Sloan: It's Got To Work -- Philanthropist Has High Hopes For T.T. Minor

IN AN EXPERIMENT being watched around the country, former QFC Chairman Stuart Sloan has committed millions of dollars to rejuvenating a struggling Seattle public school. In his first interview since launching the venture last fall, he talks about his motivation - and why he thinks the project can't help but succeed.

When Stuart Sloan bought the Quality Food Centers grocery-store chain in 1986, people asked: What does Sloan know about groceries?

When he led a group of investors in 1992 in a bid to buy branches owned by Security Pacific Bank, people wondered: What does he know about banking?

And when he and a partner bought University Village Shopping Center in 1993, the question came up again: What does Sloan know about malls?

That skepticism has become a familiar refrain for a man who seems drawn to the unfamiliar in his business ventures, but never more so than in his latest undertaking:

What does Stuart Sloan know about schools?

Adopting one of Seattle's most impoverished schools is the fulfillment of a 7-year-old dream for Sloan. The multimillionaire philanthropist has launched a closely watched education experiment at T.T. Minor Elementary School that he hopes will transform the lives of children, the fortunes of a neighborhood and, just maybe, the nation's approach to public education.

"I'm not necessarily drawn to the unfamiliar," Sloan said. "I'm drawn to the extraordinary, whether familiar or not."

For T.T. Minor, Sloan's largess is indeed an extraordinary opportunity, a new beginning for the Central Area school that has struggled for years with low test scores and dwindling enrollment.

It means money for expensive reforms beyond the reach of most schools - hiring more staff members to allow small class sizes, a year-round school calendar, a longer school day, access to health care, a carefully researched curriculum and intensive training for teachers.

For Sloan, adopting T.T. Minor in partnership with the Seattle School District marks a new, more fulfilling approach to philanthropy and a new role as one of the city's most visible benefactors.

Looking to make a difference

His work at the school also highlights Sloan's enigmatic personality, an intriguing, contradictory blend of bottom-line pragmatism and earnest idealism.

Uncomfortable in the spotlight of public attention, Sloan nevertheless has chosen to launch a project so unique it's guaranteed to draw scrutiny.

Impatient by his own reckoning, Sloan says he's willing to give T.T. Minor the time it needs to remake itself. Tenacious, smart and methodical in his business dealings, Sloan has as his partner an education bureaucracy whose nature is cautious and resistant to change.

Sloan has been behind some of Seattle's best-known businesses, including the Schuck's Auto Supply chain, QFC, Egghead Discount Software and University Village.

His grocery holdings alone have been estimated at $200 million in recent years. That doesn't include his investments in other private ventures.

He had been giving away money for more than 30 years in quieter, more traditional, less hands-on ways, particularly in the areas of health care and education, "the two areas that really touch me more."

"But ultimately, it wasn't giving me the returns I really wanted," he said. Though he continues to donate from a distance to other causes, "I just found it was not as satisfying. . . . I was really looking to do something I felt could truly make a difference."

How did a man who made his money in groceries, auto parts and software end up dealing in the vagaries of public education and small children?

He started from a businessman's perspective: "The way to ensure we're growing as a society is to be competitive. As an adult, to be competitive, you need to have a reasonably good education and feel good about yourself. I'm not saying everyone has to be a nuclear physicist. . . . You just have to be educated.

"We just kept scrolling down and realized you have to start young. That's how we got to 4-year-olds."

In the beginning, though, it wasn't easy to get anyone to take his money.

Starting in 1991, Sloan lobbied the Seattle School District to let him adopt a school, an idea loosely modeled after a Brooklyn, N.Y., school founded by a wealthy New York City couple.

"But it was always, `We can't do this because . . .' I just kept hearing excuses," Sloan said.

He had nearly given up when John Stanford came to town in 1995 as the new superintendent. Stanford had been on the job just 11 days when Sloan made one last attempt.

In a meeting at Sloan's office, Sloan launched into his by now well-polished speech about why a school, why in the Central Area, but Stanford stopped him after less than 10 minutes.

"So when do we get started?" Stanford asked.

Sloan clapped his hands together and smiled. "OK, here we go!"

Modest beginnings

"Are you the mayor?" a girl calls out as Sloan strides purposefully down her school hallway in his pinstriped power suit and silver tie.

Sloan smiles and spins around. "Am I the mayor? Noooo," he says with a laugh before resuming his pace.

But Sloan certainly looks the part of a visiting dignitary. He stops by every few weeks, but when "Mr. Sloan" shows up at the school, it's still an occasion.

Stanford chose T.T. Minor as Sloan's beneficiary, but Sloan chose the Central Area, a neighborhood he drives through once or twice a day between his Madison Park-area home and his downtown office.

Sloan's own beginnings are modest. He grew up in Southern California, the son of the electrical-department manager at a hardware store. Neither of his parents graduated from high school.

He attended public schools and, at 14, took his first job sorting pop bottles in a Los Angeles grocery store after school. He arrived in Seattle in 1965 as a student studying business at the University of Washington.

