By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Much political hay has been made about the supposedly decrepit state of our nationwide public school system, with whole industries devoted to tearing down confidence in how kids are educated.
While those arguments whiz around social media, pop up in election campaigns and in the various silos of mass media — social and otherwise — it’s a different feeling when you actually walk the halls of your local schools. Especially in the busy weeks leading up to the start of the new academic year.
I started this year’s back-to-school cycle by joining a friend and his son on a tour of Washington State University, in Pullman. As they followed the official guide, I wandered the campus on my own and revisited places I remembered as a graduate student there from 2017-’19.
I’d forgotten how much affection I feel for that place, with its infinite hills and buildings of brick, steel and glass. It’s a stalwart, self-possessed place that wears its land grant legacy with pride (for evidence, see the ubiquity of the greeting, “Go Cougs,” whenever students, alums or professors meet).
My own private tour included where to get the best pizza downtown and showing off the grizzly bears WSU hosts in captivity. Meanwhile, I appreciated the students running around hauling backpacks and water bottles, posted up in cubbies and nooks working on papers, getting texts printed, jostling for books in the library and generally representing a community of young people in the act of becoming who they plan to be.
The fact that I was there with a friend whom I met in kindergarten at Sagle Elementary School in 1986 and his son, who is somehow going to be a senior in high school when I feel like I just met him as a toddler, underscored how education is community and how that belonging can last lifetimes across generations.
That feeling came into clearer relief when I went to orientation with my own son at Sandpoint High School on Sept. 1. We gathered in the gym where I attended who knows how many assemblies, pep rallies, games and concerts during my own time as a Bulldog from 1995-’99.
I embarrassed and exasperated my incoming freshman by pointing out the locations of all my past lockers, showed him my class picture and mural — both still on the walls after so many years — and visited the classrooms where I was once a student and he will be soon.
I had that cliched feeling of middle aged wistfulness when crowding through the halls with all the kids and parents, participating together in a ritual of growing up experienced by countless others. I was touched by the confidence of the juniors and seniors, the excitement of the sophomores and the jumpiness of the freshmen, trying to cover their nerves with an affected detachment.
There’s no doubt that I’m biased. My wife is a teacher, my mother was a teacher and administrator, and I’m an unashamed lover of school. I could also cite the stats that give lie to the argument that our local educational system is failing our kids — the most recent testing data shows a different picture — but that doesn’t tell the intangible part of the story about the friends, neighbors, classmates and others who contribute to one of the most important lessons, nor is it the point of this little rumination.
I’m also not naive, and know that high school is tough. But, at SHS, I saw teachers with whom I was once a student in the very same school, and left with a sense of gratitude that such an institution can hold all these people through the decades and serve them for no gain other than what is accrued for all of us: safe, supported, encouraged young people who become the older people who sustain and build the community into which they’re being invited and will inherit.
