CONDUIT TO THE CITY

THE SUMMER AFTER Latasia Lanier ’90 was accepted at Lakeside, she attended the school’s long-running summer program, Lakeside Educational Enrichment Program, known as LEEP, to familiarize herself with the campus and to get comfortable. The program brings students from public schools to Lakeside each summer for academic, social-emotional, and experiential learning, in and out of the classroom. Amid long bus rides, fun camping trips, and new friendships, Lanier launched what would be her decades-long engagement with the school. In 1993, she returned to LEEP as a counselor, and after more than a decade of summers spent teaching, she became the program’s director in 2008. “I was just excited to be in community and create community and connections for others,” she says. “That’s just something we try to do.”

For Lanier and her staff, LEEP is all about connection: connection with the city, connection across the perceived divide between public and independent education, and connection between educators and students that fosters skills and confidence that can last long after the summer ends. The program, which is free for all attendees, is an example of how Lakeside’s partnerships share resources in a spirit of abundance and collaboration. “We have to be intentional in the way in which we are trying to partner with others in the community, and there’s definitely things that we can learn and grow from, too,” says Lanier. “How do we ensure that we’re having as much as possible a reciprocal exchange of ideas and energy and support?”

LEEP began in 1965, at a time when independent schools were reassessing the diversity of their student populations in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. “If it were not for a program like LEEP, how were we going to begin to make our connection with Seattle south of the Ship Canal?” asks Lanier. At the time, Lakeside was relatively isolated from the rest of the city. “How could we get out of our own way and recognize that it’s important to really expand throughout the whole city?”

LEEP became that conduit. An original component of the program was a recruiting initiative to bring greater diversity to Lakeside’s student population, through something Lanier describes as “a LEEP-to-Lakeside process.” At the conclusion of Lakeside’s admissions process in early spring, two spots would be held for LEEP students who seemed like they would be a strong academic fit. Selected students would go through a modified admissions process, Lanier says, and join the freshman class at Lakeside at the start of fall semester.

That process was sunsetted several years ago, because, for one thing, as Lanier puts it, “the school shouldn’t rely on programs like us to paint a new picture for their schools.” Instead, those efforts need to originate from Lakeside’s admissions office directly. The recruitment piece also conflicted with LEEP’s mission, which is grounded in collaboration rather than extraction, with the goal of empowering students with new skills that they can bring back to their original schools, rather than keeping them within a closed loop at Lakeside.

“LEEP was really supposed to help students create this community and this network of resources for you to apply it in whatever your Seattle Public School would be in the fall, and so, if we are not having all of those students continue to matriculate into a Seattle Public School, then there’s really not the same opportunity for them to apply what they’ve hopefully built during their time with us,” says Lanier.

Recruitment didn’t align with that spirit of partnership. And LEEP staff members do see it as a partnership, one that benefits Lakeside as much as the participating public schools. Each year, LEEP staff coordinates visits with local schools and works with public school partners to identify students who could benefit from the program.

Lilia Goldsmith, an 8th grade counselor at Hamilton International Middle School, plays an active role in connecting students at her school with the program, with an emphasis on centering students of color, first-generation students, students whose families may not have the resources to send them to summer enrichment programs, and students who could simply benefit from the additional academic support. “Oftentimes, it’s really hard to find those supports,” she says. “So this is a great opportunity for them.”

Goldsmith sees the program as a way to get kids thinking about future academic goals. Even filling out the application, she says, helps students familiarize themselves with the mechanics of applying for future academic opportunities, like scholarships for college — even if they don’t end up attending LEEP.

For Shaz Salah, a Lakeside teacher who has taught at LEEP for several years, working with LEEP students “made teaching, for me, come back to life.” Salah found that the social-emotional aspect of teaching at LEEP reinvigorated her teaching in a way that brought new energy to her Lakeside classroom during the school year.

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“I can make these emotional connections important, too, and my first year at LEEP really, really reminded me of that,” she says. LEEP even motivated her to start a young adult literature course at Lakeside to expose students to the experiences of other young people through reading.

In just four weeks, says Salah, she sees real growth in her LEEP students. “I just think it’s an incredible opportunity for students from all across the city to have a summer where they meet new people, have fun, and feel socially, emotionally, and academically prepared for the next school year,” she says. “And it’s honestly the same thing for me, too.”

To Salah, LEEP is “a gem of Lakeside. There’s a lot of amazing things about Lakeside, and I definitely think that LEEP is high on the list.”

A partnership with Seattle Public Schools might not be the first thing people think of when they think of Lakeside, Lanier acknowledges, but it’s an important aspect of the school’s engagement with the community around it. “A lot of people think about Lakeside as Bill Gates and Paul Allen and families associated with privilege,” she says, but points out the modern reality of a richly diverse and amazing student body and alumni from all walks of life doing incredible things with their education.

“Lakeside could definitely have stayed in its own bubble,” she says. “But is that really what we want to be?”

— Megan Burbank