During my first year at the UW, I participated in two distinct service learning experiences through an Inner Pipeline Seminar and through a Sociology course on Public School in America. I volunteered for a quarter in a kindergarten class that Highland Park Elementary School in White Center. The following quarter, I volunteered at Adams Elementary School in Ballard as an after-school homework club tutor. 

 

These two back-to-back experiences provided a great deal of insight into the radically different models of education that are present within the same city. At Highland Park, there is a high population of minority students and students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. The classroom I worked in contained over 20 students, many of whom required additional behavioral or academic support (this support came mostly in the form of a part-time Instructional Assistant). The teacher in this classroom was a recent graduate and was in her second year of her teaching career. While the students were outside during recess, the teacher shared conversations with me about how difficult she found her job and how she already felt 'burnt out.' She reflected on her role in the classroom and remarked on how most of her time and energy was spent on managing student behavior. Her remaining and compromised energy was spent on teaching in a classroom that, by design, resisted her. It was clear to me that this woman had received professional training that had not prepared her for the classroom circumstances that she had inherited, and that while she plainly wanted nothing more than to help her students, there were simply not appropriate resources in place to allow her to do so. I noticed too that my role in the classroom was spent mostly monitoring behavior and encouraging students to focus on the task at hand. The conditions for successful teaching and learning were not quite there, despite the desire of both the teacher and the students. 

 

The circumstances in Adams Elementary school, however, provided a sharp contrast to my experiences at Highland Park. At Adams, I was one of more than six or seven volunteers that worked in the after-school homework club. There were other college-aged volunteers and many high school volunteers. At the most, the homework club involved a dozen or so students who worked quietly and efficiently on their homework. Most were simply there because their parents could not get off work to come pick them up after school. It was rare that a student need help being redirected to their work, and even less frequently did a student need significant assistance in approaching the problem. For the most part, I felt that my role in this context was redundant and borderline unnecessary. I was not actively supporting students in a way that I felt like I had the potential to at Highland Park. 

 

In light of these experiences, I observed explicit disparities in the distribution of resources in the two geographical locations. Though not more than 15 miles apart, these schools existed in distinct and very different contexts. It occurred to me that these schools illustrate a larger socio-economic patten in the city of Seattle (illustrated by the map to the right). This structural topography of resources in Seattle Public Schools became something real for me, not something that functioned purely in a theoretical or abstracted realm. I had experience grounded in these disparities. By engaging in service in these two different schools, with an analytical approach grounded in academic discussions, I was able to see how central education is in conversations about equity. It reminded me of how much work still is yet to be done, and marked the beginning of my leadership development path and my personal and professional careers and hopes for the system of education.