as LEEP director and family support liaison. Alongside Associate Director of Admissions/Financial Aid Director Tearon Joseph, Lanier also advises BSU. “[Affinity groups are] an amazing space where students with a shared identity can talk about their experiences and a range of topics,” shares Kalkidane, who first experienced affinity groups after coming to Lakeside as a 7th grader. “Coming into high school, I knew I wanted to be a leader of the BSU… Having opportunities to share the Ethiopian culture that means so much to me and being able to empower my peers and help them see the beauty in

“WHILE EACH FAMILY HAS ITS OWN SET OF VALUES, WE CAN ONLY BE SUCCESSFUL AS A COMMUNITY WHEN WE HAVE SOME

SHARED VALUES THAT BRING US TOGETHER”

— From an email from the Parent and Guardians Association sent out to the current parent and guardian community, February 2021.

their Blackness, is truly inspiring.”

Formal affinity groups at Lakeside started in the 1980s: the first were Brotherhood/Sisterhood, a precursor to BSU; Lakeside AsianPacific Students; and the LGBTQ+ alliance group POSSE, a precursor

to GLOW. The school’s student affinity group programs were revamped and expanded as part of Our Work Together; they’re now part of the student equity program coordinated by Lanier and personal development teacher Yvette Avila. At the

@ Lakeside

Black

Black Student Union leaders, and new Lakeside alumni, Nathalie Blackwell (left), Danielle Taylor (center), and Kalkidane Yeshak (right).

Upper School, 11 affinity and alliance groups were offered in 20202021, many of which have taken on a role in education and advocacy at the school. All Middle School students participate in one of six affinity groups facilitated by trained Upper School students, who are supported by a faculty or staff member.

The Upper School students spend hours preparing lessons, sometimes missing class to facilitate the conversations. Wilks, highlighting the leadership of these students, shares that “Middle School students talk about how important those conversations with Upper School students are for them, in terms of making them feel more comfortable bringing their full selves to school each day, and in making them feel that they are a part of a larger community on campus than they see in the Middle School.”

Advocacy played a larger role in affinity groups this past year. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other incidents of racial violence at the beginning of the pandemic, Lakeside’s Black Student Union met regularly throughout the summer for support and discussion. Some gatherings included Black students from around the city in meetings that could last for hours. At the same time, Lanier was launching the first-ever virtual LEEP program, and Joseph was working on defining an all-virtual admissions program at Lakeside. Even as increasing numbers of white faculty and staff become more knowledgeable and active in this work, stresses Bensadon, Lakeside’s faculty and staff of color carry a heavier burden when it comes to supporting students at the school.

The BSU meetings took a further turn toward advocacy at Lakeside when the affinity group’s members sat down with administrators starting in August. The listening sessions built trust and created pathways for honest feedback. “I’ve only been here for two years and have seen changes in classroom dynamics, the relationship between administrators and black students,

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 47

“Throughout my time as a student and employee at Lakeside, I have seen tremendous change and growth in the school’s equity and inclusion efforts. When I reflected on the work a couple years ago, I felt proud of all we had accomplished and could list off a number of things we had in place to make Lakeside a better school for all students. This past year has been very challenging for me because I had to revisit those accomplishments and ask myself, “But why are Black and brown students still reporting similar experiences?” This caused me to pause, listen, reflect, rethink, and get real about what actually needs to be done. Examining the systems we have at Lakeside and asking ourselves, “Do these systems center and support the Black and brown experience?” have 48 L AKESIDE

In late April 2021, Asaka and Bensadon sat down with me to talk about how to update our community at the close of the school year. We’d launched a dashboard for Our Work Together in the fall, and we were struggling with how to update it given that so much of this work takes years to accomplish.

“This has been a year of uncovering things and investigating them in a systematic way,” said Asaka with a sigh. “On one hand, I’m glad that we were able to do this work to interrogate systems. In the next phase: Are we willing to change them? If we’re not, we’re not going to change.”

A month later, Asaka and Bensadon stood before a group of Lakeside administrators, leading a conversation about what they had learned, their concerns, and their excitement for the work ahead. In addition to the three workstreams mentioned above, they discussed a fourth stream, focused on transforming the curriculum and our ways of teaching, and briefed the group of the work of the PGA and of the Board of Trustee’s equity and inclusion committee.

After their presentation, Head of School Bernie Noe spoke to our concerns. “We’re not going back.

We are going to change systems that will change the experience of individuals,” said Noe. “We’re recognizing systems and patterns that embed systems of privilege… Students can’t be having the same experience that alumni were having 30 years ago.”

When I think of the biggest change I’ve seen at Lakeside in the past several

years, it’s an openness to listening, to dialogue, and to learning.

Why? Because we believe in our students, collectively and individually, and their ability to contribute wisdom, compassion, and leadership to a global society. Because believing in students and centering their experience means listening to them, empowering them to take action, and involving them in decision making.

In a video that will be released to Lakeside families this fall, former Washington Governor (and parent of Lakeside alumni) Gary Locke says, “Lakeside’s ongoing DEI efforts acknowledge the very real imperative that a world-class education is no longer just the academics in the classroom. It is also the difficult work of knowing how to build and support a cohesive community that those classrooms operate within.

In an increasingly connected world with immense and complex problems that affect all of us — from climate change to economic equity to shared prosperity, even pandemics — we can no longer operate in silos. … Our kids will need skills to work effectively across borders AND identities like race, class, religion, gender, and creed. In a world where so many people talk without listening, progress and opportunity will fall to those who are skilled at building bridges connecting all of us.”

This work — of education, of supporting students in their learning, of striving toward excellence — is ongoing. So how do I end this article when there is no end to the work? When does Our Work Together just become part of the larger whole, the work we are doing, together?

We welcome your feedback. And we welcome your involvement in making this school — our school — a place where every person feels like they belong.

Amanda Darling is Lakeside’s director of communications. You can find updates and descriptions of Lakeside’s Our Work Together initiative, including a dashboard that tracks progress on each of the initiative’s primary goals, at: lakesideschool.org/dei

@ Lakeside

JAMIE ASAK A ’96 Director of Student and Family Support, outgoing Director of Equity and Inclusion

opened my (and our) eyes to new possibilities. Our administrative team, supported by the Board of Trustees, has never been so vulnerable, open, honest, and willing to examine the systems that will lead us to systemic change. Because of this paradigm shift and new approaches, I have never been more hopeful for what’s to come.”

Black

and the overall enthusiasm from the school to be a better place,” says Nathalie. “Teachers are taking the time to re-evaluate based on feedback and are implementing the changes needed to solve the problems in their classrooms.”

One thing BSU students advocated for was more connections with Black alumni — particularly since there are few Black teachers at the school. Lanier again led the response, with the creation of a mentoring program for students who identify as Black, African, and African American. Fourteen students were paired with Lakeside alumni during the first year; in 2020-2021, the program doubled in size, to 39 students connecting with alumni from around the world. Lanier also co-led the creation of a Black alumni group.

Lakeside trustee Brandon Vaughan ’06 and Lanier organized Black Family Reunion virtual get-togethers, where alumni talked about everything ranging from former teachers to church experiences to the differences in friendships between male and female classmates. Even among alumni from different decades, there is a tangible sense of connection and support.

Class of 2014

CLASS CONNECTIONS

TWO LAKESIDE LIFERS from the class of 2014 — Gaby Joseph and Taylor Harris

— are classmates again: Knight-Hennessey Scholars at Stanford. (Re­markably, Jani Adcock ’14, is also a part of that global leadership program.) Good friends ever since Taylor asked Gaby to be her date at their sophomore year “TOLO” dance, the two have reconnected following similar paths: Gaby from Princeton with a BS in molecular biology, having played varsity soccer; Taylor, a year later, after earning a degree in biomechanical engineering and rowing crew at Stanford. Both are now pursuing a joint MD/MBA alongside their Knight-Hennessy leadership training.

“Taylor is doing what I’m doing a year behind me, but doing it better,” says Gaby, laughing. Says Taylor, “Gaby is the trail blazer!”

Photo: Chloe Jackman

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 49

Andrea Gurvich ’80 Lieberman and her husband, Jamie, hosted a Common Power event in Sun Valley.

CLASS CONNECTIONS

Paul Walsh ’69 and his wife enjoy a view from the bridge on a friend’s boat in Roche Harbor.

1969 Paul Walsh shares, “My wife, Valarie, and I incorporated 20 years ago to formalize our commitment to serving trauma victims as Hand by Hand Inc. We are in the process of adding a marvelous new service to help combat osteoporosis in seniors without the use of drugs. You can learn about that at sanjuanstrong.com.

As for us, we are loving our life here on San Juan Island and are deeply involved in the local community, where we have felt more at home than at any other place or time in our lives. Here’s a photo of us enjoying a view from the bridge on a friend’s boat in Roche Harbor.”

1972

Last fall, Thatcher Bailey was named interim executive director of Friends of Waterfront Seattle.

