| Notes |
Brian Benzel, the superintendent of the Edmonds school district, provided the link to the alliance. Benzel had chaired a statewide task force on "Schools for the 21st Century" under Gov. Booth Gardner. The grants competition provided seed money for innovative schools, with the hope that their ideas would be widely replicated.
In 1986, the year the Carnegie report was published, Gardner invited Tucker to Washington State for a meeting about the report and its implications for the state. When Tucker formed the alliance in 1989, Gardner signed on, and Benzel became the state's representative to the group.
Benzel had moved to Edmonds the year before, where he had begun meeting with his neighboring superintendents over breakfast. All of them were new to their jobs and discovered they were facing many of the same challenges. When the alliance applied for NASDC funding in 1991 and laid out its five design tasks, Benzel recalls, "the framework was highly aligned with what we were already doing. It subsequently has fit so well with all of our strategic efforts that it's fully integrated."
Today, the four districts pool resources, share expertise, coordinate their work on the alliance tasks, and send teachers to each other's districts for training. "What I see happening with this regional piece is an incredible leveraging of thought," says Mary Ann Kendall Mitchell, the superintendent of the Shoreline school district. "Collaboration produces speed."
What the alliance has provided, she says, is a framework. "We decided to participate in the alliance because the five design tasks were so congruent with the goals that we had set in our district plan," says Mitchell. "They were probably a better explanation of what we were trying to do and took us more in depth. To me, it seemed like we would be looking a gift horse in the mouth if we didn't go for it." |