Sunnyside Neighborhood Association

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.