The Hustle (28 page)

After the meeting, department heads immediately began to look for teachers of color, Noe says. The administration discussed ways to make minority students feel more comfortable, such as holding “Diversity Days.” They also set a goal to increase the number of students receiving financial aid to a third of the student body within a decade, a rise from about 13 percent when Noe arrived at the school. “The goal is to have everybody feel like it's their school,” Noe says. “So from the most privileged to the least privileged and everybody in between, you're equally valued, equally celebrated, equally appreciated.”

Of course, offering more financial aid, not to mention sending kids to foreign countries for “global learning,” was going to cost a lot of money. The school launched the “Living Our Mission” campaign with the goal of raising $105 million, which Bill Gates helpfully kicked off with his $40 million contribution. In the meantime, under Noe's direction, Lakeside had already started to aggressively seek minority students and teachers to fulfill its goals.

Terrance Blakely was twelve when he came home from a basketball trip in the summer of 2000 and saw the letter from Lakeside on his bed. He was so upset that he started to cry before he even opened it—he knew that he must have been accepted.

Blakely had come to Seattle three years earlier. His father had been in the army, and the family had lived in Alaska, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and San Antonio before his dad's final assignment at Fort Lewis in Tacoma. Blakely's parents had decided to remain in the area and moved to Tukwilla, a South End neighborhood that has seen its African-American population balloon with the movement out of the Central Area.

In public elementary school, Blakely was put on the “gifted” track, leaving his regular classroom for special classes with other advanced students. When Blakeley was in the sixth grade, one of his teachers told his mom that she should look into Lakeside. About five times that year, Blakeley did half days at his elementary school, and then traveled the twenty miles north to Lakeside to take part in a battery of tests and interviews.

Blakely hated the idea of leaving his friends and crossing the city to go to Lakeside. He tried to bomb the entrance exam, purposely leaving questions on the multiple-choice test blank. It didn't work. When the acceptance letter came, his mom told him to go for a year and see how it went. In addition, administrators at Lakeside put on a hard sell. “In my interview, I said, ‘I'm probably not coming here. I don't feel like this is really the place for me.' I was really polite about it,” Blakely says. “And it was like, ‘No, it would be a great place for you, we would feel honored if you came,' the whole nine yards. As a sixth-grader, some adults are completely fascinated with me? I'm like, ‘Maybe there is something there.' ”

The seventh grade was a shock. “The things they did for fun were not what I did for fun,” Blakely says. “Kids in seventh grade were talking about going to the symphony and going out on boats. I was used to playing football in the street and having a sleepover.”

For the first several months, Blakely lived “two separate lives,” traveling up to Lakeside for school but then coming back to the neighborhood every afternoon to hang out with his old friends. Eventually he was caught in between—he wasn't comfortable with the kids at Lakeside, but the neighborhood kids started to distance themselves. “I now became the spoiled kid on the block, and I just ended up not really having anything to do,” Blakely says.

When basketball season came around, Blakely faced a choice: If he stuck to his position of disassociating himself with Lakeside kids, he'd have to skip the season and miss doing something he really liked. He chose to play, and the kids on the team ended up as his closest friends throughout the rest of his time at the school. “I had a common bond with them,” he says, “and if I was going to be friends with anyone else at the school, I figured it would be the kids I played basketball with.”

Eric Hampton, when we spoke, made the point that going to Lakeside for him was a confrontation on both race and class levels—he felt he was different because he was African American, and because his family, in comparison to the average at the school, was poor. People treat you differently because of your race, and, at the same time, you don't really get their world because the financial gap means they do things that you don't.

Several other African-American alums of Lakeside I contacted expressed feelings similar to Eric's, and talked about their means of dealing with them. Stan Evans, who graduated in 1973 in the same class as Bill Gates, was still processing the experience three decades later. Evans, who got into the school through its summer program for minority students, later went on to earn a law degree. He said that Lakeside had taught him analytical skills he would not have learned in public school, but he had mixed feelings. Mainly, he thought that leaving the black community to attend Lakeside had always made him a man in the middle—it severed his relations with the kids he grew up with, but he said that when he went back to Lakeside for alumni reunions he felt that all he had was “superficial friendships.” “The majority of blacks I know have a little regret that they went to Lakeside,” he told me.

Ronnie Cunningham, who graduated in 1986, told me he fit in through playing sports and then “decided to get what I could” out of the school. He said that though he received acclaim as an all-city running back, he regretted that he didn't gain confidence in his academic skills until years later, when he was in graduate school working toward his Ph.D. in psychology.

Bob Henry, the Middle School teacher and former diversity director, told me that he had sent his oldest daughter to Lakeside for her freshman and sophomore years, but she had then asked to leave. “She still has painful memories of those days,” he said. “It was a time where, as she looks back on it, it was formative in that she became aware of this hierarchical structure of things and how it was set. I don't know if girls are more sensitive than boys are, but she saw where the power was. She saw the whole thing lined up and she wanted to compete or to be in those roles, and she did all that she could, but in the end she didn't particularly like herself as a result.”

Henry said that kids who come from minority or nonwealthy backgrounds end up in a peculiar situation at Lakeside. Because they can't participate in all the rituals that their classmates are—such as getting a new car when they turn sixteen or vacationing in Sun Valley—they often end up sharply observing everything around them. The role, Henry said, is “almost anthropological.”

I contacted Blakely, who graduated in 2006, because I wanted to speak with some recent African-American Lakeside students. We meet in the summer of 2007, after he has just finished his freshman year at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he is planning to major in accounting before going to law school.