1980 Scilla Andreen shares, “This past year I didn’t travel. I worked from home with a full house dragging on our internet. Three of our kids moved back home from college and learned online. I spent the first six months working from the moment I woke up to the minute I went to sleep. I

stacked coffee-table books on my dining room table to create my standing desk after six months of sitting on my Zoom butt.

I walked a lot. I learned to run my company remotely. I made up some great ice breakers and had too many meetings. Mental health became my life’s work, taking our mental health SEL film programs, Angst, LIKE & The Upstanders out into the world — virtually. I am now directing a new movie called RACE. It’s a documentary about the effects of race and racism on our mental health.

You can watch the movie trailer at indieflix.com/foundation/race. iNDIEFLIX is thriving in a way that makes me proud. We are growing our content created by all genders and diverse voices that couldn’t perform or share their work in person this last year. We are supporting kids in foster care to make movies and share their stories. The stories that have come out of quarantine are inspiring. I look forward to sharing many of them. Most of all I am grateful, vaccinated, and hope anyone reading this has found the silver linings in this incredibly challenging time.”

In December, Carla Erickson Orlando shared, “My Class of ’80 classmate and parent of young Lakeside alumni, Andrea Gurvich Lieberman, has been an ongoing inspiration to me during this election season.

Andrea lives between Seattle and Sun Valley, Idaho, and has committed to political activities across these states and the country during these challenging times for our democracy. Andrea joined the efforts of Common Power in 2018, an organization that was created in response to the 2016 election, helping to organize civic action through travel, phone-banking, letter writing, and fundraising efforts, encouraging my own political action by sending me well-written, informative email letters

S E N D U S Y O U R N E W S Events big and small, personal or professional, chance meetings,

fun adventures … they’re all of interest. Share your baby announcement and photo and we’ll outfit your little Lion with a Lakeside bib. Photo guidelines: High resolution, ideally 1 MB or larger. If sending from a smartphone, be sure to select “original size.” Email notes and photos to alumni@lakesideschool.org by Oct. 4, 2021, for the Fall/Winter 2021 issue.

50 L AKESIDE

Ethan Rutherford ’98 teaches creative writing at Trinity College and just published his second book.

1986

A May Geekwire article announced the sale of telemedicine startup Spira, founded by two Seattle teens, to New York-based health care company Galileo. One of the Spira founders is 17-year-old Sage Khanuja ’21, who left Lakeside after 10th grade to attend the University of Washington’s early entrance program. The CEO of Galileo? Fellow Lakesider Tom Lee. In the article Tom shared, “To be honest, I didn’t really think much or ask about their age. I generally evaluate technology and teams based on their capabilities and potential. I think the only surprise for us was having to get parental permission on the final agreement.”

1989 Ethan Janson ’89 won the Outdoor Racquetball World Championship in Las Vegas. that keep me up to date with her ongoing political activity. Andrea has successfully recruited other Lakeside friends, including Bruce Bailey ’59 of Seattle, and Bill Vanderbilt and Mary Karges Hall of Sun Valley, to take part in Common Power’s online seminars and team-building. During this election season, Andrea inspired me to work with Common Power myself, along with The Sierra Club and Indivisible, as she extended her commitment to the National Women’s Political Caucus, a multipartisan grassroots organization dedicated to increasing women’s participation in the political process. Another classmate, Gigi Ryan Gilman, has dedicated her professional life to public service and currently serves as a licensed Washington attorney focusing on State and Local Tax (SALT). Gigi advises and represents the government in complex SALT-related matters involving multiple industries, including aerospace, consumer goods, entertainment, financial institutions, retail, and utilities. This year has me reflecting on the inspiring role of my classmates, wondering, ‘Who else, among us Lakesiders, has been active in democracy, inspiring the rest of us with their commitments to public service and the common good?’”

On Oct. 18, 2020, Ethan Janson won the Outdoor Racquetball World Championships in Las Vegas. He shares, “I won the Classic Professional Racquetball Tour for players 40+ years of age. I got my start by playing on the squash team for three years while a student at Lakeside.”

1996

Brianna Reynaud Jensen shared a post from the Allen Institute about classmate

Rachel Tompa, winner of the Northwest Science Writers Association’s 2020 Best of the Northwest Science Writing Award in the institutional writing category. The award was for her story about a young man with epilepsy who donated part of his brain to science.

1998

Ethan Rutherford teaches creative writing at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives with his wife and two children, all the time in the house, together every second of the day, because it’s been a year of lockdown. His second book “Farthest South,” a collection of stories, was published in April.

He misses Seattle very much.

1999

Evan McGee shares, “My company, SignalWire, continues to grow at a crazy pace.

We’ve just closed a $30 million funding round to keep building Telecom 2.0, infrastructure that powers future remote work, collaboration, and entertainment. We have been a fully remote company since Day 1 — with so many industries suddenly thrust 10 years into the future of virtual citizenry, we’re excited to be a big part of helping them Continued on page 52

Evan McGee ’99 and his son in Santa Monica.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 51

Julia Laughlin ’04 Belsante is a pre-K teacher in Nashville, Tennessee.

CLASS CONNECTIONS

Iben Falconer ’02 and family at their threeperson COVID Christmas celebration. navigate it. All the while, my wife, Kate, and I are happily running around Santa Monica with our two boys Jesse (5), and Harrison (7), where I’m the chair of the elementary school auction. Finally, all those years of working the Lakeside auction and rummage sales are paying off — to the highest bidder!”

2000

Beau Lewis is the CEO of Rhyme Combinator, a cause-driven viral media company. In 2020, it drove hundreds of millions of views to get out the vote and defeat Donald Trump.

He is currently developing a rap musical for Broadway, “Co-Founders,” which centers on themes of diversity in tech, alongside co-producer Anthony Veneziale (co-creator of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Freestyle Love Supreme”). The musical has been featured in New York City at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s 2020 Festival of New Works and New York Theatre Barn, and has been showcased in West Coast presentations at ODC Theater, the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, and on Netflix.

2002

Iben Falconer shares, “My husband, daugh-

Leo, son of Reid Rader ’03 and his wife, Claire.

52 L AKESIDE

Beau Lewis ’00 is CEO of Rhyme Combinator, a cause-driven viral media company. ter, and I still live in Brooklyn, though we had an unexpected but lovely 4.5-month stint in Pittsburgh last year, due to the pandemic. In August, I took a new job and am now the global marketing and business development leader for SOM, a 1,200-person architecture firm. (We have a small but growing office in Seattle, which I hope to visit soon.) While I don’t get to see my Lakeside friends nearly enough, I did realize a few years ago that Cartier Stennis ’01 lives across the courtyard from me. We reconnected in the laundry room, when I saw someone with a Seahawks hat — only to realize that I recognized the face underneath it, too.”

the floor for his brother, Lando (the Labradoodle).

2004

Henry Pedersen writes, “After a phenomenal 10 years, I’m bringing my career as a Green Beret to an end and moving home to Seattle. Looking forward to seeing you all!”

Julia Laughlin Belsante shares, “When I was a junior, Mr. Pedersen told me two pieces of advice: go to Vanderbilt University and

Continued on page 54

Mark Middaugh recently started his own criminal defense law firm, Middaugh Law. He’s sharing an office suite in downtown Seattle with Cooper Offenbecher ’00. Mark hopes that his fellow Lakeside alums don’t get arrested, but they should call him if they do!

2003

Reid Rader and his wife, Claire O’Donnell, welcomed Leo (the Lion) into the world last year, proving that some good things did happen in 2020. Reid, Claire, and Leo live in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood, where Leo has taken to throwing food on

Oliver Brady ’05, his wife, and son live in Salt Lake City.

Photo: Obatala Mawusi (Beau Lewis)

On the shelf “A Collective Breath: Stories of Being Black in America and Visions of Change”

“Wandering Memory” Emma Page ’12 has translated to

Paul Johnson ’84 con-

English the story of Jan J. Domi-

tributes an essay to this

nique, daughter of Haitian jour-

collection, compiled by

nalist and pro-democracy activist

Bridgett McGowen-

Jean Léopold Dominique, who was

Hawkins. The book

assassinated in 2000. The mem-

offers candid, personal

oir provides a uniquely personal

thoughts on the many

perspective on the tumultuous end

challenges that Black

of the 20th century in Haiti.

Americans face today — challenges they may not directly divulge to others, but that are part of their realities.

They offer ideas for solutions and actions to pave the way to a more

“Running in Circles: Sciencey, Gamey, Head-Scratchy Track Workouts for Faster Running” Scott Tucker ’80 and John Zilly ’80 guarantee one thing to make

optimistic future.

you a faster runner. Intervals.

“Shake & Tremor”

lines the sheer tedium of running.

Debby Bacharach ’84 received a runner-up in Grayson Books’ annual Poetry Contest for her contemporary book of poetry, which uses references to biblical stories in order to illuminate the difficulties and complications of relationships between men and

There’s also one thing that underAgain, intervals! Running in Circles is different. It’s for serious runners, but it’s full of fun, smart, humorous track workouts. You’ll never run boring intervals again.

