LLyn, former dean, and Don, Gay Center representative, share perspectives on their early days at Evergreen and the how they came to sit across the table from each other mediating a gay rights debacle.
We had no offices at first. The buildings weren’t ready. So, a solution that became a model for programs for years after was born. We retreated to Sun Lakes State Park in Eastern Washington near Coulee City. We loaded vans with food and sleeping bags and projectors, films, books . . . five faculty and nearly a hundred students.
We are all longtime Olympia folks and three of many who learned and organized at the Labor Center with Dan Leahy. We did not differentiate between our work at The Evergreen State College Labor Education Center and our working-class roots. We each tell about our involvement with the Labor Center and how it affected our lives. Dan Leahy passed away in 2022.
I was a programmer on KAOS FM, the campus radio station, for most of my undergraduate years at Evergreen 1974 – 1980. I read news stories as the news director, and did public affairs spots . . . On one show I read a brief story about a WPPSS (Whoops!) nuclear power plant being decommissioned, due in part from finding a fault line under the construction site. A week or so later I was called to the office of the college president.
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.
“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.