ON HOW HE HIRED TEACHERS: David Forbes: The faculty came to me. The first was a woman who had just retired from teaching for many years in public schools in Portland, Oregon, Georgia Dyer. Georgia wanted to keep teaching; she was only maybe 55 years old or something, but she was tired of Portland. So I hired Georgia to be our first, fourth and fifth grade teacher. And with her came, of course, Shadow, the famous dog that was the feistiest dog you ever knew. When I hired teachers, I looked them in the eye and I challenged them to say why they should be a teacher in my school and what really excited them. And if I didn’t see a spark in them, I didn’t want to hire them. The result was a very feisty kind of faculty. We used to say, if our faculty is not at war, there’s something going wrong here. I didn’t get to hire teachers with credentials—I couldn’t afford them. But I hired teachers that were all very well educated and who believed strongly in broad education. I hired people who were individualists and who had to love kids and love education. I think that set the tone for the School in many ways.
ON THE EARLY STUDENT BODY AT CATHEDRAL: David Forbes: The idea was never the Cathedral School would take kids that other schools wouldn’t take. We would take kids that wanted to come, but we could also take kids that other schools might not want to take the time to work with. And the result was that we had a more eclectic student body. And the diversity which you talk about all the time now was born in the days after the founding of our School, especially economic diversity in our case, but also racial diversity and equity and inclusion. We had a lot to learn, but from the very start that was part of Cathedral’s vision. I always felt that it was important that our kids all not come to us as nicely well-developed persons. We were prepared to take on some kids who needed the social context of a school like Cathedral, so sometimes we would take kids that really would struggle to be at the school for a while. But they often ended up being the most promising graduates, in my opinion, because they got the most out of the school. I think of five or six students off the top of my head who really succeeded, and they succeeded at Cathedral because of the permission of the school and the faculty to take on a certain proportion of kids like that.
“A SCHOOL IS AN ORGANIC ORGANISM, AN INSTITUTION. IT’S KIDS, IT’S PARENTS, IT’S FACULTY, IT’S TRUSTEES, IT’S FRIENDS. SO THIS IS A LIVING ORGANISM AND IT’S A COMMUNITY.”
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