Family has seen ups and downs at Hawthorne Elementary
Her style of leadership, strict and involved if you agree with it, dictatorial and meddling if you don’t, conflicted with the school’s prevailing culture, which gave teachers the freedom to chart their own course, or to be lax, again depending on who is talking. Hawthorne’s problems aren’t unique. While the district is preoccupied with budget troubles, children in too many of its schools are not getting the education they deserve.
Like lots of parents, we’ve been planning for next fall. Our son will be in middle school, and of course we want to find the best spot for him. My wife even suggested, maybe only partly seriously, that we should move to the North End because that’s where the best schools are. Why should that be?
I drive past Hawthorne and wonder what the problem is. Everyone involved has a story worth listening to: teachers, parents, children and administrators.
This time, let me give you one family’s view.
Rhonda and Howard Berry have a son, Phillip, 14, and a daughter, Achijah, 10, so the family has been at Hawthorne since its heyday under John Morefield, and has gone through each of the subsequent leadership transitions. Moreover, both parents have been active at the school.
“Phillip had a great experience at Hawthorne,” Rhonda Berry, Tukwila’s assistant city administrator, told me. “Both kids have done well on standardized tests and have done well socially.”
She praises Morefield’s ability to lead. He knew how to get people to do what he wanted, to buy into his vision. “Morefield was politically savvy. Every group thought he was doing just what they wanted.”
She says his immediate successor, Larry Bell, found that the school was not the right fit and quickly moved on.
Berry was on the panel that picked his successor. “We had some good candidates, but I felt like Carol Coram stood head and shoulders above the rest. John Stanford asked for two candidates, and Coram was the one he selected,” she says.
The Hawthorne community is a rare mix of families. The neighborhoods around it range from wealthy to poor, black to white. The Berrys say some of the folks higher on the socioeconomic scale had problems with Coram’s “East Coast style.” Some took their children out.
Eventually Coram’s relationships with teachers and parents started improving. “Then we got word Carol was being replaced with Gloria Warren,” Berry says.
“We were accustomed to having a say in who was assigned to the school. At first, there was a lot of grumbling. “Then there was a letter that came home, a letter that you couldn’t argue with. It was letter that said what a wonderful job Dr. Coram had done at Hawthorne, how students had benefited and that her skills were needed to bring students at another school up to the level at Hawthorne.”
“That kind of stilled the waters until a parent at Hawthorne got into a conversation with a parent from Emerson and they started comparing notes.”
She said Emerson parents got an identical letter about Warren’s departure from that school. That rekindled discontent. Berry says it bothered her that “little things that were part of the culture” changed under Warren. Kids were assigned seats in the lunchroom. If someone left a mess, they could be identified. “We felt there was an assumption the kids were going to do wrong.” Teachers were complaining and leaving. Parents, too.
The Berrys’ daughter is now a fifth-grader at St. Joseph School. Their son attends University Prep. They had looked at Washington Middle School for Phillip. “My son has always tested well,” Berry says. “My feeling from the teachers in the Spectrum program and the (advanced placement) program at Washington was, I didn’t feel like my son was going to be taken care of.
“I didn’t feel putting my son in a public middle school was the right thing, and that caused me all kinds of heartburn, socially. I tutor in Tukwila schools. I’m a great advocate for public school.”
She doesn’t think the district cares much about retaining black parents.
“When white people start moving to Mercer Island, that’s a problem, but when Howard and I start pulling our kids out, it’s not a problem.
“We can make a way to send our kids to private schools. It’s not easy.”
Not every family has that option, and Howard Berry wonders what will become of their children.
“When we are 70 and these kids run the community, our quality of life will depend on what we do now,” he says.
Of course, these kids may not be in a position to run the community, or to contribute their best, if we don’t find a way to make all of our schools work.
Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.
More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.