“Little Do You Know” Iman Lavery ’18 follows college

women.

student Hadley as she reaches

“Farthest South”

she always thought she wanted and the truth of her

Ethan Rutherford ’98 has written a collection of stories about family and home in which a baby is born with gills, foxes raise and then lose a human child, and a man, in the final throes of his deathbed fever dream, experiences a cross-Antarctic voyage.

a crossroads between the career passions. Juggling a new summer romance and a reluctance to confide in those closest to her about her struggles, Hadley is faced with the emotional and mental health implications of maintaining a facade of perfection and must find a way to overcome her fears and discover happiness.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 53

CLASS CONNECTIONS

2016

Adrian Rodrigues, left, and Jonathan Yu (at their Yale graduation), classmates from 2012, are now medical students who recently teamed up on a journal article.

become a teacher. Neither was on my radar at the time, but I am so thankful I listened to him! I graduated from Vandy in 2008 with an education degree and I am a pre-K teacher to 20 incredible kiddos. I live with my husband and three amazing boys, Louis (7), Teddy (6), and Thomas (3) in Nashville! If you ever come this way, I’d love to connect!”

2005

Oliver Brady has settled down in Salt Lake City after finishing his residency in emergency medicine at the University of Utah and is enjoying his work at a rural critical access hospital. Even more, though, he enjoys his life as dad to 1-year-old Caleb and husband to the lovely Danielle Dory Brady, a pediatrician. Oliver and Danielle met in college and attended medical school in San Antonio together after three years of outdoor adventures and working as Outward Bound instructors. They completed their residencies during the height of the pandemic last spring, and Caleb made his appearance about the same time. It’s been a busy year, needless to say, and everybody is starting to catch their breath. Oliver would love to hear from friends or get together if you are in Salt Lake City sometime!

2008

A Jan. 12 Wired article, “How Many Microcovids Would You Spend on a Burrito?” followed Catherine Olsson and her five roommates in San Francisco and their decision to follow

54 L AKESIDE

a collective risk model to stay safe as they navigate the pandemic. Check it out at wired. com/story/group-house-covid-risk-points/.

2010

Abby Nathanson shares, “After living and working in a two-stoplight town in the Hudson Valley of New York for six years, I took the plunge and moved to Manhattan in August 2020 for a new job. I have also been reveling in urban miracles like public transportation and these apps that bring you food. I would be delighted to make connections with any fellow Lakeside alums living in the city!”

2012

While at Lakeside, Jonathan Yu and Adrian Rodrigues were great friends and played on the tennis team together. After graduation, Jonathan went to Williams and Adrian to Yale, where Jonathan transferred sophomore year. Jonathan continued to beat Adrian at tennis, and they stayed close after graduation. Three years later, both are in medical school, Jonathan at Cornell and Adrian at Stanford. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, they brainstormed on how to contribute so they leveraged the resources of their respective institutions and the result was an October 2020 article published in JAMA Internal Medicine about the decline in noncoronavirus hospitalizations, suggesting people are delaying necessary medical care during the pandemic.

Inès Guillaume shares, “On September 30, I officially left my job at Accolade in demand marketing and lead generation. The next day I embarked on an eight-month journey from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean Sea. I went from working in an office for a fantastic company to working on the deck of a French boat as Bosun. We started in Spain, went to Gibraltar, sailed down the Moroccan coast to the Canary Islands, where we spent nearly two months going from island to island. On Nov. 23, we set sail across the Atlantic for a total of 20 days without land, only the sea, the storms, and the creatures to keep us company. After arriving in Guadeloupe, we spent three months sailing the Caribbean.

It was a real privilege to be able to do this amidst a pandemic; however, the pandemic did end up catching up to us and causing our trip to end early, but the adventure continued on land. I’ve moved to London full time and recently started a job as a strategy and implementation associate/expansion manager for Gorillas, a German startup that has reached unicorn status in a mere eight months and is considered to be the fastestgrowing startup in Europe, and I’ve loved every minute of it. I plan to keep sailing, but that will have to wait until I help Gorillas take the world by storm. To keep things simple: sail fast, live slow.”

MIT graduate Marla Odell was named a 2021 Marshall Scholar. Marshall Scholarships finance young Americans of high ability to study for graduate degrees in the United Kingdom. For her Marshall degree programs, she will pursue a master’s of advanced studies degree in mathematical statistics at Cambridge University and then an MS in the social science of the internet at Oxford University.

2017

The fourth installment of Lakeside’s video series “The Next Level” features Princeton University’s running star Sophie Cantine.

She talks with Mike Lengel from the Lakeside athletics department about the legacy of Lakeside’s running programs, her future in the sport of running, how runners avoid injuries, and how she earned the nickname “Pirate.” Check it out at youtube.com/watch ?v=B3RAuMsSfKg&t=264s.

The artist

TO S E E MORE cobygallery.net “Erasing Innocence,” 2020, paper, alcohol ink, oil on canvas, 36" x 32"

Reckoning

back to Lakeside’s sculpture room,

“My grandkids — they are the most

learning under art teacher Edward

precious to me,” Elena Coby ’96

Pincus. “The classes I was able to take sparked me and made me want

Jenkins says. “They are innocent little ones, and yet they are little

to continue on and continue on,”

Black men… They are not looked at

Elena says. She began oil painting

as innocent by the rest of the world.”

just a couple of years ago and hasn’t

Her two grandchildren feature in her

stopped. “Erasing Innocence” is

2020 painting “Erasing Innocence,”

one in a series of five paintings she

surrounded by images depicting the

made last year as a way of processing

history of racism in the U.S., every-

America’s reckoning with truth and

thing “Black boys have to deal with,

racial violence.

and the things that surround them

“2020 was the year of a lot of broken

now. The things we need to protect

promises in our country,” she reflects,

them from.”

“Broken Promises,” 2020, oil on canvas, 51" x 65"

“but we can get through all of this regardless. We can still persist. [All my

Jenkins, a full-time nurse living in St.

paintings] are about the internal fire,

Louis, is primarily a self-taught artist.

the eternal strength.”

She can trace her artistic ambitions

— Julia Randall ’20

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 55

CLASS CONNECTIONS

Alumni at Lakeside W H I L E R E M O T E A N D B L E N D E D learning during the pandemic challenged our community, it also

created opportunities for alumni to connect with Lakeside students in fun new ways. Alumni returned to Lakeside and provided in-person support in the classroom and on the field — and connected virtually with classes and clubs. Here are some of the ways alumni were involved at Lakeside this school year.

Athletics

Classroom

Kallin Spiller ’17, Sam Kuper ’16, and

A number of young alumni worked as

Maddie Walsh ’16 supported Lakeside

teaching assistants while Lakeside was

athletics as the department worked to

in hybrid learning. Teal Luthy ’87 Miller,

manage compact season scheduling

Gigi Ryan ’80 Gilman, and Cooper Of-

and livestreaming competitions for

fenbecher ’00 coached students in Mary

fans at home. Alumni coaches support-

Anne Christy’s Freedom, Crime and Law

ed student-athletes excited to return

class moot courts. Later, Josie Wiggs-

to their sports. Volunteer coaches

Martin ’96 served as judge and Sean

included William DeForest ’19 (base-

O’Donnell ’90 as a coach for the class’s

ball), Kallin Spiller ’17 (volleyball/girls

mock trial. Ben Klebenoff ’16 was a

basketball), Grace Harrington ’20 (girls

guest of Alban Dennis’s Drama IV class

lacrosse), Emme McMullen ’19 (girls

and its playwriting unit. Michaela

lacrosse), Angela Tran ’19 (wrestling),

Kim ’20 spoke to Erica Johansen’s Middle

Laurel Ovenell ’20 (girls soccer), Guy Thyer ’11 (boys soccer), Lewis Cramer ’12 (boys basketball), and Clare Madden ’19 (girls soccer).

School musicians about vulnerability Two-sport athlete Kallin Spiller ’17 returned to the Lakeside athletics department to help out in the office and on the field.

in relation to sharing recording drafts with others. Stella Xu ’18 spoke at the Middle School in conjunction with the

Community meetings, affinity groups, and college counseling

PE SK8PE residencies. In Todd Kresser’s

The weekly Middle School community

Hopkins ’14, and Tim Randolph ’14

meetings welcomed alumni guest

visited the class Zooms to give advice and

speakers throughout the year, includ-

provide students feedback on their writ-

ing Freddie Wong ’04, Jimmy Wong

ten work. Megan Asaka ’99 spoke with

’05, Coco Sack ’18, Kendall Titus ’18,

Emily Chu 05’s Asian American Studies

Aditya Sood ’93, Stella Xu ’18, Abdur-

class. Journalists Isa Guttierez ’13 and

Rahman Bhatti ’19, Chris Lee ’18, Sofia

Simone Alicea ’11 shared their reporting

Dudas ’16, and Crystal Xu ’19. Aditya

experiences with the Tatler class. Ben

Theory of Computation independent study class, Chinmay Nirkhe ’13, Max

Sood ’93 and Siva Sankrithi ’04 spoke

Klebanoff ’16, Storme Webber ’77, Arianne True ’09, and Uma Dwivedi ’18

with students in the South Asian Affinity Group. The college counseling office hosted nearly 40 alumni chats where recent grads spoke about their college or university with students.

