A Diverse Vision -- At Happy Medium School, Kids Learn That Differences Are A Source Of Pride

The Oval Rug Assembly begins with a song in Spanish and English. A near-dozen boys and girls fall into place around teacher Kristin Sampson, who, within a matter of minutes, trades words and phrases with the students in languages including French, Chinese and American Sign.

They are 4- and 5-year-olds with boundless energy and action-hero shoes, curious, huggable, their innocence yet to be dented by societal mores about mining one's nose for treasure. They are respectful of space, though, mindful of differences, and they settle disagreements by discussion. It reminds one of a certain large Pacific Northwest city.

That sense of tolerance and community is what draws parents, teachers and administrators to Happy Medium, a Central Area private school that makes the diversity of its 170 students, and the backgrounds they bring with them, sources of pride, not something to hide.

The school has been cited as a model of multicultural education by the Teaching Tolerance Project operated by the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., an organization that fights intolerance through litigation and education. (Its co-founder, Morris Dees, won a court battle that bankrupted the United Klans of America in 1988.)

The Happy Medium approach is prominently featured in "Starting Small: Teaching Tolerance in Preschool and the Early Grades," a package of educational materials provided by Teaching Tolerance to instructors nationwide.

Multicultural education, increasingly a hot topic, still is a relatively new area, until now confined mostly to theory. Few schools have tried to put it into practice in a comprehensive way.

"Teachers go to schools wanting to do it, but they don't know how," says Rosa Sheets, a kindergarten instructor at Seattle's Concord Elementary who wrote most of the instructional text that accompanies the accounts of schools featured in Teaching Tolerance's educational materials.

Nevertheless, educators are beginning to realize that acknowledging all of a child's identity - race, gender, language, religion, family situation and so on - is critical to achievement. Teaching kids to recognize that not all family trees grow the same way or that skin color might distinguish, but does not define, a person is one way to do that.

On the other hand, forcing children to leave certain parts of themselves at home - a foreign language, being a foster child or having two moms - leads to resistance, hostility and other factors that derail a child's ability to learn, Sheets says.

At Happy Medium, student identities shine through in self-portraits that line the walls, and their input is welcomed and fair game for launching a discussion.

Sampson's classroom, although not as racially diverse as others at the school, has a distinctly multicultural flavor. The Oval Rug Assembly, in which students sit around the rug and kick off the day with songs and discussion, often features guest speakers, such as the parents of students Joshua Markowitz and Eli Zavatsky, who talked about what Passover means to their families, and Petai Parker-Aderem's dad, who spoke about growing up white in Cape Town, South Africa, during years of segregation.

The classroom is a preschooler's paradise, with hanging gardens of felt-wire chain too low for grown-ups to walk under without bending, a wooden loft, pillows, Jacob Lawrence prints and a long strip of poster that reads: "We are all alike. We are all different."

It's that attention to and celebration of differences that attracts parents like Sue and Ed Taylor, who researched dozens of schools and chose Happy Medium for its warmth and passion for education. "It's in the walls," Sue Taylor says. "It's how you feel."

Paradise comes at a price - $6,300 a year tuition, to be exact. A third of Happy Medium's students, most of whom come from the Mount Baker, Beacon Hill, Seward Park and downtown neighborhoods, receive financial aid, which amounts to about a quarter of the school's annual $1 million budget.

Students range from preschool to fifth-grade age. The school has had only two directors in its 25 years, and although its place in the Central Area community is now secure, that wasn't always the case.

There was a time when the school, just south of 20th Avenue and Jackson Street, was not accessible to neighborhood residents and didn't want to be. New leadership prompted a period of institutional soul-searching, and behind the direction of then-head Susan Kerr, Happy Medium began its journey toward the inclusive, label-free, anti-bias-minded school it wanted to be.

A third of the school's students now are children of color, mostly African American, and between 20 and 25 percent of students come from so-called "nontraditional" families, which include being raised by grandparents and gay or lesbian parents.

The Taylors, an interracial couple, were careful not to pick a school where they'd be made to feel like some sort of window display. Happy Medium's atmosphere is one in which differences are celebrated as integral parts of a community, not tolerated oddities.

Viewed in `people colors'

When it comes to race, people aren't actually black or white, not in the eight-ball and cue-ball sense. This is something teacher Debra Goldsbury makes clear at the start of the school year, when she asks children to do self-portraits using paint mixtures to match their skin tone. The exercise teaches children to see themselves not as black, red, yellow, brown or white but in multicultural "people colors" such as melon, ebony, terra cotta, gingerbread, or olive.

The point is that differences exist not to be glossed over but to be reckoned with. These are lessons children take home to parents - biological, adoptive or foster - or to whatever family member might be raising them.

Free from stigmas

"We all want the same things," Sue Taylor says. "A place where our children aren't going to be stigmatized or made fun of."

Parents say it's hard to find such a place, although a number of them send their children on to TOPS, a K-8 Seattle public school whose head teacher, David Katz, was recently named Happy Medium's new director. He'll start in July.

Kerr, the former director, says that despite being under the district average in terms of minority-student representation - 48 percent as opposed to the district-wide 56 percent - TOPS probably comes closest to sharing Happy Medium's values.

Happy Medium has managed to instill an attitude of acceptance and awareness throughout an entire school. For that to happen in the bureaucracy of a public-school system, where no one is turned away and class sizes are much higher than the 15-to-1 student-teacher ratio that exists at Happy Medium, would take strong, individual leadership, says Sheets of Concord Elementary.

"A lot of schools say things, but they don't do it," says parent Cheryl Pappy. "There's a feeling of respect for people here. Even the field trips - my daughter went to a mostly Asian nursing home, and to a Buddhist temple. We don't just go to the zoo.

"I want my children to be exposed to different experiences, to be comfortable with other people," Pappy says. "That's key to preparing them for the world."

Marc Ramirez's phone-message number is 206-464-8102. His e-mail address is: mram-new@seatimes.com