Everyone was needed on time because the children had drawn names and if everyone was not there someone wouldn't get their present. Finally, Nadine couldn't hold it inside and have another Christmas ruined. She confronted Mary Kay over the phone.
“No more! I've had it up to my eyebrows! If you want to exchange gifts, you bring the gifts the day before. I don't care if you come from Timbuktu, bring the gifts over here. At least we will have the gifts for the kids,” she said.
If Mary Kay was an outsider in Steve's family it didn't matter much to her and she dealt with it when she had to. Individually, she considered them all right, salt-of-the-earth types. But all of them together in a group was something else. She thought that they carried gigantic chips on their shoulders.
“I don't know what it is all about,” she told a friend later, “but Steve's family—his mother's side—spend every minute of the day thinking that the world owes them something. It is as if they aren't good enough. There is so much negativity there.”
When Gregory Heights sixth-grade teacher Mary Newby picked up the phone in the late summer of 1989, it was her former student teacher Mary Kay Letourneau calling with a good news / bad news scenario. She had been offered a job teaching second grade at Shorewood Elementary, but she didn't know if she wanted to teach that grade level. She had preferred teaching older kids. The principal, she said, was pressuring her.
“Well, you know,” the veteran teacher said, “I've taught every grade and there are wonderful things about each one of them. You'll do fine with second-graders… you'll have your foot in the door.”
Mary Kay said she'd think about it.
Chapter 16
JUST BEYOND A church sits Shorewood Elementary School at 2725 SW 116th Avenue S., down the hill from the trouble and traffic of Ambaum Boulevard, one of the SeaTac Airport area's busiest streets. The neighborhood is older, with lots of “Grandma Houses”—small, single-story homes with mature camellias and driveways without oil stains. In the past few years, some have been torn down to make way for newer, bigger, not nearly as charming homes for a younger crowd of Boeing workers and professionals just trying to get a toehold in a tough Seattle housing market.
The neighborhood surrounding the brick- and glass-block-faced school hasn't changed all that much since the 1950s when the school was a bastion of middle-class homogeneity. The homes are tidy and the yards clean. No autos growing moss on blocks in the front yards. Shorewood remains far enough from White Center and Burien to feel safe at night, though not as many would walk its streets as they did in the past. Today, the school draws students from a larger area, going far to the east to pick up children who live in low-income housing and fixer-uppers-in-waiting. Almost a third of the children enrolled at Shorewood are eligible for the free-lunch program.
The building is unremarkable in a way that makes one wonder if anything, or anyone, of any particular interest could come from such a place. Inside, the school is antiquated, though clean; a victim of failing funding levies. One teacher's father once inquired if the building was condemned. A seagull is the school mascot. Glazed terra-cotta tiles made by students over the years are inset into the hallway walls. The gymnasium walls are painted with college football-team logos from Washington State and the University of Washington.
All teachers are white, which belies the ethnic diversity that has taken root over the years. More than forty languages and dialects are spoken in the Highline School District. At Shorewood, twenty percent of the students are Asian and Pacific Islander, six percent black, four percent Hispanic, and the other two thirds, white. Five hundred students attend the school. Twenty-four teachers stand up in front of their classrooms each day to provide the foundation for the education that will carry their students through the rest of their lives.
But in the end, that world would only focus on two. One teacher and one student.
When Mary Kay Letourneau arrived to teach second grade in 1989 she brought with her an undeniable and welcome burst of enthusiasm. For the shiny new students in her class, she was Mary Poppins and the tooth fairy all rolled into one. The children adored her because she was pretty, young, and probably most important of all, fun to be around. She invited the children to participate in the process of learning.
One teacher who observed her classroom during those early days noticed that Mrs. Letourneau gave her children nearly an unprecedented amount of personal choice when it came to curriculum. Whatever the kids wanted, she allowed.
“She would constantly rearrange things; she never had a lesson plan book. Well, she did, but it was hardly filled in and she never followed it because things would change minute by minute or hour by hour,” the observing teacher said later, though she admitted, “It seems like when the class had big projects to do, they did get done.”