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SO: How long did you work for the Minneapolis Public Schools?

SS: I worked for them until 1995. I came back here in 1984, so that's eleven years there and then I had worked for them two years before I went to Japan so thirteen years in all is what I worked for them. But even after I finished in the classroom I got called back to do some work in the, what they called the Research and Evaluation and Assessment Department where they did a lot of the testing, and they would send me out to different schools to do different kinds of tests with different classrooms. And I organized what they called the... I think it's called the NAEP Test -- the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- the one that's mandated by Congress. And I went to eight or ten schools in the district to test for that and then towards the end I ended up helping Edison High School with all the tests that have to do with the No Child Left Behind Law. So I did a lot of part-time work for them up until two years ago. So quite a few years after I finished working in the classroom.

SO: Was that full-time?

SS: Well, no, it was part-time. It was always seasonal work because the testing season is only several months out of the year.

SO: And during your time as a teacher and when you were testing, you must have seen a big change in the students.

SS: Oh very much so. I saw changes taking place of course during my own final years of teaching, especially with the student population, how it was really changing -- much more diverse, much more students of color. Of course in the inner city we have easily 35, 40 percent, and in some schools 75, 85 percent students of color. We saw the wave of immigration of the Southeast Asian families and then the Hmong families and then lately the African families, like from Somalia or other regions of Africa. So it wasn't unusual for our students to have maybe sixteen to twenty different languages being spoken at home. And the kids would come to school and have to use English. But in a way I was used to that because the international school that I taught in in Tokyo had students from sixty different countries. Because many of them were children of embassy families or of course their fathers were there for business or working for different companies. So it was something that I enjoyed and I was used to that.

SO: Did you ever have any problems in the classroom because you were Japanese American?

SS: I never sensed any kind of problem in the fact that I was Japanese. Not at all.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.