Balancing work, community service and the Kentlake Site Council | Kris Hill

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t say no very often.

So, when Principal Joe Potts asked me to be on the Kentlake Site Council little more than a year ago, I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. I agreed to participate.

Then I forgot about it.

A few weeks later I was at Bill Maxwell Stadium covering the Kentlake-Tahoma football game and Potts came down out of the stands to chat with me.

At first I didn’t recognize him. Potts was wearing a ball cap and somewhat more casual clothes than how I had seen him dressed before.

Honestly, it was the hat that threw me off. Anyway, after I figured out who this was, we talked a bit and he asked me if I was still planning to be on the Site Council. Oh. Yes.

I asked when the first meeting would be and it was planned for a Wednesday. You know, I told him I couldn’t do meetings on Wednesdays when he first asked me in late August. Up until just a few months ago, we laid out the paper on Wednesdays, which meant I often didn’t get out of the office until 6 p.m. at the earliest on those days.

The Site Council meets at 6:30 at Kentlake.

Still, I agreed. I don’t like to back out on something unless I have a good reason.

When he asked me to be on the Site Council, Potts simply wanted to have a cross section of people from the Kentlake community involved, ranging from students to parents to politicians to teachers to community members.

I fell into the “community member” category from his perspective. Trust me, I asked him twice why he wanted me to be on the Site Council, I wanted to be sure he was serious.

We never discussed the idea of my writing about it.

He never asked me to and until the first meeting, I wasn’t really planning to, either.

But, then I went, I saw all this data, the student climate survey from the spring of 2010 and knowing where Kentlake was in terms of Adequate Yearly Progress, I was confused about what had happened at the school — especially considering it happened right under my nose.

When I realized I had a lot of questions I wanted to get answers to, I decided it was worth documenting the process, so I asked Potts if it was OK if I wrote about the meetings.

He said he didn’t mind.

And he never tried to influence what I wrote. Potts has made Kentlake totally accessible to me, which has allowed for a level of transparency most governments don’t allow or even aspire to, so it seemed an opportunity to give people a look into the workings of a public high school.

My columns about the Site Council have generated feedback from people I would have never expected it from and the one thing people consistently tell me they read are those pieces.

I didn’t really know if they would have an audience but even people who don’t have a vested interest in Kentlake’s future are watching through my columns.

Someone recently told me it seemed like my being on the Site Council could be a conflict of interest.

I don’t view it that way.

First, I don’t live in the Kent School District, I don’t have kids in school and so my only job is to provide the perspective of an interested, hopefully objective third party observer.

Secondly, anyone who knows Joe Potts knows he’s not the kind of person who would manipulate a group like this, though he has told me he appreciates the positive coverage I have done of Kentlake.

From my perspective, I don’t think I’ve sugar coated any of the issues Kentlake has dealt with in the past few years, nor the challenges Potts has faced since taking over as principal.

And in visiting Susan Best’s journalism class at Kentlake on Sept. 29, I’ve come to the conclusion that while the school has made strides in the past year or so since Potts arrived, it seems like until the class of 2013 graduates there will remain lingering bitterness among students who were at the school under previous principal Diana Pratt.

OK, in fairness, that’s what the kids told me.

The overall vibe at Kentlake seems better than it did when I spent two days there talking to students and visiting classes last year.

Of course, it could still just be the 6-0 start for the football team. A year ago students told me morale was significantly boosted by the success of the Falcons football team. It continues to have an impact this year.

There are still complaints. Not everything Potts has brought to Kentlake has been embraced by students such as the dance policies and accompanying contract they must sign in order to go to school dances.

But, these are things that are more typical for teens to complain about.

I suspect there will always be some discord between adults and students because of what grown ups want teens to do while they’re at school. The kind of stuff that’s reasonable for adults to expect and equally reasonable for kids to find unreasonable because they want to be treated like adults even if they can’t seem to act like it all the time.

One thing that remains a consensus is the students love Potts. They appreciate that he’s involved, that he doesn’t hole up in his office, that he makes an effort to get to know them as individuals.

So, he’s got that going for him, at least.

With all that in mind, the first Site Council meeting of this school year is set for Oct. 26. After that I plan to tell you about what things will look like for us this year. I am hoping for some new members.

I would still like to see students on the council. I’ll probably throw in some more information about what the students in the journalism class told me, as well.

In the meantime I am working on a story that will segue nicely between this column and the first piece on the Site Council. I will be writing about test scores, end of course assessments, interventions and what all that information means to Tahoma and Kent school district students as well as staff. Hopefully that will run in the Oct. 21 issue.

Education writing always gives me more to think about and more questions to ask than I end up answering but if you believe in lifelong learning as I do then it should be that way.