56 L AKESIDE

Journalist Simone Alicea ’11, shown here covering the construction of the Amazon Spheres for KNKX, was one of many alums who spoke via Zoom to Lakeside students this pandemic year.

were guest speakers in Lindsay Aegerter’s Quest for Queer Literature class. Thank you to all the alumni who connected with Lakeside students this year.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

a diversity manager at Starbucks, then Microsoft, Paul went into DEI work because of his upbring-

Working for Justice

ing in Beacon Hill. “I grew up in a

A H I G H N U M B E R of Lakeside’s Black alumni have focused their

98144 and the neighboring 98118

careers on furthering the goals of DEI. Here’s a sampling.

community where [diversity] was sort of second nature; my ZIP code are two of the most diverse ZIP codes in the country.”

Coming to the Seattle Waldorf School, Paul recalled his experience at institutions such as Lakeside. He didn’t encounter much diversity in his time. He notes that transitioning to education was “an opportunity to try to improve” on the private school experience for Waldorf students. He wants to help the school community better understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion is not “asking [people of color] to come in and leave who they are at home,” as he had experienced at schools and corporations; it is an idea that

Teacher, mystic, and podcaster L’Erin Asantewaa ’97 says, “My work is my medicine and my ministry.”

“we want to contribute and bring what we have to the table and have

❚ L’Erin Asantewaa ’97 shifted her

mystics and spiritual teachers on

others learn from us, as well.” For

work during the pandemic to center

topics such as wellness, healing,

Paul, DEI work is about improving

people who have been traditionally

transformation, resilience, self-

experiences for people, work that

marginalized by their skin color or

discovery, and self-love. “Isolation

spans generations. From ’68 class-

gender identities. “I’m thinking of

is difficult,” says L’Erin. “Centering

mates T.J. Vassar Jr., Fred Mitchell,

not only the COVID-19 pandemic,

wellness and well-being has been a

and Floyd Gossett Jr. to Paul and

but also the pandemic of racial

top priority for me.” (Hallie X. '23)

on, “it’s about starting and creat-

violence against Black people,” says L’Erin. She is currently doing heal-

ing a legacy where somebody else ❚ Paul Johnson ’84, the new direc-

can carry that torch.” (Aaron Z. '23)

ing, transformative, and restorative

tor of diversity at the

justice work with a people-of-color,

Seattle Waldorf

youth-led, nonprofit organization

School, is focus-

in Milwaukee. She is also the pro-

ing on bringing

ducer and host of a weekly podcast,

greater diversity,

“Black Girl Mystic,” in which she in-

equity, and inclu-

Museum, which, like many

terviews Black women, femme and

sion to the school

other museums and gal-

nonbinary healers, and modern-day

community. First

leries, has had to develop

Photo: Kelley Raye (L’Erin Asantewaa)

Johnson has led Seattle Waldorf’s diversity and equity efforts.

❚ Briaan Barron ’09 worked until June 2020 as the marketing director of the Northwest African American

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 57

CLASS CONNECTIONS

ways to present engaging

In her work, Ericka aims

exhibits digitally. For

to combat these inequities

2020’s Juneteenth, which

by providing accessible

is traditionally character-

early learning programs.

ized by live music and

The early learning system

celebrations, Briaan

is particularly rife with

designed the branding

inequities, as early learn-

and created the website

ing is not guaranteed like

for the museum’s online

K-12 education in the U.S.

event, including musical

This further exacerbates

performances and virtual

disparities in early educa-

tours of historical sites.

tion, when “the foundation

“The pandemic showed a

for your life is being built,”

real need for profession-

Ericka says. She hopes to

als who can bridge the

offer children “the beauty

gap between high-quality

of education, listening to

and standard marketing

students, respecting their

work and human-centric

talents, giving them space

motivations, as opposed

to explore interests”—

to profit-driven,” says

aspects of education that

Briaan. “I think more and more people will embrace this skill set, because

Briaan Barron ’09 was recently featured in 425 magazine in an article entitled “Chic of Staff.”

we’re seeing new emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion among brands of all sides.” Noticing the increasing demand for a digital platform that allows easy communication and skill sharing, Briaan decided to pursue her consulting business, Worthi, full-time. She now helps a range of small businesses and grassroots organizations with designing digital brands, creating marketing strategies, and managing social media. (H.X.) ❚ Ericka Ward ’08 is the director of early learning at the Raphah Institute in Nashville, Tennessee.

The nonprofit’s Early Embrace program works to combat inequities

recalls that her time at Lakeside shaped her understanding of education: “People really cared what I had to say, and the teachers would actually listen to me and ask questions, and the school was physically beautiful.” But on the hourlong bus ride from Rainier Beach to Lakeside, she noticed disparities between the communities. Her peers didn’t have the same resources, she says, and she didn’t have the same resources when she attended a public school.

A formative influence on Ericka Ward ’08: the bus rides between Rainier Beach and Lakeside.

she loved at Lakeside, she points out. “I want the children that are in our programs to be able to expe-

rience the joy of learning.” By working to address educational inequities, Ericka is paying it forward from her Lakeside education. (A.Z.) ❚ Alan Loveless ’86 is a case manager at Shoreline Community College. He works with the Career Education Options Youth Reengagement Program, which helps students who have dropped out. A large percentage of the program’s youth come from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds, the latter of which comprise 24% of the program’s participants. They often face stigmas and pressures from the educational system, and

in education by providing cultur-

Alan notes that a major factor in

ally sustaining early education for

the success of African American

low-income Black families. Ericka

high school students is feeling

58 L AKESIDE

At Shoreline C.C., Alan Loveless ’86 reaches out to low-income and underserved high school students.

Amerra Sheckles ’14 in Washington D.C.’s historically Black Anacostia neighborhood, not far from where she teaches.

welcomed and connecting to a

pandemic has required Amerra to

opening up to: “I love hearing about

staff member. Thus, the program

experiment with virtual learning

who is best friends with whom, or

works to “provide this space to help

and accommodations for the remote

why someone hates mayonnaise, or

students specifically feel welcome,”

setting, but the greatest challenge

how many steps baby brother Liam

Alan says. He works to bring a

for her has been developing the

took last night.”

sincere connection to education. “I

strength and mindset to face such

Looking back at her high school

want to see people get where they

transitions. “Teaching is hard, and

years, Amerra believes that her

need to go,” he says. “I want to see

humans are naturally social crea-

experience at Lakeside helped pre-

students catch their vision.” (A.Z.)

tures,” writes Amerra in an email

pare her to thrive in institutions of

interview, “[and] there has been

higher education, but it also made

❚ Amerra Sheckles ’14 teaches 4th

a giant barrier between teachers

her aware of her privileges and the

grade humanities at Rocketship

and students this past year. When

inequality around her that are en-

Legacy Prep, a public charter school

you add stress, isolation, and the

larged by disproportionate access

in Ward 7 of southeast Washing-

realities of teaching in disen-

to education. “I know the power

ton, D.C., where the population

franchised communities to those

that comes with high-quality edu-

is 91% Black. She is a resident at

circumstances, it requires a lot of

cation, paired with resources and

Urban Teachers, a Johns Hopkin

mental fortitude to make it out OK.”

opportunity,” writes Amerra. “If I

University program that equips

At the same time, some of Amerra's

am capable of working to provide

graduate students with the neces-

happiest moments also emerge

any, if not all, of these to Black

sary tools and strategies to become

from the classroom. She is proud

and Brown students, then it’s my

high-quality educators who serve

to become someone whom the

responsibility to do so. (H.X.)

the underserved. Adapting to the

students trust and feel comfortable

Photos: Chloe Collyer (Alan Loveless); Ben Tankersley (Amerra Sheckles)

– Aaron Z. ’23 and Hallie X.’23

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 59

CLASS CONNECTIONS

ALUMNI EVENTS

Above: Chef Ben Resnick puts on a show. Bottom: Dan Dan Noodles.

A

S A L U M N I E V E N T S continued in the virtual realm in the 2020-2021 school year, alumni from across the country and the globe participated in new offerings and annual events reimagined for a quarantined world. In early 2021, the sixth annual T.J. Vassar ’68 Alumni Diversity Celebration moved online with powerful comments from current students, administrators, and members of the Parents and Guardians Association. Two 30-person cohorts of alumni jumped at the chance to participate in a book club with former English teacher Tom Doelger. The groups, both of which reached capacity within hours of registration opening, met over two sessions in January and February to discuss the Marilynne Robinson novel “Gilead.” In January, the alumni cooking class went virtual when Lakeside chef Ben Resnick demonstrated a delicious Indian dinner of Rogan Josh (lamb curry) and Keralan cauliflower and red lentil curry with almond crumb. A second cooking class in April featured Szechuan cuisine and Dan Dan noodles. Alumni from across the country and as far away as Singapore either cooked along with family members or enjoyed watching Chef Ben’s demonstrations. In May, an alumni trivia night rounded out the year’s offerings. The

60 L AKESIDE

alumni relations office and Lakeside/St. Nicholas Alumni Board will continue to offer virtual events in the coming years and hope to see you virtually or in person in the 20212022 school year. See page 62 for upcoming alumni events — plus a save-the-date for next June’s belated centennial + 2 reunion.

