Trish Millines Dziko has a question for you. How much do you care about public education and how involved will you become to make it better?
For Trish the answer to both questions is ‘lots’. “Right now I spend most of my time trying to transform public education for kids of color.”
She has many reasons to care. Four of them live in her house. But there are hundreds of thousands more reasons as well. People Trish has never met and never will but whose stories she knows all too well. These are the forgotten children of color, low income kids, girls. The ones who, by virtue of the happenstance of birth have been tracked into low achievement and even lower expectations.
Trish might have been one of those back when she was in high school, but “I got lucky and had some teachers realize that I was put in the wrong track, and they made sure I got to where I needed to go. That meant I had to go to summer school every single year starting my freshman year all the way through college, in order to catch up.”
Catch up she did.
She went to college and got a degree in computer programming, setting in motion a course for her life that would continue to circle back to that realization, that she, among legions of African American girls, had been shown a door that she pushed her way through.
After graduation, Trish moved through a career ladder that wasn’t exactly accommodating to people who looked like her. “It was hard getting a job because people weren’t hiring Black folks no matter how smart they were. Really, the only place where you could get a good job was with a government contracting company.”
That path took her to, among other places, Hughes Aircraft Company. “I realized that was going to be a dead end, working on military style machinery, going from radar systems to missiles.”
She came to Seattle in 1985. After a stint with a start-up that crashed and a time working for herself, she got swept into the Microsoft maelstrom. Before long, she was working the not-atypical Microsoft workweek of 70 – 80 hours as she and her team pushed to get a new product to market.
After leaving that group, Trish got hooked into Microsoft’s outreach efforts to attract more people of color. Trish would do campus visits to the historically Black colleges, “where I would tell them, I could not have made it in Microsoft as my first job. I was not confident enough, but you are.”
Then Trish had a run-in with management about her commitment to grow in the company. “Because I had made a commitment to recruit students of color instead of staying behind to work, the comment was made, ‘you’re killing your career’. My manager at the time didn’t want me to go on this one recruitment trip, so she found another colleague, who was in marketing mind you, not technical, and she says, ‘John can go for you, he’s half Black’.”
Trish made the trip.
Then Microsoft created a job for her, the Senior Diversity Administrator. “It was a tough move – it’s where my heart was but it was hard, because if you’re not a technical person at Microsoft you don’t have much credibility.” During her two years in that position, “I realized this stuff is never going to change unless we change the pipeline.”
In a real way, this notion of feeding the pipeline is one that has guided Trish ever since. Recognizing that it takes a long time, Trish has directed her life to seeding the pastures of change.
She approaches life with the sensibilities of an engineer or a program manager. You can’t expect a quality machine if you use faulty parts. If your expectation is for a quality, diverse work force, the people coming into that system must be quality and diverse. What goes in comes out.
Trish met her partner Jill in 1995, a social worker whose clients were in the middle school behavior disorder classrooms “where there were always lots of African American boys. One day Jill brought a group of her kids over to the campus to meet some of my interns. We took them over on the campus shuttle and they were a little rowdy. And then we walked into this conference room, where there were six interns doing product testing. You could have heard a pin drop. Jill’s clients could not believe they saw these kids, who were just a little bit older, doing this work.
“It was an ah-hah moment. It was the thing that said to me, we need to do more.”
And that’s how TAF, the Technology Access Foundation was born. http://www.techaccess.org/
Jill and Trish left their respective jobs in 1996 to work fulltime for TAF, which:
“…prepares students of color for success in today's technology-driven world. With support from our programs more students in our public schools graduate high school on-time, ready to enter college.”
“I watched over the years how in the technology industry you really don’t see growth among people of color. Girls have had a little easier time. In corporate America you’ll have more women at the top and every rung all the way down. But with people of color, you may see a few at the top but then nobody else until you get all the way to the bottom, so the ladder isn’t full.
“I felt that I could help the generation behind me make their way through this industry a little bit easier. You’ve got to hold your weight once you walk through those doors, but some of those doors have to be opened for you.
Trish wasn’t seeing those doors open, so she committed herself to transforming public education for kids of color, to prepare them for careers at the next Microsoft, or whatever else they might take on.
While others might be intimidated by the enormity of the challenge, Trish seems to draw on her experiences of pushing through year after year of summer school, or successive 80 hour weeks bringing a product to its launch point. It’s not a dispassionate approach – you have to be hugely passionate to set a goal to transform public education– but it is analytical. It’s deliberate. As I listened to her talk about everything from her kids to educational pedagogy, I was struck at how Trish is intentional, about all manner of choices, even about the books she reads. (“I read one at bedtime and one during the day. My day book is usually about some sort of management/work thing. My bedtime book is my ‘social’ book.”)
By their second year (1997) TAF had launched two programs, Connecting Communities of Color (C3) and Technical Teens Internship Program (TTIP). In 2000 they started TechStart, a free K-8 afterschool academic enrichment program for students of color. Then after some time, “we saw that kids were coming to the after school program having had no academic rigor in their day-to-day schooling,” so in 2008 they reached a major milestone in opening their first school, the TAF Academy. http://www.techaccess.org/Programs/TAFAcademy.html
They opened a public school, located in a diverse community in Federal Way (south of Seattle). TAF Academy is a 6th through 12th grade public school “that prepares students for college and life by using project-based learning rooted in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).”
