Why I Love My Diverse and Accepting School

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Ben Jatos, GoLocalPDX MINDSETTER™

In my 21 years of teaching I have worked at three schools but have spent lots of time visiting other schools for meetings or visits or professional development opportunities. I always enjoy checking out other places, but I also relish coming back to my home school where I work. I teach at Fort Vancouver High School and I absolutely love it here.

Fort Vancouver High School serves grades 9-12 and has approximately 1,500 students wandering its halls. Our neighborhood includes low-income housing and tons of apartments resulting in almost 80% of our student body being on a free or reduced lunch program. Our clientele includes students of different colors, nationalities, and backgrounds and our kids come from more than 50 different countries, speaking more than 75 languages. To say we are a diverse school would be an understatement. Because of this diversity we are viewed as a “rough” school by many outsiders.

For example, earlier this year a representative/mentor from a local college visited a classroom where she was observing a student-teacher. At the debriefing between the student-teacher and the college mentor, the only thing the mentor could say was that the teacher did a nice job considering how “rough and scary” the students looked. It was an Advanced Placement class and the class wasn’t rough and scary. It was a diverse crew with both dark and light faces. To make it worse, the class was discussing perceptions people have of students of color and how awful it makes them feel. Personally, I love the diversity. I feel like I get so much from my students and the stories they bring with them to class. Many of us that teach here celebrate our students’ differences and embrace them.

Besides the diversity my school exhibits, the very best thing about it is that Fort Vancouver High School is the one school I know where students truly aren’t judged by their peers. This isn’t 100% absolute but it's seriously close. About five years ago I had a little freshman girl show up to class wearing a tiger suit. It was a big, fuzzy, orange and black striped tiger onesie. She made no mention about it during class and I was feeling kind of uncomfortable for her, thinking that maybe she thought it was school spirit dress-up day or something so I asked her right after class about why she wore it. She told me that she liked tigers as if my question was utterly ridiculous. I then watched her walk down the hall and what struck me was that every single face she passed remained non-judgmental. Not one student she passed made a comment toward her. To be honest, nobody ever looked at her funny. It was like they were saying, “Oh, a girl in a tiger suit,” and then just moving on. It was an eye opener. At other schools, students labor over what they wear to school every single day because the wrong outfit could be social suicide. At my school nobody cares. It’s glorious.

Our school has a new employee who came over after working in a Portland high school for years. What was his first reaction to Fort Vancouver? He says that it’s amazing that nobody judges or makes fun of people here. That it’s shocking that in a high school in today’s society, people are so accepting. Whenever someone comes here to spend an extended amount of time, that’s always the first thing they notice.

Two years ago we had a transgendered student who lived as a female. This student stayed for all four years until graduation and she loved school. The students here just didn’t know about her or didn’t care about her being transgendered. She was just another student here. Whatever. No big deal.

Although our sports teams are fairly awful (wait though… our boys basketball team is 3-0 and on fire!) our students are great fans and participants. People say that character is built through adversity and if that’s true, our athletes have character galore. Some of our coaches preach “attitude and effort” and that starts with our amazing Athletic Director who knows that as a high-poverty school the cards are stacked against us. He wants our athletes to have a positive experience and he wants the fans that attend games to have one too. We can’t control much about how many camps our athletes can attend or who their personal trainers are but we can help control their attitude and effort. It takes a lot of heart to be an athlete on a team that loses game after game, but our athletes show up again and again and again. And they do their best all the time. The fans show up as well. All the time. It’s high school sports and it’s not the bigtime. At Fort Vancouver you won’t see the “win at all costs” attitude you see at other schools. You will see attitude and effort though.

I’ve had opportunities to teach at other schools that are viewed as more successful (read as affluent) and I have no interest. My daughter is three years old and she will go to school here because I want her to be in a welcoming, diverse, nurturing high school, free from pressures and judgment so she can become a well-rounded and grounded young woman. Fort Vancouver High School will make that happen.

Ben Jatos is in his 21st year of teaching secondary English. His opinions are his own and in no way represent the views of his school district. He is passionate about his family, the Portland Trail Blazers, the writing of Raymond Carver, and educating young people. For more of his opinions and reviews of literature for the classroom, check out his blog at www.benjatos.com.