Sloan spent 17 years as co-owner and president of Schuck's Auto Supply before a string of high-profile business deals in the 1980s and '90s made him both well-known and extraordinarily wealthy.

Divorced from Marsha Stroum, the daughter of Seattle philanthropist Samuel Stroum, he has two sons, 30 and 31, one of whom graduated from Mercer Island High School, the other from the private Lakeside School.

One is an institutional trader living in New York, the other a film editor in Los Angeles. Sloan, 55, says he talks to them at least once every day by phone.

To Sloan, the Central Area is a bellwether - as the nation's poorest neighborhoods go, so goes the nation. If his effort to remake a school and rejuvenate a neighborhood can work here, it should be able to work anywhere, he believes.

This was always meant to be more than just a lucky break for the children at T.T. Minor, and Sloan confesses he'll be disappointed if his program isn't replicated nationally. "I'd like to see thousands of these all around the country," he said.

Already, a half-dozen people with both the interest in education and the means to do something about it have called to learn more about how Sloan started his program.

He has guided several groups of visitors through the school since September, people interested in joining his effort at T.T. Minor and others wanting to adopt their own schools.

"It'll take time to prove it, but the truth is we just believe every child can learn," he said. "This isn't a Central-District-of-Seattle issue. It's a national issue."

In it for the long term

But it starts smaller, with 262 children in a long-neglected, mostly minority school and an investment he can see, touch and hug.

The key is attention to each child's needs - and not just the academic needs. "It's more than reading and writing, though those things are important. A lot of kids are coming to school hungry, sick, not well-clothed, coming in with the belief of what they can't do," he said.

"You can't work like that. How can we expect a 4-year-old or a 6-year-old to be able to function like that?"

People have assumed Sloan would be spending $8 million on T.T. Minor when he said he was committed to the school for $1 million a year for eight years. But Sloan said he's in this project for the long haul, and he clearly isn't counting the pennies.

He has a full-time project manager, Holly Miller, who is at the school frequently, trouble-shooting and overseeing the program. Sloan said he is approaching this project the same way he handles his business ventures: "You're either in or you're not. I know what's going on, though I may not be there every day. I trust the people who run this."

This is about more than just money, however. While the extra resources provide teachers the tools to do their work better and more effectively, Sloan said it's also an attitude he's trying to cultivate in which children come first.

The expectation is that no need is overlooked - "the whole child for the whole year," Sloan likes to say. The school is organized around meeting children's needs, whether that means uncovering a child's learning disability, addressing mental-health concerns or transporting a child to the eye doctor.

Even after Stanford agreed so quickly to Sloan's idea, it took three more years to open the doors on Sloan's "Enhanced Program" at T.T. Minor. The program is starting with prekindergarten and kindergarten this year and will expand by one grade level per year until the whole school is part of the program.

Part of the delay grew out of community concerns about how the program would work, whether some children would be left out - and whether Sloan had some hidden agenda for adopting their school.

One rumor suggested Sloan's real motive was to drum up more business for QFC - "Let me tell you, there are cheaper ways," Sloan laughs.

But some of those fears linger still.

In December, a Central Area community group published a newsletter alleging that African-American teachers were being pushed out of T.T. Minor, where 72 percent of students are black, and out of the district. African-American activities had been canceled at the school, the group claimed.

"The school is being exploited by private ownership," the report said, "with the intent to move the African-American children and teachers out of the community."

Sloan says that sentiment has faded now, and others at the school agree, including many parents and the principal, who is African American, hired this year to lead the school. "I think some people will always be reluctant to change," Sloan said. "It doesn't bother me anymore."

But hearing of the community group's allegations, Sloan's blue eyes spark and he leans forward out of the child-sized chair where he has been sitting in the school library for an interview:

"OK, we have a school here that's (mostly) African American. The kids here come from the catchment area around the school, right? And I want to turn this into an all-white school," he scoffs. "Why didn't I go to Laurelhurst? It's crazy."

This project isn't about race, he said. "What we're doing here needs to happen for all kids."

"This isn't any ego trip. I'm trying to do good."

`It's just got to work'

Sloan is fond of answering questions with more questions, and when asked how he'll judge his project's success or failure, he challenges:

"How can't it work? It's just got to work. . . . It just comes back to hugging and loving these children - just come up with a scenario to explain to me how it won't work."

He'll be looking at test scores as one way to tell whether this is working, but that's just one piece of it, he said.

The ultimate measure of this effort is whether it produces "productive, contributing adults in our society - if we get that, we've won, because it'll perpetuate itself. Those adults will pass it along to their kids."

But that doesn't mean he has to wait until today's 4-year-olds enter the job market to know whether his investment paid off.

Indeed, he's ready to pronounce his program a success now, just from watching children working together in their classrooms and listening to parents describe how their children are so happy they don't want to leave the school at the end of the day.

"Don't you think we've won?" he asks.