Hannah Wallace, Author at Sunnyside Neighborhood Association

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

A Q&A with Mia Pisano, Founder/Teacher at The Understory preschool

Mia Pisano has lived in Sunnyside since 1998. After two years at Reed and another two at Evergreen (with years off in between to travel), she was an elementary school teacher and then worked in early childhood education at Garden’s Noise preschool. A friend who was looking for a preschool for her granddaughter urged Pisano to open her own. She finally did just that, opening The Understory in 2008 in her own Sunnyside home. Since then, it’s been a beloved neighborhood preschool for kids 3- Kindergarten age. We met in Pisano’s glorious backyard, which is full of pear, persimmon, and pawpaw trees, and one enormous pumpkin. We spoke about her teaching philosophy, the persistence of potholes on Salmon Street, and the unique pleasures of Sunnyside.

How long have you lived in Sunnyside?

Mia: I first came to Portland in the mid 80s to go to college. I came out from the East Coast, wandered around the western United States doing this and that, and then I was in Albuquerque, teaching. I came back here in 1998, and I started my school, the Understory, in the Fall of 2008.

How many students on average do you have every year?

Mia: Eight is the sweet spot. There’s a critical mass of how many children can become a community together. A group that’s smaller than five is more like a family. Of course, a family is a beautiful thing. But one of the points of coming to school is to start to become part of a slightly larger community of people you don’t live with. When there are eight children, there’s enough diversity of personalities and ideas and experiences that their imaginative play can flourish.

Do they tend to be mostly people from Sunnyside or surrounding neighborhoods?

Mia: I’ve had students from all over the city. The majority come from a couple-mile radius. I’ve had the children and grandchildren of quite a number of Sunnyside school teachers as my students, which has been really lovely. A lot of my students go on to Sunnyside or to Richmond.

How do people hear about it?

Mia: In my first five years, I tried every way that I could stand of trying to market myself. My program is so small and so specific that I was not connecting with people that way. But after a couple of years, word of mouth spread. People are connecting me with their friends who already know if it feels like a good fit.

Do you have a particular teaching philosophy or method?

Mia: There are three really well-known pedagogies: Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia. I’m not teaching in any of those. However, all of those pedagogies have a shared underlying view of early childhood as a unique and valuable time, and all of those pedagogies share a belief in the integrity of the young child and of the value of an early childhood setting that is beautiful, well ordered, enriching, calm, and well-tended by adults who have high regard for young children and who can hold that experience with warm confidence.

Jean Piaget described how young children develop through predictable sequences, and how the quality of the environment can really have a big impact on how those qualities develop in children. I have developed my program to give children a space to develop their capacities to their fullest possible expression. Children come pre-loaded with incredible capacities. What I can see more and more clearly with every year is that every child is born absolutely brilliant. It can be really hard for them to maintain and develop that brilliance in a world that has a lot of mismatches with not just children’s but all people’s basic needs.

What do you like about Sunnyside?

Mia: I like the obvious things. I like that it is so walkable. I also really love that in Sunnyside there’s a lot of appreciation for doing things for the pleasure of doing them, rather than having them for the pleasure of having them. Compared to other places, there is comparatively less cultural value placed on visible status symbols than there is on a different kind of quality of life–going slower, stopping to talk to the neighbors, putting out bowls of water for the dogs. Creating a stick library for the dogs. Stopping at your neighbor’s yard sale when you don’t need anything from a yard sale just to talk to your neighbor. I hypothesize the origin is that into the ‘90s, property prices in this area were still lower than in a lot of other parts of the city, and so a group of creative, scrappy, curious, young people could rent a house, and then maybe eventually buy a house. When [there are] scrappy, creative young people and older people and all ages of people—people for whom creativity, social issues, community care are more a priority than climbing up some imagined social ladder over time, it really changes the culture of a neighborhood. I love that.

If you had to say that there was something that needed improvement in Sunnyside, what would it be?

Mia: Most things that could be better in Sunnyside don’t originate from root causes in Sunnyside or Portland or Oregon; you have to go so far upstream to find the root causes of them that it can be pretty defeating to try to focus on those.

Portland has put a lot into creating bicycle transportation infrastructure. But putting in infrastructure is one piece, maintaining infrastructure and continuing education about how we exist together in the street grid with motorized and non-motorized transportation [is another]. Southeast Salmon Street was the city’s flagship neighborhood greenway, and I don’t ride my city bike on Salmon Street anymore. I ride a mountain bike because of the potholes. If you bike around the city, the bike lanes, the striping is not maintained. The bollards are not maintained. They’re not swept. The storm drains aren’t cleaned. The bike lanes are full of glass. There’s overhanging branches. The signage is missing. It would be a big neighborhood improvement for those maintenance and repair needs to be consistently implemented.

