Good Intentions Turn Into Diversity Backlash at Lakeside School

When Briaan Barron got accepted into Lakeside School, the elite private institution whose formidable roster of wealthy and powerful alumni includes Bill Gates and Paul Allen, it felt to family and friends like heaven's doors had swung open to receive her. "Whenever we told anyone," says her mother, Daphne Cross, "it was like, 'Oh my God, you got accepted into Lakeside!'"

"The campus was beautiful," says Barron, thinking back to her first impressions of the North Seattle middle and upper school's meticulously maintained red-brick buildings, which rise from sprawling lawns of deep green. "Everyone was very friendly."

Furthermore, not only was Lakeside's academic reputation superb, but Barron, who is African American, was impressed on her initial visit by how many black students and faculty there were, noting that she was used to seeing virtually no African Americans at her previous Catholic school on Capitol Hill, St. Joseph.

Nearly two years later, Lakeside has lived up to Barron's hopes—academically, at least. She is now a high-achieving Lakeside sophomore who sits on the school's Black Leadership Union's leadership committee. Yet she has thought often about leaving. "My daughter is miserable there," says Cross, an executive assistant at Sound Transit.

The problem, according to Barron, is that "everything turned into a race debate."

Sitting cross-legged on a couch in her family's South End rambler, Barron, a self-possessed young woman wearing jeans, hoop earrings, and a headband pulling back her shoulder-length hair, relates how she first listened eagerly to campus discussions about race. That was when, as a freshman, she found herself in the classroom of Kim Pollock, an African American teacher who had recently come to Lakeside from Bellevue Community College. While teaching English, Pollock often talked to her students about racism. "She was the first teacher I felt I could identify with," Barron says.

But Pollock also stirred controversy, particularly among white students, who perceived that she was accusing all whites of racism. Barron felt compelled to defend her and found the ensuing debates dispiriting. "We're coming from two different perspectives," she says. Barron felt herself pitted against people who liked to hear the sound of their own impressive vocabularies, and who would say things like, "My father does this, and this, and this; therefore, I have more background information on this."

Then Pollock suddenly left Lakeside midyear, with little explanation from the school. A number of other teachers and staff, several of them African American, also handed in their resignations. "If everyone's leaving amicably, where's the cake and punch?" Cross asks.

At the same time, Lakeside became embroiled in debate over its decision early last year to withdraw a speaking invitation to high-profile author Dinesh D'Souza. His conservative ideas on race sparked protests from African American faculty, as well as some whites, and were ultimately judged "harmful" to Lakeside's "current efforts to be an inclusive community," according to a letter written by Lakeside Head of School Bernie Noe. Notwithstanding that decision and an intense effort by the school to become more diverse, two African American teachers filed suit against Lakeside last October in a case now proceeding through federal court, charging the school with being a hostile work environment that practices racial discrimination.

On top of all that, it seemed to Barron and her mom that the school was always talking about how much it valued diversity—not necessarily a bad thing, but one which brought even more of a draining focus on race. Cross says she was always hearing questions among the Lakeside community such as: "How do the black kids compare to the white kids?" and "How do the scholarship kids compare to the nonscholarship kids?"

Says Barron, "All I had to worry about at St. Joe's was doing my best in my classes."

"We just want her to go to school," her mother adds.

Race crops up more often as a subject of debate in public schools than it does at an institution like Lakeside. The Seattle School District has made ending institutional racism official policy. (Concerned about the achievement gap between African American and white students, the School Board has concluded that the district's own racism is partly to blame.) And the district's recent search for a new superintendent brought a barrage of questions from the press and public about racism.

Meanwhile, Lakeside has had the same kind of self-recriminating discussions about ending "white privilege," heightened in some ways because the privilege enjoyed by many students at a school that charges upwards of $20,000 a year in tuition fees and admits less than one-third of its applicants is far vaster. The Gates-Allen connection is used so often as shorthand to convey Lakeside's royal pedigree that it is easy to forget all the other storied names attached to the school, which read like a history of moneyed Seattle: Pigott (the PACCAR founding family); Blethen (the family that owns The Seattle Times); Selig (the real estate family responsible for the Columbia tower); Ballmer (as in Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose children attend the school); Schwarz (Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz sent a daughter there); Bullitt (founding family of King Broadcasting); McCaw and Nordstrom (of cellular communications and department-store fame, respectively).