Photos: Tom Reese

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 61

2 02 1 -2 02 2 c a le nd a r

VIRTUAL & IN-PERSON* EVENTS FOR LIONS YOUNG AND OLD 2021

2022

September

January

25

25

Lakeside Fund Note-Writing Breakfast

October

5 19 20

Lakeside Fund Kickoff (virtual) Beers with Bernie young alumni gathering Mark J. Bebie ’70 Memorial Lecture: Darcy Gaechter

February

8

8

20 24

June

17

ROAR auction

Recent grad reunion

Seattle-area alumni reception

April

26

December

T.J. Vassar ’68 Alumni Diversity Celebration

March

November Middle School Grand Day

Bay Area alumni reception

New York-area alumni reception

9 Commencement 10 Centennial +2 Reunion for all alumni

* All in-person event dates are tentative. Visit lakesideschool.org/alumni for updates throughout the year.

Questions? Please contact the alumni relations office at alumni@lakesideschool.org or 206-368-3606.

2020-2021 Lakeside | St. Nicholas Alumni Board ❚ Elizabeth Richardson ’85 Vigdor President ❚ Nicholas Stevens ’06 President Elect ❚ Cooper Offenbecher ’00 Mission and Governance Chair ❚ Scott Reed ’85 Activities Chair ❚ Brianna Reynaud ’96 Jensen Connections Chair

MEMBERS ❚ Bruce Bailey ’59 Honorary Lifetime Member ❚ Teryn Allen ’04 Bench ❚ Nate Benjamin ’07 ❚ Kate Coxon ’01 ❚ Stephanie Saad ’94 Cuthbertson ❚ Calder Gillin ’98 ❚ Gigi Ryan ’80 Gilman ❚ Erin Kenny ’89 ❚ David Mandley ’99

CENTENNIAL +2 REUNION — JUNE 10, 2022

❚ Jackie Mena ’08 ❚ Ric Merrifield ’84

Save the date! We hope to celebrate Lakeside’s Centennial +2 Reunion with

❚ Mark Middaugh ’02

all alumni in June. In addition, reunion gatherings will be planned for classes

❚ Teal Luthy ’87 Miller

ending in 0 and 5, 1 and 6, and 2 and 7 throughout the weekend. Festivities

❚ Piper Pettersen ’03

will kick off on June 9, when the St. Nicholas and Lakeside Classes of 1970 and 1971, and the Lakeside Class of 1972, will be honored at a joint 50th reunion luncheon and lead the Class of 2022 into their commencement ceremony. The next evening, Friday, June 10, Lakeside School will host a Centennial +2 Reunion gathering on campus for all alumni. Join your classmates and Lakeside friends for an evening not to be missed! If you are interested in volunteering to help plan your class reunion, contact the alumni relations office at alumni@lakesideschool.org or 206-368-3606 for more information.

62 L AKESIDE

❚ Reid Rader ’03 ❚ Casey Schuchart ’96 ❚ Nina Smith ’76 ❚ Ishani Ummat ’13 ❚ TJ Vassar ’94 ❚ Sean Whitsitt ’05

i n memori a m

ST. NICHOLAS ALUMNAE Nancy Taft ’43 • April 7, 2020 Virginia Kimsey ’45 Moore • Oct. 27, 2020 Virginia slipped into the arms of Jesus at the age of 94. She was born Sept. 7, 1926, in Seattle, the daughter of Herbert Dale and Grace Kimsey. Virginia was raised in West Seattle and grew to have a deep love for this town that continued throughout her life. While Virginia attended St. Nicholas School, Virginia’s father was named chief of police of Seattle, a distinction Virginia was quite proud of. After attending Stephens College for Women in Columbia, Missouri, Virginia attended the University of Washington, where she met her beloved Charlie. Virginia and Charlie married Jan. 30, 1948, and made their home in West Seattle. They raised two daughters, Melinda and Sharon. Virginia was known for her quick wit, her deep love of family, friends, animals, and staying young at heart always. Virginia is survived by her daughter Sharon; son-in-law Richard; grandchildren Rebecca, Matthew and his wife, Sonia, Joshua and his wife, Callie; and nine great-grandchildren.

Memorials to Pasado’s Safe Haven in Monroe.

Sally Ingraham ’51 Goodson • Jan. 18, 2021 Born in Honolulu to Capt. Charles N. Ingraham and Eleanor Caldwell, Sally grew up in Seattle and graduated from St. Nicholas School and the University of Washington. Sally married Glenn Goodson on July 3, 1964. In 1967 they moved from their houseboat on Lake Union to Shoreline to raise a family. Sally resided for 23 years on Camano Island.

She is survived by her sons Bruce, Steve, and John; her grandchildren Nastassia and Nicholas; and her brother, Charles "Skip" Ingraham.

Sid Edmunds ’51 Goss • Nov. 24, 2020 Priscilla “Sid” Goss passed away peacefully in the company of her family, ending a brief struggle with cancer. Sid was a much-loved sister, mother, and grandmother, and great friend of many. She will be dearly missed. Born and raised in Seattle, she attended St. Nicholas School and graduated from the University of Washington. Throughout her life Sid was an accomplished tennis player, clever and competent seamstress and craftswoman, and avid bridge player. In all endeavors, it was the people and companionship that she valued most. Sid is survived by her brother, L. Henry Edmunds Jr. of Philadelphia (Martha Mel); sister Elizabeth “Boo” Edmunds of Cambridge (Michael); children Scott Goss (Karen), Tyler Goss (Susan), Chip Goss (Amanda), and Ann Swiftney (Ty); and grandchildren Stephen, Madelyn, William, Lily, Alexis, Emerson, and Michael. Memorials to Northwest Harvest, Vashon

I F Y O U H AV E A R E M E M B R A N C E

Land Trust, and the National Tennis Foundation.

Toni Dickinson ’51 MacDonald • Feb. 14, 2021 Born Dec. 3, 1933 to Alma Calhoun and Phillips Dickinson, Toni was raised in Seattle, where she attended St. Nicholas School. She developed passions for the opera, knitting, and playing cards, and enjoyed many lifelong friendships. She had fond memories of walks in Seattle with her Grammy and family trips to Long Beach, Washington, a tradition she carried on with her own family. An accomplished piano player, Toni attended Mills College and the University of Washington to study music. She was a member of the Seattle Tennis Club, Pi Beta Phi sorority, Junior League, and Sunset Club. With Brent MacDonald, Toni had four children, whom she lovingly raised through moves between Seattle, Anchorage, Boise, Billings, Sherman Oaks, La Jolla, Bellevue, Ramona, and back to Bellevue. Toni was predeceased by her parents, her brother, Calhoun, and her daughter Andrea M. Zabel. She is survived by her children Cameron C. MacDonald (Cindy), Alison M. Thomas (Mark), and Alexandra M. Kauffman (Doug); her grandchildren Calhoun (Ashley), Adam, Anna, and Adeline; and her great-grandson, Ewan.

Elizabeth Evenson ’58 Drury • April 3, 2021 Gretchen Elizabeth Evenson Drury was born April 6, 1940, in Seattle to Margaret Waltz Evenson and William Ellsworth Evenson. She married Don Mowat Drury on April 6, 1962, in Plymouth Congregational Church. She is mother of Andrew Mowat Drury (Alissa Schwartz) and Peter William Evenson Drury; grandmother of Ayo Alston-Moore, Max and Cedar Drury, and Rowan and Cora Drury. Gretchen attended John Muir, Laurelhurst, and St. Nicholas schools, and the University of Washington. A member of Delta Gamma, she studied nursing and interior design. As senior class officer, she sat on the elevated stage with President John F. Kennedy in Edmundson Pavilion, as he spoke at the university centennial. She wore a lovely white ball gown as a debutante in Seattle’s Christmas Ball and later blossomed into a Kitsap County gardener in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Moving to Bainbridge Island in 1972, she volunteered with the Bargain Boutique (Seattle Children’s Hospital), Bainbridge Arts & Crafts, Helpline, Bainbridge Performing Arts, and activities of her children. She was coowner of Drury Construction Company for 40 years. She served on the board of directors for IslandWood and the Bremerton Symphony. She was an art docent in public schools with the Junior League. She and Don were honored as Outstanding Philanthropists by the Kitsap Community Foundation. She loved family, friends, and the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest and became a steward of God’s landscape.

