Wednesday, Sep. 09, 2009

Operation Motivation once housed some Pasco High students

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

When the Ask the Editors blog about Pasco having only one high school until this fall ran in the print version of the Herald, it prompted several calls and e-mails.

Among them was a message from John L. Nestor, a 1971 Pasco High graduate, who dug out information from his high school days about Operation Motivation, a predecessor of today’s alternative high school in Pasco, New Horizons.

Nestor said his records show Operation Motivation had about 70 students, who took many vocational and work-centered courses. They could receive on the job training and a salary while attending the school, which claimed to offer “equal opportunity” to all students and “no racial problems,” according to school materials.

Nestor also said the students graduated from Pasco High when they received their diplomas, despite attending classes at the old Whittier School on Pasco’s east side.

Until 1965, Whittier had housed an elementary school, which in its final year had 116 black students and only 15 white students. It was closed because then-Superintendent Lewis Ferrari said, “Economically it was not feasible to keep the school open for 131 students.”

Nestor’s information seems to confirm my earlier conclusion that a reader’s comment that Pasco had an Ainsworth High School that was segregated was wrong. The reader likely was partly correct in his comment that it was turned into an alternative high school, because apparently that’s what Operation Motivation functioned as.

Another reader noted that Pasco has long had its alternative school, New Horizons High School, and felt I should have included it. I did not, because it’s a very different kind of operation than a traditional high school. New Horizons, for example, shares a campus with Discovery Alternative Middle School, which was established in 1998, and their total number of students is only about 200.

w Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com

Stay updated with the latest news from the Tri-City Herald with an RSS feed: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/1309/story/97842.html