It’s Founders Day season, a time to commemorate the eight teachers who started UPrep and reflect on their contributions. In early 1975, the Seattle Public Schools District suffered from reductions in force, which laid off any teacher who worked nine years or less, according to co-founder Terry Nelson Froggatt. This included teachers at Roosevelt High School, seven of whom became the founders of UPrep: Roger Bass, Terry Nelson Froggatt, Pat Landy, John Makinen, Christine Petersen, Mary Jane Seymour and Aileen Welgan.
In planning, co-founder John Makinen, a math and history teacher, business manager, and WWII veteran, posed the question, “What’s best for the students?”
The founders chose to answer this with integrity, and hope this value remains. Froggatt, a math teacher, remains appreciative of the group, but described the collaboration as a “learning process.”
“The biggest challenge, I really feel that we as founders were all very different people,” Froggatt said. “The fact that we could come together, and sometimes talked issues to death, I think, ended up being the best.”
In the fall of 1975, Bass, an English teacher and the second Head of School, Seymour, a science teacher, and Welgan, an English teacher were rehired at Roosevelt. There, Bass raised the question: “Could we possibly start our own school?” Because of SPS’s job instability, the founders wanted teachers and administrators to work together, and essentially be one and the same, to amplify teachers’ voices and job concerns.
“We always taught, and we always administered,” co-founder Pat Landy said. “Who knows best what should happen in a school than the teachers who are in the classroom with the students?”
According to Landy, a French and Spanish teacher, every UPrep head of school has had teaching experience. That includes current Head of School Ronnie Codrington-Cazeau.
“I was a history teacher, and I remember when I started here, teachers really bought into that,” Codrington-Cazeau said. “They respected the fact that I started off as a teacher.”
Cathy Faulkner (’84) started in UPrep in its third school year as a seventh grader in 1978. She came to UPrep after struggling academically at her previous school. Petersen, an English teacher who also worked in admissions and helped develop the library, interviewed Faulkner as a sixth grader.
“I found it really interesting that I was having a conversation with an adult, and it wasn’t about my failure, but about my potential and the teacher’s responsibility in that journey,” Faulkner said. “She flipped education upside down for me just in that statement. And that definitely changed my road going forward.”
Before UPrep opened in 1976, the only independent schools in the area were Lakeside, Bush and Overlake, according to Landy. All other private schools were religious. A place like UPrep was “foreign to the public.” In order to fund the school, the founders gathered their “savings, investments and stocks and bonds,” according to Seymour in a 1976 article. They built furniture themselves, according to Bass. The eight founders also helped to finance the “science and activity building” according to a 1979 article.
UPrep was “building the school in real time” according to Faulkner.
She recalls the founders often had “four or five job titles,” and they prioritized initiative, hard work and self advocacy.
She is grateful to have seen their dream unfold.
“I think of them every day,” Faulkner said. “My hope for the current student body and those that follow is just take a little time and marinate in the fact you’re in something very unique that was designed with the utmost of care.”
Both Landy and Froggatt serve on the board. Codrington-Cazeau describes the founders as dreamers.
“I have so much respect for our founders. I could not have imagined doing what they did 50 years ago. They gave up everything to start this school,” Codrington-Cazeau said. “I think they’re amazing people, and that’s why we will always have a place for them at our school.”
In UPrep’s 50th year, the founders are grateful the school stands strong.
“I don’t know that we had a moment, to be honest, to think about what the school had become,” Landy said. “We were hopeful if we made it another year and then another year, and we just kept making it. It was wonderful, and it still is.”