A woman of deep faith, Gretchen and her spiritual life were centered in the garden, the community, Rolling Bay Presbyterian Church on

to share about a St. Nicholas alumna or Lakeside alumna/

alumnus for the next magazine, please email the alumni relations office at alumni@ lakesideschool.org or call 206-368-3606. The following are reprints of paid notices or remembrances submitted by family members. All remembrances are subject to editing for length and clarity. The submission deadline for the fall/winter issue is Oct. 4, 2021.

S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 63

IN MEMORIAM Bainbridge Island, and All Pilgrims Christian Church in Seattle. The Drury home was open to foster children, young people in crisis, adults in unique situations, and a beloved exchange student, Arturo Cardenas. Gretchen loved her dogs, and the home on Bainbridge included one of the earliest pickleball courts and hosted an annual pickleball tournament. Memorial gifts are suggested to Rolling Bay Presbyterian Church, IslandWood, Wellspring Family Services, Continuum Culture & Arts, or a charity of your choice.

Casey Carlson ’60 Iffert • Jan. 4, 2021 Karen "Casey" Carlson-Iffert was the best kind of lady. She knew when to be formal and when to let loose, and she loved with her whole heart. She was born in 1941 to Maxwell and Willadee Carlson. She grew up tagging along with her big brother, Deane, on the older neighborhood children’s adventures. She spent summers riding horses at a dude ranch. She loved her family dearly. The world opened up to her in high school and college when she spent four life-changing years in Switzerland and France. She studied (sometimes). She learned to ski. She ate chocolate and smoked cigarettes.

She fell in love. She made friends from all over Europe. When she returned to the U.S., she attended Washington State University and then joined the working world. She did research for Sunset Magazine and modeled. Her curious eyes and fabulous figure graced many an edition, as did the information she learned about native plants, newly remodeled homes, prime vacation spots, and growing vegetables.

She met Sy Iffert at a Young Republican meeting and married him “for his sunken living room.” Together, they raised two girls, Jena and Teresa. Casey was a great mum, giving hugs, reading books out loud, creating Halloween costumes, and driving carpool. She painted perfect circle cheeks on toy soldiers for the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” and was co-chair of the Lakeside Rummage Sale.

She took every opportunity to travel with her family, from Girl Scout camping trips to international trips to see friends and history. She mowed the back 40 of her family’s home on Hood Canal and managed the tree farm. She created a tradition of annual trips to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After age 40, she came fully into her own stride. She traveled more of the world with friends. She became an artist aide at the Seattle Opera, shuttling set directors, maestros, and other artists to and from rehearsal and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She planned many years of Wednesday afternoon lectures for the Sunset Club, insisting we are better people when our brains are inquisitive and engaged. Through it all, she was curious about the people around her, ensuring each one felt accepted and interesting. She passed away in January, leaving her two daughters, their husbands, Justin and Andrew, and her granddaughter, Makayla.

We miss her and her sparkling smile already.

Joan Schenkar ’60 • May 5, 2021 Joan Schenkar, who started her career as a playwright but switched to biography, producing an especially well-regarded take on a complex literary figure in 2009 with her book “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith,” died on May 5 in Paris. She was 78. Hannah Starman, a close friend in Paris, confirmed the death and said the cause had not been determined.

In her plays and biographies, Ms. Schenkar, who split her time between Paris and an apartment in Greenwich Village, often focused 64 L AKESIDE

on women, re-examining conventional wisdom and forms. “I retrieve, I rescue, I quarry out from the limestone beds of history the lives of women, and some men,” she said in an interview included in “Speaking on Stage: Interviews With Contemporary American Playwrights,” a 1996 book edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman, “and return them to audiences, circumstances altered, psychological truths intact and extended, even enhanced, by the new forms I find for their stories.” That was certainly true of her acclaimed biography of Ms. Highsmith, the colorful and controversial author of novels including “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The Price of Salt,” all of which were adapted for movies. Joan Marlene Schenkar was born on Aug. 15, 1942, in Seattle to Maurice and Marlene (von Neumann) Schenkar. Linda Gaboriau, a close friend for many years, said Wikipedia and other online sources list her as having been quite a bit younger, by Ms. Schenkar’s own design. About the time of the Highsmith biography, Ms. Gaboriau said, Ms. Schenkar set about tweaking her age because of the way people over 65, especially women, were often marginalized. “What she had decided to do,” Ms. Gaboriau said in a phone interview, “was take a neat 10 years off her life.” Her father was in real estate, and Ms. Schenkar may have picked up some of his skills, Ms. Gaboriau said; wise real estate investments over the years gave her financial security. She received a degree in literature at Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied under Stanley Edgar Hyman, the literary critic and writer for The New Yorker, and was friends with his wife, the horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson.

Ms. Schenkar acquired a farm in Vermont, alternating between living there and in New York, and began writing plays, experimental works built on absurdity and out-there humor. She used the phrase “a Comedy of Menace” as a subtitle for many of them. The plays were given productions by out-of-the-mainstream theaters in the United States and beyond — Theater for the New City in New York staged several in the 1980s — but the critical reception was sometimes harsh. That was one of the things that drove Ms. Schenkar to try biography, Ms. Gaboriau said. Her other major work in that genre, besides the Highsmith book, was “Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece,” published in 2000. She took an unconventional approach with this book as well, organizing it by themes rather than chronologically as she told the story of Dolly Wilde, a lesbian who was sort of an It Girl in 1920s and ’30s Paris but who never capitalized on what everyone agreed was her considerable writing potential or on her wit, which reminded some of her uncle’s.

— Excerpt from The New York Times

LAKESIDE ALUMNI Gerald Davis ’43 • Dec. 14, 2020 Merritt Benson ’49 • Feb. 2, 2021 Merritt was a devoted husband, loving family man, and doting dog owner. Born in 1931 to Merritt Eliju and Isabelle Dowie Benson, Merritt was raised in Seattle, where he attended Lakeside, a school that he always remembered fondly. While studying economics and law at the University of Washington, Merritt worked construction and was a proud member of the Seattle Street Pavers, Sewer, Watermain, and Tunnel Workers Union. Merritt met Maggi when they were students

at the UW and, after a whirlwind romance, they married in 1957. Upon passing the bar in 1956, Merritt honorably served in the U.S. Air Force as judge advocate at military bases around the country, from Arizona to Texas. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1963 with an MBA, quickly putting his business acumen to work at Homesmith in Phoenix. After working several years at Polaroid and Xerox, Merritt struck out on his own as owner and president of the Kinney Company, a Providence, Rhode Island, manufacturer of emblematic jewelry and gifts that had contracts with a number of U.S. corporations and major sports leagues. Taking great pride in providing a safe and equitable workplace, Merritt was one of the first employers in the state to offer a four-day work week. Committed to public service, Merritt was a frequent blood donor and a volunteer for the Rhode Island Mental Health Association, which recognized him with its Otto Hoffer Award for outstanding and devoted service. He was presented with a Volunteer Service Award by the Santa Clara Senior Center in California. Merritt was a lifelong Unitarian. He loved to talk, often engaging people he had just met in friendly conversation. He was happiest surrounded by family and friends at the dinner table, telling stories and discussing politics and world affairs. Merritt and his lovely wife, Maggi, were amazing hosts who enjoyed preparing wonderful meals, and they joined gourmet cooking groups and developed close friendships everywhere they lived. Merritt was an avid skier from his teenage years until his early 80s and relished being in the mountains with his family and skiing buddies. Merritt and Maggi were married for 63 years. They lived on both coasts of the U.S., raising their children on the East Coast and doting on grandchildren in California.

They explored exotic foods and cultures around the world, traveling from Hong Kong to Egypt, Australia to Siberia. Merritt is survived by his loving wife, Maggi; his two children Kristen (Doug Edwards) and Bradford (Lisa Benson); and his grandchildren, Adam, Nathaniel, and Avalon Edwards, and Maggi and Sabine Benson. He is missed by all, including his loveable labradoodle, Happy, who rarely left his side.

Bill Ryan ’55 • Nov. 7, 2020 William Hanley Ryan crossed the River Styx on Nov. 7 to meet his friend and fellow poet, John Sangster, and his other Lakeside classmates, friends and mentors who crossed over before him. Bill was often quoted as saying, “Lakeside saved me,” and he meant it in ways intellectual, social, and emotional. He often talked of the “masters” (so-called in those old necktie days) of classroom and administration who promoted critical thinking, independent learning, and self-reliance. He plainly honored Fred Bleakney, Jean Lambert, Dexter Strong, and even Vern Parrington Jr., with whom he often had political differences coupled with mutual respect. Bill was particularly proud and honored that three of his children attended Lakeside and two of his daughters (Leslie Ryan ’79 and Gigi Gilman ’80) graduated, along with his grandson, Quinn Gilman ’19. Bill attempted to live according to the old Lakeside motto: Tibi seris, tibi metis (As you sow, so shall you reap) and Jean Lambert’s advisory from “The Rubaiyat”: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor all your wit will cancel half a word of it.” Vale! from Bill.

