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Saturday, September 10, 2011

An Urban Teacher's Education: Back on the West Coast

An Urban Teacher's Education: Back on the West Coast:

Back on the West Coast

After scrounging for job offers for weeks (and nearly prepared to move to South America), I finally stumbled into four interviews in the first week of August. Two in Oakland and two in the Seattle area.

In the end, I accepted a job in the Highline School District, which is just barely south of Seattle. The school I work at sits right next to the Sea-Tac airport. I chose this school because I was excited by their decision-making model (consensus), its small staff and student body (a similar organization to the school I worked at in the Bronx), its relationship with the Coalition for Essential Schools, and my familiarity with the student population (the student body is very similar to the group of students I taught with when I worked at Renton High School, also just south of Seattle, between 2007-2009). We serve among the most diverse communities in the United States (and are very near the most diverse zip code in the US). My students' backgrounds include Mexican, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Somalian, Samoan, Eritrean, West African (mostly Liberian), Turkish, Bosnian, and a few blacks and whites whose families have been in the States for some time.

A few things have struck me about my current school thus far. First, this is the first time I've entered a district