Ferris crises make it ripe for labeling

Ten years ago, during an interview with Spokane history buffs, an elderly man told me that Ferris High School was built in a single-story design and spread out over a large campus so that if a plane ever crashed into the school, it wouldn’t destroy everything and everyone.

He said that in the late 1950s, a few years before construction began on Ferris, an airplane had demolished a multistory school in another city, and this was the impetus for the Ferris design. This week I looked at our Ferris newspaper clip file from that era to see if this explanation appeared anywhere. It didn’t.

There was a vague reference to Ferris being designed with safety in mind, but the campus-style architecture was chosen mostly because it was trendy at the time.

No airplane has demolished the school, though writing those words makes me skittish. Maybe that’s next. The school has experienced a series of crises that make the Old Testament’s Job look like a lottery winner. I won’t list all these crises for you, except for the worst one – Jacob D. Carr, 14, has been charged with attempted murder. Police say he packed a gun onto school grounds, intending to shoot his former English teacher.

If there is something rotten at the core of Ferris causing these crises, then students, parents and teachers shouldn’t wait for administrators to ferret it out. As Hopi Indian elders once advised: “Know your garden. And do not look outside yourself for your leader.”

But now that I’m done preaching, I admit to this: I feel sorry for Ferris.

We pigeonhole our schools so easily here, and the schools get stuck in these holes for years. The negative incidents might be building an unattractive pigeonhole that Ferris is about to be dropped into. This pigeonholing has gone on forever.

During the early ‘70s, when I was in high school in Spokane, Ferris was known as the school for rich South Hill kids. Lewis and Clark – now the “it” school, by the way – was for poor, inner city kids. North Central and Rogers were for poorer North Side kids, while Shadle Park was for the North Side kids from nouveau riche families.

I attended Marycliff – the school for middle-class and average-looking Catholic girls – and we competed with Holy Names – the school for wealthy and beautiful Catholic girls – and we dated guys from Gonzaga Prep – the school with jocks who drank too much on the weekends.

Now, if you attended any of the above schools in the ‘70s, I hope you felt defensive while reading these labels. They were unfair and incomplete then, just as the current labels at our Inland Northwest high schools – fill in the blanks here – are unfair and incomplete now.

Allow me to quote once again in this space the wise theologian Margaret Guenther, who said: “When I label, I limit.”

Unfortunately, it is human nature to negatively label institutions, thereby limiting the individuals who work in them.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, my very-out-in-public job as one of the interactive editors coincided with the country’s growing disgust with mainstream media and the River Park Square garage debacle. Need I say more?

Listening was part of my job, so I didn’t mind the criticism. But one evening I drove an acquaintance home from a non-work function. Her live-in man was in a fighting mood. Here’s a description of our encounter from a work journal I kept in 1998 as part of an interactive journalism project.

She introduces us and the roar begins. (The man) says: “That is the worst newspaper of any city I’ve lived in and I’ve lived in five! Who checks your grammar and spelling? Fifth-graders?

I say, “I’m proud of the paper.” I walk out the door.

To the hard-working teachers and students at Ferris, the majority not involved in the latest crises, I pass on to you what helps when a metaphorical plane crashes into your institution. Continue to do your jobs well and with pride. If unfairly attacked, stand tall and walk away.