Paul Suzuki ’55 • Jan. 4, 2021 Yoshio Paul Suzuki passed away at home in Issaquah from natural causes. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Jean; his brothers, Robert and Howard; sister Carol (spouse David); children Christopher and Karen (spouse Chris); and grandchildren Lauren, Kelli, and Eric. Paul was born the eldest son of Dr. M. Paul and Nobuko Y. Suzuki. He grew up in Seattle, where he graduated from Lakeside School. He continued his education at Pomona College and then at the University of Pacific School of Dentistry in San Francisco. Practicing dentistry for over 38 years, Paul was a life member of the Seattle-King County Dental Society and the American Dental Association. Paul’s love of downhill skiing was passed down to his children and grandchildren. He skied for most of his life and taught for many years. Winters in Sun Valley, Idaho were an annual tradition. He enjoyed racing and sailing and cruising his boat on Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands. Paul and Jean loved traveling to Europe and thrived on the adventure of new places to explore.

For their 50th anniversary they spent six weeks in London, Paris, and cities in Switzerland and Italy. Paul enjoyed University of Washington football, the Seahawks, listening to audiobooks, and spending holidays and special occasions with family. His approach to life with courage and determination will be remembered by all who knew him, and he will be truly missed.

William G. Van Amerongen ’64 • March 23, 2021 Gregory Bertram ’65 • Nov. 13, 2020 Gregory Leigh Bertram passed away unexpectedly in November. He is survived by his fiancée, Leslie Coaston; his children, Travis, Sean, Reid, and Keira; sister Carole Bleistein; brother-in-law Steve Bleistein; and nieces Laura Chutich and Vanessa Ryan. Gregg grew up in Magnolia and spent happy times on Bainbridge Island with close family friends. He raised his children in Edmonds and on Bainbridge Island. Gregg graduated from Lakeside School, Occidental College, University of California Berkeley, and the University of Puget Sound Law School, with a special focus on marine and environmental law.

Gregg often claimed that his Lakeside experience was the best foundation he could have had for his future success. Fred Bleakney, Vernon Parrington, and George Taylor were instrumental in shaping Gregg’s skills and values. In 1983, Gregg co-founded the Seattle law firm now known as Bennett, Bigelow and Leedom, focusing on complex commercial litigation and becoming one of the most experienced and successful mediators/arbitrators in Washington state. From 2000 to 2008, he was a principal at JAMS ADR (alternate dispute resolution), a nationwide provider of ADR services, and Washington Arbitration and Mediation Services, where he earned the “Master Mediator” designation. In 2015, Gregg founded and subsequently became president and CEO of Pacific ADR Consulting. As president and CEO, Gregg grew the organization with a commitment to providing mediation, arbitration, and other services at the highest professional level. His passion and belief in the utility of alternative dispute resolution developed over many years and thousands of mediations and arbitrations in virtually every area of law. Gregg was recognized as a “Super Lawyer” for 10 consecutive years in Washington Law & Politics magazine and had received repeated recognition in Seattle magazine through peer surveys as a “Top Lawyer.” Gregg and Leslie recently had traveled to Austria, where he was a featured S p r i n g • S u m m e r 2 0 2 1 65

IN MEMORIAM speaker on mediation. More than a top lawyer, Gregg was a kind and caring person who loved his family and life. He was a natural athlete, playing basketball, running, skiing, and eventually his favorite, playing tennis. While in Palm Desert in California, he often could be seen at the Tennis Garden enjoying the greatest in the world in match play. He had many passions, including Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs, fine wines, and fast cars. He was well versed on Porsches and loved researching and owning them! Anyone who knew Gregg will miss his powerful intellect and, even more, his incredible wit. He loved to make people laugh and was so good at it. For his love of life and his loyal friendship, Gregg will be missed. Remembrances to the American Heart Association.

Mark Powell ’76 • Feb. 2, 2021 A very sweet soul has lifted off. Mark Alister Powell was born July 3, 1958 in Seattle and grew up in Denny Blaine. He attended Lakeside from 7th through 12th grade. Many from his class cherish those years we shared with him. His joy, exuberance, intelligence, and charm were so very genuine. Don’t we all wish we could go back in time and dance to Earth, Wind & Fire just one more time with him? His early interest in Latin America sent him off to Amigos in Paraguay. His interest in a good adventure led him to a summer at Arcosanti, Arizona, in 1975.

Mark attended Pomona College, where he studied French, Spanish, and international relations. In 1982, Mark received a B.A. in English from Evergreen State College. Upon graduation, Mark moved to Cuernavaca and then on to Mexico City, where he worked for a newspaper, taught English, and was an interpreter and translator. Mark always had a love of travel and adventure. When he moved to the Bay Area in 1984, he joined Casto Travel, where he worked for 27 years. While at Casto, he traveled all over the world and enjoyed every minute of it. In the Bay Area, he and his sister, Joanne, spent many happy times together. His beloved partner of 10 years, Jim Sanchez, died in 2001.

The family place on Shaw Island was a source of joy for him as well.

He loved to fish and go crabbing with his family and friends. May we all strive to be as kind as he. In loving memory of our dear pal Kevin Cameron ’84 • Feb. 5, 2021 Kevin Mandery Cameron, loving father, husband, son, uncle, friend, and master negotiator, died peacefully at home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Born to Willam and Peggy Cameron on June 7, 1966 in Seattle, Kevin attended Lakeside School, where he participated in cross country, wrestling, football (briefly), and his first love, crew. The summer after graduation, he was selected to the U.S. Junior National Team and rowed on the eight at the Junior World Championships in Sweden. He went on to row varsity crew at Harvard College for the legendary coach, Harry Parker. Kevin graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a degree in economics. He spent a year on a “world tour” before beginning a career in investment banking in New York City at Smith Barney. It is there that he met Keri. They married in the summer of 1998 in Seattle at his parents’ home on Lake Washington. After a decade of helping build one of the most successful health care banking groups in the industry, in 2001 he left investment banking to work as a senior executive at WebMD. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, and following a successful stem cell transplant at the City of Hope Na66 L AKESIDE

tional Medical Center in Los Angeles, he returned to work. Kevin was named CEO of WebMD in 2004 and joined its board of directors. Kevin and family vacationed often with friends in Mount Snow, Vermont; Kiawah Island, South Carolina; and the Big Island of Hawaii. He obtained his pilot’s license in 2008 and took anyone who was willing up in his plane. As a consequence of his diagnosis, Kevin became an expert in navigating the often confusing world of clinical care and insurance coverage. After retiring from professional life, he spent much of his time working with others who were diagnosed with cancer. He shared his hard won wisdom broadly and tirelessly and became an active supporter and generous donor of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

At the time of his death, Kevin was working on a book about remaining resilient despite the physical and emotional pain of cancer. Kevin is survived by his equally tenacious wife, Keri; two amazing daughters, Nell and Jane; his parents, William and Peggy Cameron; sisters Karen and Kim; brothers-in-law Paul and Dana Pabst and Pat Shanahan; nieces; nephews, and many friends.

FORMER FACULTY & STAFF Rosalie Hannafious • Oct. 21, 2020 Lakeside food services 1989 – 2000 Dr. Lindsay Heather • Oct. 29, 2020 Lakeside librarian, foreign language, music, and history teacher 1973-1993 After a bomb blew a hole in the roof of his parents’ home in wartime England, Lindsay was sent to the farm of his Welsh grandfather, the mayor of Cardiff. He developed a stammer after seeing the slaughtering of an animal but had a beautiful, steady singing voice. He received a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, and sang as a soloist in the King’s College Choir on BBC Radio and with the London Philharmonic. He earned an M.A. in modern languages, a Royal College of Music diploma, and became close friends with author E.M. Forster. In 1964, Lindsay received a British Council scholarship to the Munich Music Academy but struggled to find steady vocal work in Germany because of his stammer. After three years in Munich, he and his family boarded the Queen Elizabeth II for New York City in their Volkswagen Beetle, driving to Tucson, Arizona. for his Ph.D. in music. In 1971, Lindsay decided an M.A. in library studies at the University of Washington might lead to a job with few speaking requirements. He became head librarian at Lakeside Upper School, but his language skills soon led him to teach Latin, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese from 1976 until 1993. He enjoyed a sabbatical year in 1978 at the University of Malaga, Spain, performed in Japan, and conducted the Polyphonic Singers in Seattle. In 1991, Lindsay spent a summer touring the Czech Republic, performing solo voice recitals with a Czech organist. He fell in love with the country and in 1993 moved to Cheb, teaching German, French, and Spanish at the University of Western Bohemia. He continued to sing and perform and fulfilled his dream of the gentleman farmer, moving from his apartment overlooking the spa town of Karlsbad to a 10-acre farm in the hops growing region of Zatec. He wandered through the 250-acre English park next to his farm, where Goethe once roamed among the 1000-year-old trees. He went on long runs through

the forests with a knapsack full of sausages to roast and Czech pilsners for everyone. There were pingpong tournaments in the barn, bonfires in the field, and hours spent cooking, singing, mushroom gathering, tending to the fruit and walnut trees, smoking cigars, and drinking good sherry. Lindsay loved having visitors and was generous and open. We miss his great sense of humor, warmth, wit, intellectual curiosity, and, of course, his singing. Lindsay is survived by his wife, Drahuse, her daughter Draza (Milan), and her granddaughter Drazenka, as well as by his daughter, Gillian, Class of ’83.

