The educator who changed my life

Evelyn Taylor 1923 - 2010

I remember the day I walked into the Principal's Office at North Shoreview Elementary School with my San Mateo Leadership class and met Evelyn Taylor. It was a cold day in February, 1992, and I was not at all ready professionally to grasp what I was about to learn.

Evelyn was a force of nature and had the immediate commanding presence of a powerful leader and a teacher with a heart of gold. But before I go on, a little about where I was coming from in 1992 and years before.

As a youth, I grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York on a slightly isolated property that had been in the family for a long time. My friends in elementary and high school were all white with the exception of Hilton Clark, my best buddy in those days. He was, I think, the only black kid in our school system in the 50's.

I went to college at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and I do not remember a single student of color in my four years there. I did not cut the widest social swath, but that is my honest memory through graduation in June, 1961.

My first teaching gig was at The Trinity-Pauling Boarding School in Pauling, NY., and I have the same memory of no kids of color but lots of Canadians who could play hockey like pros!

Before arriving at Crystal Springs Uplands, I had three more important stops along the way: a Master's Degree in Spanish in Madrid from Middlebury College, a four year stint at Dickinson College and three years completing Ph.D Spanish course work at the University of Arizona. None boasted students of color!

I arrived in Hillsborough, CA in late summer 1976 and began my now 35-year-long career at what was Crystal Springs School for Girls. The girls school was a gem and along with Dick Loveland and Jim Garrison, the other two men on campus, we plodded along doing our best to educate the mostly white young ladies. Boys began arriving in the fall of '77, but our racial mixture was tilted toward white students for many more years. (Parenthetically, I am very proud to tell you that 48% of our current student population self identify as "other than white.")

The point of this rambling is to help prepare you for my shock when I came upon a small school on the East side of the Bayshore Freeway that was populated mostly by kids of color-and many "under-served"kids with desperate needs. Evelyn had a big jar of peanut butter and a loaf of Wonder Bread on her book shelf because, "Some of my kids don't get enough to eat." In the corner she had a large cardboard box of used clothing because, "Some of my kids don't have enough clothes to wear to school." She took us to visit a few classes on that memorable Leadership Education Day, and I was blown away by the kids and the frustration some of them had with their classwork.

On the way home I had a flood of images of the day, and all I could think of was what an incredible school we had with hot chocolate at snack, wonderful teachers and students with nice clothes. I had a significant, career changing epiphany!

I determined to try to help a few of Evelyn's kids, and as a direct result of meeting her, I began the summer outreach classes known as SummerQuest, Gateway and currently, Peninsula Bridge. www.peninsulabridge.org. I am proud to say that for the past 22 years, CSUS has been the summer home to hundreds and hundreds of under-served public school students who have directly benefited from our healthy food and superb summer school faculty.

The outreach to those kids twenty years ago was CSUS' first foray into the exciting realm of "public purpose," a topic which I will expand upon in later blogs.

Thank you, Evelyn Taylor, for your dedication, inspiration and total love for your kids.