The same week, I catch up with another African-American graduate of the class of 2006, David Changa-Moon, who is a student at Whitman College in Eastern Washington, where he is studying engineering. Changa-Moon had started at Lakeside in his freshman year. Though they had played together on the basketball team, Blakely and Changa-Moon are not close friends. I meet up with both at Starbucks—with Blakely at one in the Madison Park neighborhood, and Changa-Moon at one near a shopping mall south of Seattle.

Both describe a series of challenges and choices that go unnoticed by the average Lakeside student—often in words almost identical to those of Eric Hampton, who attended the school fifteen years earlier. For example, most nonwealthy minorities in Seattle live in the South End, and Lakeside is at the very northern edge of the city. While many students with more money have stay-at-home moms who take them to and from school, a lot of minority kids come from families where both parents have to work. Coming from the South End, it's about an hour and a half bus ride each way. Not only do you have to get up much earlier, but also, when you go to a school that assigns several hours of homework a night, that means you have much less time at home to get it all done. Besides that, you might be expected to cook dinner for your siblings or do other chores to keep the household functioning.

Another complication, Blakely tells me, is that the school seems to have lower expectations for students of color. For example, he says, in Middle School most of the minority students were placed in a lower-level math class. When his parents complained, Blakely took a test and got bumped up. But for some students, it's tempting to take the easier route. “It's like, ‘If I don't try enough, they'll leave me alone, and then just let me coast along for a little bit,' ” he says.

Changa-Moon often breaks into laughter when he speaks about his time at Lakeside, shaking his head at various absurdities. “It's so backward to how you're used to living life,” he says. “I would sit there and eat this really good food and I would come home and have food from the food bank that the rest of my family's eating. So it's just that sort of reality, that sort of juxtaposition.”

Changa-Moon continues, “You don't hear of bad things happening in the Lakeside community, you don't generally hear of deaths, things like that—it's a rare occurrence, it's surprising, it's staggering, it's a big deal. But when you come from a community in which a life where you're struggling is just normal, you can identify with people because you understand everything isn't easy, everything isn't given to you. I understand that everyone has their own struggle, but when your struggle is to just eat and live and stay healthy, it's a much different struggle.”

A very basic issue is, of course, money. Not only does the average kid at Lakeside have a lot of stuff—a cell phone, an iPod, the desirable brand of laptop, computer games, a scooter, a car—but also access to money powers a student's social life, making possible things like going to baseball games, movies, or restaurants. While kids from poorer backgrounds might just hang out and watch TV or play basketball at the local playground, Lakeside kids tend to do things that require cash. “It's not like I can just go home and say, ‘All right, Mom, can I have twenty bucks? I want to go to the movie.' That's not going to happen,” Changa-Moon says. “When that's just assumed, it's like, ‘Why aren't you doing this?' When you're young it's hard to be like, ‘Well, my parents do not have money. I can't afford this.' ”

Though Blakely's parents resisted at first, they eventually broke down and got him the things he felt he needed to fit in—first a cell phone, and then a car a few months after he turned sixteen. At times he felt very involved with the Lakeside social scene, and at other points he pulled away from it to spend most of his time with friends he played with on a select basketball team outside of the school. Changa-Moon felt that his large family kept him grounded. “I was in the popular group, I guess, just because I played basketball and I'm a person of color, and that pretty much locks you in,” he says. “So I'd always get invited out to things, but I just didn't really choose to do that.”

For Blakely, one of the biggest differences between Lakeside and public school was the level of motivation in students. In public school, he says, most kids don't really plan much into the future beyond what they're going to eat that afternoon. Unlike Lakeside, which starts prepping kids for the SAT in eighth grade, a lot of public school students don't even think about college until the second half of senior year, and then they'll likely just head off to community college, if they go anywhere.

At Lakeside, the payoffs were tangible. Kids who did well, first of all, got material rewards from their parents. Because the kids were already motivated, teachers could spend their time going through the lessons and engaging the students, which made classes more fun. Even if you didn't like doing a lot schoolwork, you could still see college ahead, which would be paid for by your parents. You knew that if you made it through college, you were going to be well positioned for life. “There are a lot more foreseeable goals at Lakeside than in public school,” Blakely says. “I think that's the underlying difference.”

It has been harder for private schools like Lakeside to attract African-American faculty than students. For a minority student, there is the prospect of feeling isolated or out of place, but Lakeside offers the carrot of a good education and entry to a prestigious college. A teacher of color, on the other hand, doesn't have that potential payoff and also may be in high demand at many other institutions.

Beginning in 2003, with its new mission focus in place, Lakeside set out forcefully to change the racial composition of the faculty. The search was led by T. J. Vassar, who, in 1968, was one of the school's first three African-American graduates. Vassar had returned to Lakeside in 1992 to direct the Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program, the summer course for minority students, and later became the schoolwide diversity director. At Noe's urging, the school soon hired a slate of new teachers of various backgrounds, including two Latin Americans, one of East Indian origin, and three African-American teachers: Chance Sims, who began at the school in 2003; Kim Pollock, who started there in 2004; and Novella Coleman, who began in 2005.

Sims, a history and humanities teacher in his early thirties, had been teaching at Tacoma Community College. Coleman, who hired on as a math teacher, had just graduated from Stanford University. Pollock, in her midforties, had been teaching English at Bellevue Community College, across Lake Washington from Seattle.

A short woman with a hearty laugh and a forthright manner, Pollock had long focused on issues of race. She had started the ethnic and cultural studies curriculum while at Bellevue Community College and taught a class called “White Culture in the United States.” When T. J. Vassar called out of the blue to ask her about taking a job at Lakeside, telling her about the school's new mission focus, she was intrigued. “I was very committed to the idea that if I could reach the kids that were going to rule the world at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen that I could have a shot at actually making change,” Pollock says. “I was very much devoted to that idea and very much seduced by that idea.”