Russell Edward Haigh • Dec. 19, 2020 Lakeside business manager 1989-1994 Russell Edward Haigh peacefully went home to our Lord and savior at age 90. Born during the Great Depression on a farm in small town in rural Texas, he served in the Korean War in the Air Force, had a successful business career at General Mills, and then reinvented himself to become the business manager at St. Paul Academy in St. Paul and the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle. His rich and fulfilling life centered on faith, family, fishing, and football. He met the love of his life, Carol Jean, on a blind date and married her 11 months later. They spent 65 years together. Russ was known for his humble, generous, and soft-spoken soul. In his final act of generosity, he donated his body to science, and was adamant that no one travel during the pandemic.

He leaves behind his devoted wife, Carol Jean; children Mike (Cheryl) Haigh, Sally (Michael) Alex, and Jane (Steve) Casey; and grandchildren Zac (Amanda) Haigh, Maddy (Josh) Morgan, and Alec and Jack Casey.

Fred MacFarlane Lakeside business manager 1980-1989 Fredrica Rice • March 6, 2021 Lakeside English teacher 1972-1975 Fredrica Rice, known as Freddie to family and friends, was born Aug. 29, 1943, to June Wooden and Ray Dudley, who died three months after she was born. June remarried and Fredrica was joined by her brother, Gil Bliss. They grew up in Houston and enjoyed summers with their grandmother in Princeton, N.J. Fredrica majored in philosophy at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, graduating in three years and then marrying Bruce Burgess on her 21st birthday.

He was hired to teach English at Lakeside School in Seattle. Fredrica pursued her M.A. at the University of Washington while raising their sons, Nat and Josh. When Bruce died in a light plane crash in 1972, Fredrica was hired to take over his teaching position at Lakeside. In 1974 she married Steve Rice. Their first adventure together was living for four years on a small farm in Whatcom County. Steve worked in a shipyard while she ran the farm, fulfilling a childhood dream.

Returning to Seattle, she completed a Ph.D. in American literature at the UW while pregnant with son Paul. Son Glen followed a few years later and then Fredrica joined the faculty of Edmonds College, where she taught philosophy and English for 25 years. After retiring from Edmonds she taught philosophy to a senior citizen group at the Lifetime Learning Center. Every morning Fredrica wrote in her journal. She left the family over 200 volumes. Fredrica enjoyed a wide range of music but especially loved her piano and playing chamber music. She was a longtime subscriber to the Seattle Opera. Her gardens were full of roses, raspberries, dahlias, and vegetables. Family

meals were often works of art as she cooked her way through Julia Child’s books. She and Steve and their sons hand-built a cabin in southeast Alaska. They spent summers there teaching grandkids how to fish and drive skiffs. Her smoked salmon made a lot of people happy. Always adventurous, she did a static line parachute jump to celebrate her 50th birthday, downhill skied well into her 70s, and walked at least a mile every day. Fredrica is survived by eight beloved grandkids; husband Steve; sons Nat (Erica), Josh (Cara), Paul (Louisa) and Glen (Stacey); as well as her brother, Gil (Denise); and numerous Wooden and Dudley cousins. The family would like to express their sincere thanks to the Seattle Fire Department and Harborview Hospital. Remembrances are suggested to Planned Parenthood of the Northwest and Hawaii or the UW Heart Institute.

Christopher Wearing • Aug. 19, 2020 Lakeside foreign language teacher and fencing coach, 1980-2000 Christopher Wearing died in Bath, England. Chris was polite and well-mannered to a fault, always well turned out and loved by so many people across at least two continents — Europe and North America. He led a double life to some extent, and somehow managed, for 50 odd years, to keep his feet planted on both sides of the Atlantic. He lived and worked most of the time in the U.S. in various places, including Boston and Washington D.C., but mostly in Washington state —- particularly in Seattle. Chris was born and spent his early years in London, apart from a period during World War II when he was evacuated, along with his mother and many thousands of other children, from London to a rural part of the country. He began attending St. Augustine’s Abbey boarding school in Cambridgeshire at age 7 where he made some lifelong friends. After St Augustine’s he went to Douai Abbey school in Berkshire and then on to Queen’s College Oxford. At Douai he was introduced to fencing as a sport, something he was passionate about and continued to coach in America even after he had retired as a teacher. From an early age Chris was a traveler. He had a gift for languages and for teaching — mostly French but he also spoke Spanish fluently, and taught Latin.

He became a modern languages teacher par excellence, and in 1985 he was invited to the White House to receive a special Presidential Award from President Ronald Reagan for services to teaching. Chris loved young people and being around them. He spent a couple of years back in England getting a master’s at Cambridge, but America called him back, and by 1980 he was back in the U.S., this time in Seattle, teaching at Lakeside School. He remained there until he retired in about 2008 at the age of 69. After he retired, he continued teaching privately for several more years, getting his students into the universities that they aspired to attend. He also coached fencing at Lakeside. During these years he continued his summer visits to England, spending time with his mother until she died in 1999.

He also visited friends and took groups of his American students to France. He spoke French like a native and was absolutely in his element there. He loved French cuisine and, of course, French wine. He was incredibly generous and there is no one whom he came across in his life who would not describe him as a true gentleman. He was highly intelligent and well educated himself and wanted others to benefit from the same things he had. In October 2014 he moved to England to live in a sheltered housing flat, The Orchard, where he lived quite happily for the next five years.

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p o e t ry

ode to blues Safe thus far the Blues has brought me through. This I know to be true. Yes it wasn’t nothing but the Blues; the gutbucket stomp down shoot out the lights it’s too damn funky in here Blues. The well it’s a real mutha for ya what’s thrillin you is killin me Blues yr worries ain’t like mine Blues.

Reaching back to where in Africa a moan rose & spiraled into a wail across the Atlantic to this strange land where we were enslaved & our drum outlawed. Fools never thought to be concerned with what they called “darky songs.” Too simple to know what those songs were telling us — who was running that night when where how — blue gospel told us what we needed to know. “Steal Away” yes we did and not to no Jesus.

In the deep of the dark of the darkest night Barefoot through the swamp can’t see yr hand in front of yr face neither that cottonmouth easin up on yr sweet baby girl knowing that Harriet kept that pistol at hand for the weary and the fearful — why nothing but the Blues could explain how to go on through.

Don’t say nothing to me bout pilgrims or pioneers. I got yr profiles in courage my fellow americans.

That soul music was comforting winding rolling soothing through our spiritis somehow.

"Lesbian Langston” photograph by Jim Gupta-Carlson.

Storme Webber is a Two Spirit Sugpiaq/Black/Choctaw poet and interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle. Since 2007, she has given voice to marginalized communities through her project Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture. The poem “Ode to Blues” was originally published in the Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Volume 13 and later appeared in the “ancestral mixtape and tribute” Blues Divine (2015).

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Most woulda just lay down and died and you know that is the stone truth. Paddyrollers on horseback in hot pursuit hounds just baying and those whoops and hollers those white men let out when they’d get to thinking bout the reward money or how much somebody called a “likely wench” or a “strapping buck” might fetch at auction. Now as if slavery weren’t enough as if manifest destiny weren’t enough surely that would be sufficient to make a body feel the lowdown Blues start those Blues flowing like that Ohio River we only had to get cross to freedom.

Turquoise lapis sapphire indigo sea and sky let

So alls I can say is: Hail the Blues! Queen Bee of music. Mother of all North American music — roots.

steelmills. Home of storefront churches pumping

Blues you made a way outta no way. Blues you made my back strong my heart not fall splintered and tore up out my chest my feet take that one more step.

If ever a song could rise and take form it would have to be you oh blue black mighty mighty tone the way you held me (nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen) — nobody but you.

Hollerin like a mountain jack. When I hear you I know you and I know I’ll be alright by and by.

Same way you held my mama and hers before and all reaching back in your eternal arms.

me count the ways you appear in my heart and to my wondering eyes and ears I feel you o song of my deepest soul.

Rising from way back from Africa to Houston Texas Plain Dealing Louisiana Miss is sippi and let us not disremember Sweet Home Chicago (say c’mon baby don’t you wanna go?) — to where the Blues amplified herself so as to rise above the din of the El train the stockyards and the blue gospel or is it gospelled blues onto the urban prairie and the juke joints just jukin on. Why before we ever marched with eloquent signboards Muddy threw back his head and roared “I’m a Man” and Ms. Koko Taylor pitched her Wang Dang Doodle all night long.

Listening from a place deep inside where the tone meets the note in love with candlelight warm meets the note encounters the rhythm in a sweet sway of step.

Hold me in your arms like a voodoo chile.

Blues I love you and I don’t know why but I swear I’m gone love you til the very day I die.

Blues I love you. Be you moan about shuffle or stomp I’m there.

Let us now praise the Blues!

— STO R M E W E B B E R ’77

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