“Our goal is to have 75% kids of color, and 50% girls.” Into their second year, TAF Academy has come close to meeting their goals. “We’re working hard on outreach and marketing, but it’s pretty tough. For so long these kids have been hearing, ‘you can’t do this stuff’, so it’s become internalized.”
I asked Trish if she were concerned that TAF Academy would become popular with white families, taking away places for her target students. After all, it’s a public school where preferences aren’t allowed. “We’re very public about who we’re trying to attract, so only the bravest of the white families will come – those who don’t have issues with their kids being around mostly kids of color.”
TAF plans to open a network of five TAF Academies by 2015. Interestingly, it’s not likely that one will be in Seattle, the state’s largest city with a highly diverse public school population.
Putting it nicely, Trish has some issues with Seattle’s commitment to educate all its children.
Perhaps not ironically, Trish and Jill have moved their kids out of the Seattle Public Schools. They recently moved to Vashon Island, a short ferry ride away. True to form, Jill and Trish made an appointment with school administrators there before moving the family. They liked everything they saw. “The staff was very open and accepting of our family structure and our kids seemed excited to visit the classroom.
“We went to some of the stores in town to see what kind of reaction we would get. People are so nice it’s ridiculous. We decided it was the place for us.”
When I asked what it was like, to work hard creating learning environments where the majority of kids were of color and then to send her own kids to schools that were primarily white, Trish was pensive. “I look at our family and we have a lot of resources and I look at the kids that TAF serves and they don’t. What we are trying to do at TAF is to create the best public school environment for where you live. Not everybody can move to a better school.”
Trish and Jill carry their sense of purpose to the raising of their four kids, three of whom are adopted.
“We’re very intentional. I want my kids to live, so I talk to my boys about how to act if they get stopped by the police, because I want them to come home. Things haven’t changed that much. People tell us, your kids are so good. Well, our kids are good because they have two strong parents that brought them up that way.
“I want my kids to be proud of who they are and I want others to release their stereotypes when they deal with my kids of what they think Black people behave like.
“We have a lot of strong Black men and strong men of color in our family. It’s really important that our boys see responsible men of color as role models. And our daughters, should they end up straight, that’s the kind of man they want to have in their lives. Those kinds of things are important to us, and we have the ability to surround our kids with those kinds of people. That’s not necessarily true for all kids.”
Trish’s kids are part of the pipeline, and like the many other children given a hand by TAF, they’ll be ready to take on whatever they dream of no matter, like the task Trish has set out to accomplish, how ambitious its scope.
Trish’s not-so secrets for How She Does It:
- “I have a lot of good people in my life, starting with my partner. We are very lucky having two adults in our house with one of those being at home at all times. I was raised by a single mom, so I know how tough it is.
- “Two things are important to me – my family and my job. I’m getting better at compartmentalizing so I can let the work go when I come home.
- “We live a very, very modest life. We don’t have a lot of things. So the priority for us is doing things with our kids; making sure we’re there for their activities, parent teacher conferences, and I’m lucky I have a job that allows me to do that.”
- In terms of taking care of herself – “that’s the thing I haven’t squeezed in yet, but I’ve begun to make it a priority.” Trish is recovering from a pulmonary embolism, a condition she learned is common yet rarely discussed. Of those who get it, 20% of people die in the first 90 days. It occurs particularly among people who travel a lot -- too long sitting in one place, they get blood clots in the leg that travel up to the lungs. “Right now I can’t walk for more than about two minutes before I start to get exhausted, but I’m trying to get up to six.”
What book is Trish reading these days?
- Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier
- The Audacity to Win, by David Plouffe
- Stones into Schools, by Greg Mortenson
- First, Break all the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham.
Whom does Trish hope I interview next?
- Stephanie Ellis Smith – also recommended by Donna Moodie, so Stephanie and I are trying to find a time to get together!
- Rebecca Sandinsky, who started Powerful Schools
Want to help Trish and The Technology Access Foundation?
Here’s an event coming soon,
or donate on-line here: http://www.techaccess.org/Contribute/giveonline.html
By Janet Pelz
Janet-
I love these. I missed a few posts and just spent time reading them all at once, catching up on the lives of these amazing women you've interviewed. Not only is it incredibly inspiring to read of their diverse lives and situations, but the way you write is so engaging. Thank you for sharing these inspirational stories. Looking forward to the next post!
Posted by: Suzy Bank-Schamberg | 03/09/2010 at 07:53 PM
Janet! What a fabulous read! So glad that Andie O'Conor (from Colorado) thought to share your blog with us!
Looking forward to reading more about fabulous women changing the world!
Tamara G. Suttle, M.Ed., LPC
http://www.AllThingsPrivatePractice.com
http://www.TamaraSuttle.com
Posted by: Tamara Suttle | 03/08/2010 at 01:22 PM