After the morning prayer at Seattle Preparatory School last Friday, March 17, the school’s popular dean of students, Jim Flies (pronounced “fleece”), came on the public address system and warned students not to ditch class.
The administration had gotten word (thanks to a posting on MySpace) that students were planning a mass walkout. After sending e-mails to teachers to keep the students in class, administrators perhaps sensed that Flies was the only voice capable of dissuading students from leaving. The walkout was organized to protest the school’s decision earlier that week to “reassign” Flies, who’s definitely no longer going to be dean of students. (It is rumored he was offered a gig in the IS department.) The protest was organized via a 24-hour flurry of text messages. “I must have sent 100 texts,” one student says.
At 8:00 a.m., shortly after Flies’s plea that students stay in class, a different voice came over the intercom. It was a student: “The walkout is still on at 8:30!”
Then, at 8:30 a.m., another student came on the PA: “The time is now. Stand up for what you believe in. Walk out if you want to be heard.” (It’s not hard to commandeer the PA. All you have to do, according to the student who made the 8:30 a.m. announcement, is pick up a classroom phone and dial 640.)
At least half of the school’s 600 students left class and gathered in the campus plaza. Despite a demand from the principal—and Flies—that they go back to class, the students stayed there for three hours, making impromptu speeches with a megaphone.
To the students, the decision about Flies’s demotion or “reassignment” was symbolic of a trend at Prep this year under the school’s new principal, Father Michael Tyrrell, to de-prioritize student voices and concerns—and to get tougher about issuing detentions (or JUGs, Judgment Under God). Students believe the administration wants to replace Flies with someone who is more of a bad cop.
Certainly, a student protest about detention slips and an unpopular principal at a private school where tuition is $10,000 a year sounds a little frivolous given the bigger issues looming for youth these days: such as the severe conservative bent of the White House and the three-year anniversary of its war in Iraq. After all, we expect youngsters to provide the most strident and creative opposition to reactionary values and militarism. This was no SNCC lunch-counter sit-in or antiwar SDS campus strike. However, the idealistic and creative impulse to question authority and call grownups on hypocrisy was on full display at Seattle Prep last week—one of Seattle’s highest-profile private schools.
One student says problems began at the start of the school year when the administration tried to institute silly rules—like a new dress code barring kids from wearing clothing that revealed the collarbone. The trend escalated beyond irksome rules, however, into a widespread sense among students that student opinion simply didn’t matter to the administration. This jarred a student body that is immersed in the Jesuit ideals of community and acting justly—and more important, “learning critical skills to evaluate and question”—according to a supportive parent who wanted to remain anonymous.
The purpose of the rebellion is hard for the teens to articulate, however. A junior who took a lead role, the one who made the 8:30 a.m. announcement, says: “It’s supposed to be a whole community—the administration, teachers, and students. But the administration just does things in secret. Random decisions come down. It’s like the FBI or something.”
It’s in this setting that Flies’s “reassignment” became a flash point. “We are writing to express our support of Jim Flies as dean of students at Seattle Preparatory School,” a petition signed by just over 400 students and presented to the board of trustees last week read. “He is the one administrator students feel comfortable talking to. Mr. Flies promotes school spirit and unity and includes the students as important team members.”
During a student assembly on Tuesday, as the board of trustees was reportedly meeting to discuss Flies’s status, 400 students strung neon orange and green index cards emblazoned with Mr. Flies’s name around their necks. The cards also displayed either a quote from Seattle Prep’s mission statement—like, “Provide a learning environment in which all members are treated with dignity and respect”—or one of the Jesuit proverbs from the school handbook, such as, “choose those apostolates that will influence those who have the most influence on others.” The students believed the sayings reflected the hypocrisy of the administration’s decision to remove Flies as dean of students. “We wanted to show that he stands for everything Prep should stand for,” says one of the two seniors who stayed up the previous night printing out the quotes and pasting them onto the neon cards.
During Friday’s walkout, student speakers demanded that Father Tyrrell come out and talk to the crowd. When Tyrrell came out and told the students to go back inside, he was met with a resounding unison of “no.” According to students, he eventually met with a group of about five juniors who identified themselves as the leaders of the walkout. About two hours later, students report, the juniors said Father Tyrrell had committed to further dialogue about honoring and respecting student concerns.
The students returned to class.
“There was a JUG list for about 400 kids,” one student reports. “The JUG list was about 15 pages long,” says another.
Reacting to the harsh reaction of some teachers, one senior who helped organize the protests says,”It’s really hypocritical. For the past four years I’ve been told to stand up for what I believe in. And the minute I do, there’s this backlash.”
However, Tyrrell announced later that the students who took part in the walkout did not have detention.
Flies did not return calls for this story. Tyrrell declined to comment. Tyrrell did send a letter to parents confirming Flies’s dismissal from the Office of Student Life and a “general restructuring.”
