Book smarts to street smarts

Photos by clare jensen

NEW SCHOOL. Fourteen sixth and seventh-grade students make up the first class of Seabury Middle School students since 2002, when the independent school’s first middle school shut down. The new Seabury Middle School is located at 925 Court C in downtown Tacoma and incorporates the local community into its academic curriculum.

A group of youth has been roaming the streets of downtown Tacoma for the past two months, navigating the urban area and making connections while they get to know their surroundings and how to get by in the real world.

No, these are not a group of teen runaways or truants.  

They are the first class of Seabury Middle School students since 2002, and they are experiencing middle level education in a whole new way.

Based on a model similar to Tacoma School of the Arts, Seabury students also take advantage of the existing resources in downtown Tacoma, making the city their classroom.

“We’re using the community as an extension of the school,” said Sandi Wollum, director of Seabury School.

Seabury is an independent private school that was started in 1989 in Northeast Tacoma, serving intellectually-advanced children at the pre-kindergarten through sixth grade levels.

In 2002, Seabury Middle School was shut down due to a variety of logistical issues. Two years ago, planning began on the new school after the need to restart a middle school option for Seabury students became clear to administrators.

“Ever since that time we had been aware that there was a real need to serve the kinds of students that we serve,” Wollum said. “Parents were telling us and we knew there were limited options for really bright kids in the area at the middle school level.”

For its first year, 14 sixth and seventh graders and two full-time teachers comprise the new Seabury Middle School, located in downtown Tacoma at 925 Court C, right next to the Rialto Theater.

The school has the potential to grow to 45 sixth, seventh and eighth-grade students in its current location and Wollum said they would reach their maximum enrollment at 90 students in order to keep the school small and manageable.

Seabury’s last middle school was also small, but fit more closely to a traditional middle school model. The new school focuses on integrated curriculum, hands-on learning and getting out into the real world.

“If we contain the learning to only these four (classroom) walls, we’ve missed something huge,” said Toby Welch, humanities instructor for Seabury Middle School.

In addition to Seabury student’s classroom curriculum, which connects disciplines within a broad area of study, as well as incorporating advanced practices of science and math, students are getting to actively interact with their community, applying what they learn in the classroom to how they approach real-world scenarios.

Community service and local problem solving are also big criteria in the school’s curriculum.

“What’s been exciting about this so far is the combination of high level of academic work that you’re not going to get in a typical middle school and the practical life skills,” Wollum said. “Everything from how to move through the city, to planning their meals, to talking with adults and community members.”

Students at Seabury say they appreciate the small school’s access to community resources, area experts and project-based curriculum.

“We get to know a lot of people at Seabury,” said sixth-grader Petria Russell. “We really like to get out in the community.”

So far this year, Seabury has taken a four-day field trip to Mount Rainier, testing the Puyallup river for agricultural pollution and working with an expert glaciologist on a climate change study.

This spring, students will be interviewing elderly residents at Franke Toby Jones retirement home for a research project on the personal recollections of Tacoma’s history.

The students will also be proposing solutions to local problems to Tacoma City Council later on this school year.

“A lot of (our students) are just on fire to change the world,” Wollum said. “We wanted to create a program to show kids that they can make a difference and they can make a difference right now.”

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