1986: Go Wildcats!

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Today we had a ceremony because we won some awesome reward for being awesome!! The mayor came and said how proud he was. Then we got green and yellow balloons (Go Wildcats!) and they floated away in the sky like a big sea of awesomeness. It was cool. Today was a fun day.

-- Irene Bowen

Evidence: 


This rather simple story grew out of a complicated research trail, which we'd like to share because it illustrates some of the ups and downs of tracking down our historical evidence, and the challenge of creating stories that can include it all. 


We found out from old newspaper articles that Whitworth won an Exemplary School award from the U.S. Department of Education in 1986. This was right about the time that the District was starting the process of expanding the site, and there were protests at the school board meetings by neighbors who didn't want to have their houses torn down. There were other controversies brewing at the time too. In 1984 parents and staff had threatened a boycott of the school if the district didn't provide more teachers. And the Exemplary School award had been held up for several months because of civil rights complaints alleging reverse discrimination in the district's gifted programs. (We were interested, but not surprised, to discover that none of this was included in the official history of Whitworth published by the school district in 2002.) 


Then we learned that the mother of one of our classmates went to the old Whitworth School before it was torn down and rebuilt. (We found out because we saw a picture of her in an old scrapbook -- she looked just like her daughter!) So we invited her to come to our class so we could ask her about all this stuff. Her name is Emily Hendrickson. She looked through the scrapbook and remembered everybody in all the pictures. She said Whitworth was her favorite school of all the schools she ever went to. "I just loved, loved, loved Whitworth. We were the Wildcats, and our colors were yellow and green."


She told us the school was very diverse, that she had friends of all races -- she pointed them out in the scrapbook for us. We asked her if the school did anything special to help all the kids get along, and she said, "Well, I've heard that some people didn't learn about black history, but I was always taught it. When you're a kid, you don't know what's normal, but we always had it -- it was normal to us." 


She said when they tore down the old school, her class made a time capsule, and she put a Mr. Yuck sticker in it. (We tried to find out what happened to the time capsule, but nobody knows! Apparently this is a fairly common problem with time capsules.) 


And she told us all about the day the school won the award -- about the green balloons and the yellow balloons, and how excited and proud everybody was. She thought there might have been a special Exemplary School flag they got to run up the flag pole. But she said that as a kid she didn't really know much about any of the political stuff that was going on. She didn't know about the civil rights complaints. She didn't know about the houses being torn down or the neighbors protesting. She kind of remembered the boycott: "It was one of those long, hot summers, and school didn't start for like a month after it was supposed to. So it was like the summer just went on and on and on." But later on we learned that the boycott never actually happened -- the district gave the school more staff, so the Whitworth parents and teachers didn't have to act on their threat. Eventually we figured out that there was a teachers strike in September of 1985 that delayed the start of school by 24 days -- that must have been the long, hot summer Emily remembered. 

We had originally wanted to write a story about Whitworth winning the national award from a kid's perspective, and try to work in all these other things that were going on in the background at the time -- the threatened boycott, the neighbors protesting, the civil rights complaint -- but after talking to Emily we realized a kid wouldn't have really known anything about that stuff. To her it really was just "a big sea of awesomeness!" So that's how Irene wrote it.

All photos courtesy of Seattle Public Schools Archives.
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