News from the Vice President

Happy fall! As I write this in late August, the weather has already changed—we’ve had some overcast days and the cooler weather is definitely welcome. I hope you all had relaxing summers and are ready to get back to school and busy schedules!

We had a fabulous turn-out for the repainting of the Sunnyside Piazza in August. Thanks to all of you who came out for the fun day of painting and getting to know your neighbors—and catching up with neighbors who you haven’t seen in a long time. I was pleased to run into several familiar faces—including our city council representative Tiffany Koyama Lane.

Thanks to all the businesses who donated food to keep us going—from Grand Central Bakery (delicious fresh pastries!) and Old Friends (strong coffee!) to Straight from New York Pizza and Nate’s Oatmeal Cookies. Also thanks to Laughing Planet for refreshing lemonade and iced tea and to Will Grimm at First Forty Feet, who donated snacks. City Repair did an awesome job of keeping us organized and adhering to the paint-by-number pattern so we knew which colors to paint which petals.

Special thanks to SNA Board Member Tim Quayle, who was the project manager of this fantastic community event. He kept us focused, applied for the funding for the paint and other supplies, and solicited donations from local restaurants and cafes. We couldn’t have made this happen without his leadership!

The Sunnyside Piazza was one of City Repair’s first “place-making” projects—it was first painted by local residents in 2000, without the city’s permission! Since then many other neighborhoods across Portland and across the country have replicated this idea. There’s even an academic paper written about our piazza—Google it.

Our first General Meeting of the fall is on Sept. 10th at 7 p.m. We’ll be hearing from Molly Wallace, restorative justice facilitator at Lutheran Community Services Northwest who will be presenting on the free restorative justice services that LCSNW offers to neighborhoods. We may also have one of our City Council members at the meeting; stay tuned to our social media channels to find out who it will be.

We hope to see you there!

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

Q&A with Jeremy Thomas, Sunnyside Environmental School 4th grade teacher

Jeremy Thomas has been a teacher at Sunnyside Environmental School (SES) for 17 years. Currently, he teaches fourth grade, which he loves. Though he doesn’t live in Sunnyside, he and his wife, Amy, and daughter, Angela live just a few miles away in Rose City Park (His other daughter, Olivia, will be a sophomore at Willamette University this fall.) We talked about the history of SES, what he loves about being a teacher, and why Sunnyside is such a special neighborhood to work in.

How has Sunnyside Environmental School changed over time?

Jeremy: When I started, there were more kids who were from outside the neighborhood who had been lotteried in. Over the years it became more neighborhood kids. Now it’s back to a lot of kids who lottery in.

For a while there was a bit of a baby boom in the neighborhood. All of a sudden, in the 2010s there weren’t very many lottery slots. It’s an interesting school, in that it is a neighborhood school and it’s a “focus option” school. So for some kids, it’s like, “This is just my school because I live right down the street.” And then there’s other kids who sought out this school specifically.

Remind me of the history of SES?

Jeremy: It started out as the environmental middle school in 1995 and it was located in the Abernathy neighborhood. They eventually outgrew that space around 2004 and “Environmental Middle School” (as it was then called) was so small that the district was actually considering closing it. PPS said, “You can move into Sunnyside, but you have to be able to serve the
neighborhood and whatever extra slots you have, you can lottery those.” And when it became a K-8.

Which grade do you prefer teaching?

Jeremy: I taught third grade first—for 10 years, and then I’ve done seven years of fourth.

I think third, fourth and fifth—that’s my area. I like those middle ages. I think I like fourth grade more. At first I just loved third grade. I was like, “I never want to leave third grade.” And then one of the fourth grade teachers was leaving, and my principal at the time said, “You could just take your class into fourth grade.” And now I love fourth grade. I love the curriculum. They’re just a little older, so they have a little bit more of the basic skills down.

What’s your favorite part about being a teacher?

Jeremy: Gosh – so many things. I think my favorite part of teaching is the community-building that happens. It’s hard work, it’s messy work, building a community and facilitating the growth of a community. But it’s those relationships and the community-building that I find the most rewarding as a teacher.

