<Begin Segment 35>

LH: So eventually what was the, what did it turn into?

MN: When I left the program, we had nineteen full-time staff members.

LH: My goodness. What kind of budget were you working with then?

MN: The last, I think we were like $400,000 dollars. We were near half a million. We were near three quarters of a million. I can't remember which.

LH: Boy, that's quite a jump from $250. [Laughs]

MN: Yeah, it was. In fact, I got to the point where I really was a proposal writer. I got to feeling confident about writing proposals and any time there was a proposal close to multicultural, I write for it, almost like just wonder how far you can push it almost. [Laughs] And we got a couple of prestigious proposals. So we were running a three ring circus. We did curriculum development, we did teacher development, we did direct service. And then we started going to other districts. People were saying, "Can you bring your program and explain it to us at our district?" So we did a lot of -- in fact, we tried to make enough money to, and we got a lot of federal funding so we went to federal, state, national workshops and all. And we got, our one publication we got a national market. Two of our publication made national market. We were working on the third one trying to get it to junior high school when we finally quit. It finally, I think we got into politics. We're now big enough to where downtown was kind of concerned about controlling us, and I remember the big blowup kind of was: it's okay, you have a wonderful program, but when you put on your teacher training workshops, you have to not talk about racism. Rainbow was a positive, sweet, nice, gentle program. And they said that to talk about the racism doesn't belong in Rainbow. And I got my dander up, "Yes, it does." [Laughs]

And I think that one of the reasons that I even applied for the principalship was trying to use it as a leverage to see if I could get what I wanted for Rainbow, and they refused me for the Rainbow program. So I wrote a letter of resignation. I said, "I resign," in a flamboyant way. [Laughs] In my younger days I was a little bit more boneheaded, and the assistant superintendent said, "No, you can't resign." I said, "I already did. Here's my resignation." And he says, "Well, you applied for the principalship. How is that going to come out?" I said, "I don't know. I don't care." And then they said that I was selected to be the principal so I said, "I'll take the principal." I almost feel a little guilty. I took it on as almost... I didn't think I was going enjoy it. I thought I'll do it for two years and I'll just get out. At least I'll put in my two years and I'll get out. And surprisingly, I had a fun time being a principal. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the kids. I enjoyed the parents. I thought I was close enough that I knew what it was going to be all about, but... I enjoyed it, but during the second principalship I had, I took a sabbatical in between, and I came back. And then the second principalship I had, the job opened up at the state. It was multicultural. It was a little bit less money than what I was making with the... but I have been away from multicultural for so long that there was a state job on multicultural. I says I would really like to try for that job so I tried for that job, and they gave it to me. And I was kind of wondering can I really commute to Olympia every day? [Laughs] I didn't think I was going to make that, but actually I thought that the drive down would drive me crazy, and it really wasn't that bad. I would write my memos in my head as I go down, and I got to Olympia before I was ready to be down there.

LH: So you took advantage of that.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.