Sex. Murder. Mystery(132)

—A teaching colleague quoting the Shorewood principal's last evaluation of the teacher headed for disaster

The school is suffering. The teachers certainly suffered tremendously from this. Teachers walk in those classrooms… [and ask,] “what has this done with my standing in my classroom? Are they [the students] going to worry about me?” It chokes me up to think of the impact on them and the students.

—Gary Roe, grandfather of a Shorewood student

This is not a case questioning our educational system or the delivery of curriculum.

—Mary Kay Letourneau in a press release, November 1997

Before students left, I made sure I gave them a choice of a high-five, handshake, or a hug. H.H.H. I got it from a teacher at Seattle U. and I did it every day with every student since my first second-grade class. It was a way of touching base, ensuring contact.

—Mary Kay Letourneau on a teaching technique, 1999





Chapter 19

IN NEARLY EVERY way, White Center couldn't be farther from Corona del Mar, California. White Center. The name is a big joke among Seattlelites who don't live there. Toss a rock, they say, and you couldn't hit a white person if your life depended on it. Nearby Top Hat is another with a moniker that doesn't fit the ambience of the place for which it is named. Those who live there shrug and acknowledge the obvious.

“You'd think a place like Top Hat would be a little classier,” said one resident, aware of the irony.

Though White Center's name is a joke, its nickname is worse. The slogan the chamber of commerce would like to forget is Rat City, from an infestation that local boosters claim has been annihilated, although most know rodents rule the basements and back bedrooms of some of the Seattle area's worst housing. The projects appear tidy and nondescript, and some think they are a cut above some housing in Vili's neighborhood, a world of jacked-up cars, liquor bottles, and water-stained curtains. This is not Compton or Watts, but it is Seattle's version of the hood. Rap and hip-hop pulse in headsets and from boom boxes. Country, Top 40 radio, classical, be damned.

If other Seattle neighborhoods are more defined by money, cars, and lawn services, White Center is defined by the people and cultures that claim it. Cambodians, Russians, Samoans, and African-Americans run the restaurants, go to the storefront churches, and their children stake out the Taco Time and Dairy Queen on Ambaum Boulevard. When drizzle doesn't send them for cover, some kids hang around the shores of a pond behind Evergreen High School where drug use is so common deals are done in the light of day.

This is the neighborhood of a boy who would be the catalyst for unbelievable change and dire consequences for Mary Kay Letourneau. This is the neighborhood that would become the home of her youngest children.

Enrollment at the Highline School District had declined since the 1970s. After Boeing went nearly bankrupt and laid off most of its workforce (“Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?” read a famous billboard) enrollment dropped from 40,000 to just less than half that in the mid-1990s. Perhaps understandably so, those who were left behind to hold down the fort at Burien and White Center in many cases could not afford to move elsewhere. To the south of the Highline School District boundary in Des Moines and Normandy Park and north to Shorewood and Seahurst, however, are the Gold Coast homes of the more affluent.

“This is the land that time forgot,” said Nick Latham, public relations flack for the district. “Progress jumped over the area and not much has changed.” When the former television reporter first came to work for the district one aspect fascinated him above many others: the people who lived in the area never left it. White Center, Burien, Roxbury—whatever the address, it was their town.

“They are living within minutes of one of the most vital, exciting cities in the country, if not the world, and they may never, ever come here. It might as well be New York City. Nothing in Seattle interests them. They do not cross that First Avenue South Bridge.”

In the center of the district is SeaTac International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, and the source of many jobs and, without a doubt, the starting point for nearly all who live in the area. But it is more than that. Ironically, the airport is the area's biggest impediment to communication and traffic. It is also noisy. And as the airport has grown, nearby property values have plummeted and people have departed for quieter environs to the north or east.

For those coming and going, the airport is conveniently located between Seattle and Tacoma. For those who live close by—especially directly in its flight path—it is a disaster. Some schools have been so impacted by the noise that teachers have to stop lessons to wait for passing planes to go by. Families have turned up the volume on their televisions to ear-splitting decibels and learned to live with it.