I also really love the cyclical nature of it. Before I was a teacher I worked for the Social Security Administration and I was basically doing the same things in December that I was doing in July; the same thing in October that I was doing in March. I love that in school, there’s a different feel. When the school year starts in September, there’s a certain energy, and then there’s a curricular flow that I take throughout the year. Winter has its feel, and spring has its feel, and then you get to summer; there’s not working over the summer, and then it starts over again. And I like that, not doing the same thing.

Speaking of seasons, remind me what events happen in the fall?

Jeremy: Every October we have a big Harvest Fair. It’s both a curricular showcase for the younger grades and a celebration of community. I don’t know if you’ve attended one before but it’s a little carnival – all kinds of little events, where the kids buy tickets and use the tickets to do different activities. There’s even a cake walk!

And there’s a dunk tank?

Which I’ve been in many times!

What about winter events?

Jeremy: In the winter there is an event called the Riparian Festival. It used to be every December, but we’ve now moved it to January. That one is more curriculum-focused. It’s for the 3rd-8th grade, where you go from room to room in the school and see all the stuff that kids have been learning over the course of the year. In the spring we do something called “student-led conferences,” where the students lead their parents on a conference of what they’ve been learning and how they’ve grown over the year.

I’ve heard that you also mentor other teachers. Is that something that you’ve always done?

Jeremy: My first student teacher is now the other fourth grade teacher, Asa Gervich. It was funny, because when I first started teaching at SES, I was only in my fourth year of teaching so I was still kind of new. Sarah Taylor—she was the founder of the school—she was a big advocate of teachers having student teachers, and having lots of trainees and interns in the school building. Not only did that provide more people to do a lot, but it also got new people who were here who have been trained at SES specifically. That has been helpful as other teachers have retired.

So my first year there, she asked, “Do you want a student teacher?” And I was like, “I’m still new. I’ve never taught third grade before. No, I cannot take on a student teacher.” She said okay. And then, in the middle of the year, she cornered me in the office with this man that she was with and she said, “This is Asa and he’s looking for a classroom to observe and I thought yours would be perfect.” And, I couldn’t say no.

He came in to observe and he loved it. He was thinking of becoming a teacher. So when he decided to become a teacher, he worked in my room. And now we teach the same grade, which is kind of the full circle.

I’ve probably had about eight student teachers over my time at SES. I enjoy working with younger, newer teachers, because I believe it’s a really important profession and job, and I want to encourage people in learning how to do this job.

SES is a really great place to learn how to be a teacher. There are so many schools where the curriculum is very canned. We create so much of our own curriculum here, which is what I was taught when I was in college—and what many are taught in grad school. At Sunnyside, you get an opportunity to do that. And that’s not the case at every school.

What’s your favorite thing about Sunnyside as a neighborhood?

Jeremy: I just love how vibrant Sunnyside is. There’s so much life! And you’ve got so many small businesses. Throughout my years of teaching at SES, I’ve been able to develop relationships with some of the businesses. When I taught third grade, we did a whole neighborhood storyline and we went into different businesses and interviewed people.

It’s also a bike-friendly neighborhood. I like the fact that we are on Salmon Street, and we do a whole unit on salmon, you know? And I just love that it’s an old neighborhood, so there’s so much history there.

There are certain neighborhoods in Portland and definitely in the U.S., where you walk around and can’t get a sense of the place. There’s a sameness to them. Sunnyside is so unique—it definitely has its own feel.

Finally, it’s a very engaged neighborhood. When I first started teaching at Sunnyside, my wife got a horrible case of pneumonia, and ended up being hospitalized for nine days. And this was within three weeks of me starting at Sunnyside in 2008. At the time, Olivia was two and our younger daughter was six months old. So here I have a six month old and a two year old, my wife’s in the hospital, and I’m starting this new job at Sunnyside. The way the community rallied was really amazing. Without my asking, people started delivering food, saying they could watch the kids. There was a parent who was a naturopath, and when my wife got out of the hospital, she came by with all these herbs. That happens throughout my time at Sunnyside. It’s not just Sunnyside Environmental School—it’s the neighborhood as well. I’ve seen just such a community feel in that neighborhood. Probably one of the best examples of that is the Sunnyside Piazza, which has always been such an important landmark in the neighborhood that represents people coming together.

Anything about SES that you wish you could change?

Jeremy: Sometimes I wish we had more space. We’re bounded in that city block. Sometimes we have very ambitious goals when it comes to gardening and what we would like to do with the space.