What’s this kid Thinking?
By Tom Peterson
Have you ever met Calvin Evans?
If you have, you know one thing.
He’s curious.
Like, really curious.
And those questions running through his brain, well, they ran him into an interesting wrinkle recently at The Dalles High School.
You see, the 15-year-old sophomore takes a lot of polls.
Not because he has to.
Nope, because he likes to.
He likes to figure out how people think. The graduate of Mosier School said the big population at TDHS piqued his interest as there were so many people to meet and understand compared with his elementary and middle school years.
So, at lunch, he takes polls.
And this is where it gets interesting.
He recently asked 88 students how they felt about their overall high school experience - education, relationships, quality - just generally how they felt about high school.
He asked students to rate it between 1 and 10.
Low and behold, students came back with an average of 8.8.
Well, that’s pretty good, right?
You bet it is.
But during the polling, Calvin noticed something else. Students started to think about the school buildings and infrastructure.
And the sun dropped.
“It was a drastic change in the scoring,” Calvin said, noting students changed their tune when their thinking went from people in the school to the physical structure around them.
“It drove the scores down 4 to 5 points each,” Calvin said.
He said students reported water from fountains tasting bad and they had to bring their own drinking water. Classrooms were either too hot or to cold because the boiler system was difficult to regulate and air conditioning was weak at best. Halls are packed. Kitchen facilities were subpar.
“It was clear. We need a new school,” Calvin said.
Calvin’s mom, Davina Craig, said her daughter Isabella graduated TDHS two years ago.
And Isabella said she had two points to make about the current high school when the discussion around infrastructure came up.
TDHS students go to other schools and see how nice other high school campuses are and wonder why The Dalles can’t have the same. And when students visited TDHS, she as a student was “embarrassed.”
Calvin noted long delays in opening basic Google Docs at the school, noting a recent test required him to open a document and write a short essay. But he lost 5 of the 15 minutes to take the test to just getting the program to open.
Hmm…
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“It’s a good school,” Calvin said. “It’s the building itself that’s the problem.”
Calvin is continuing to take his polls.
“We’re all pretty much the same,” he said about his peers. “Our value systems are set. People get caught up in the small things. But mostly were all in agreement.
“You can do more to help people if you gain an understanding about other people’s situations,” he added. “If people understood each other and worked together, maybe we could have got a new school a long time ago.”
