Steven Kant

Steven grew up in Maryland and came to Olympia in 1974. He lived on Foote Street and then Sherman Street in a hotbed of 1970s Olympia activism; since then he wandered to the east side for 10 years and then back to the west side neighborhood from 1985 to the present. After some short-term jobs, he taught at the Off Campus School for five years, then worked for 10 years supervising a self-paced math/learning lab and teaching math classes at The Evergreen State College, then created and distributed a visual curriculum called Flip-Chip Algebra (with Frank Edge), and finally started Working Systems (with Jim Cubbage in 1989), a company that made software for labor unions. Steven and Jim retired in 2020 and Working Systems was converted to a successful worker-owned cooperative.

Steven was involved in several of the events described in this project – alternative education, Central American activism, labor organizing, and Nicaraguan solidarity. He also helped in schools with education about sexual assault and violence against women; he was an early male volunteer in Safeplace and a founding member of the Heartsparkle Players. Steven was a part of an activist men’s group in 1979 that has survived to the present day with a more social format.

These days Steven is a short-distance but regular bicyclist and hiker and has been spending time in Hawaii during the winter. He is still an active volunteer in elementary schools—in the last years he has been teaching math classes and bringing his playground of math puzzles and games to summer camps and four different schools, often several times each week (see www.flipchipmath.com). Steven has two children and three step-children.

• Supporting the Teachers’ Union in El Salvador – 1985 – By Steven Kant
  I was traveling with a delegation of U.S. teachers and union activists. The trip included people from Seattle, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities. Beth Harris of Olympia was one of the organizers. We were responding to a request from ANDES, the Salvadoran teachers union, to attend their union convention. ANDES had not been able to hold a convention for years because of the violent repression, so they invited teachers and activists from all over the world to attend as witnesses and participants.
• Goodbye to Richard Nixon – 1974 – By Steven Kant
  VIGNETTES Goodbye to Richard Nixon – 1974 By Steven Kant
• Progressive Changes at Lincoln Elementary Influenced the Community – By Steven Kant
  In 1984, alternative-thinking parents worked with the school district to create an elementary options program, and in 1995, the program was moved to Lincoln School and renamed Lincoln Options. The alternative programs were expanded in later years to another elementary school and two middle schools. The influence of these programs was also felt in many other schools.
• Thurston County Off Campus School – By Steven Kant
  “Off Campus” was an alternative secondary school located in a run-down rental house on Martin Way. The school was founded in the early 1970s by students and teachers. It was a non-profit organization run democratically by all of the students and all of the teachers that worked there. There was a corporation and a board of directors, but the decisions were made at meetings at the school every Friday where each person had one vote.
• Union Organizing at the Evergreen State College – By Steven Kant
  Staff at the college, however, were state employees and worked under conditions governed by the state civil service system. In these early days, Evergreen administrators tended to ignore the state rules and treated everyone as part of the “community family,” although Daddy was actually in charge.