杰西卡·汉森 ’86 helps launch a new school to unleash the voices of young women.

丹尼尔·利普曼(Daniel Lippman) 2008年著

86岁的杰西卡·汉森血液里流淌着教育的气息. 她的祖母是一名小学教师, 她的母亲是一名教师助理, 她的姨妈是一名教师, 太. But nothing they faced prepared Hanson in her mission to launch an allgirls high school to help teenagers navigate a world full of new challenges—including often-toxic social media that fuels online bullying and body image issues.

The crisis of teenage girls helped inspire Hanson to co-found the Hatch School in Seattle, WA, in 2022. 一小群九年级学生在这所新学校上学, and its leaders hope to increase enrollment in the coming years.

“We wanted to create a place where students could really take a step back, 为自己做出最好的选择, 并学会在他们的生活中找到平衡,汉森说. “We really wanted to create an institution where students could learn to make change in their environments, 在他们的家庭里, 在他们的社区，以及如何拥有自己的声音, 因为她们的声音非常强烈.”

Hanson says the “idea that you need to be excellent or perfect at everything is an unsustainable model,“尤其是对女孩来说。. “Our goal is to help kids figure out how they can be really amazing at the things that are important to them. And simultaneously maybe not worry so much about trying to be excellent at the things that aren’t as important to them.”

Hatch is a small school with three fulltime teachers, so students learn a lot from each other. 他们来自不同的背景, 包括将成为第一代大学生的女孩, 出生在不同的国家, 或者说不同的语言.

“One of our goals is to help provide an excellent college prep education to students who are furthest from educational justice,”她说。.

Because it’s a nonprofit startup, Hatch doesn’t have a deluxe campus like other private schools. They rent space from a nonprofit in downtown Seattle since “commercial real estate in Seattle is a fullcontact sport,汉森开玩笑说。. But she has been entrepreneurial in looking for ways for her students to learn without breaking the bank. They partner with a local fine arts center for their art program, 在附近的健身房进行力量训练, and work with a school in Guatemala for online Spanish classes, 他们在哪里学习那个国家的历史和文化.

Hanson is also reimagining how tuition works using a concept called “family individualized tuition.” 父母 pay for their student’s enrollment based on how much they can actually afford instead of feeling stressed by the high costs. The school received several significant seed money grants from private donors and is funded primarily by philanthropic giving. But the struggle to make sure they have enough money to keep the lights on “is one of the biggest challenges we face,汉森指出. “我们正在建造一架全新的飞机，并随时随地飞行.”

与welcome新2登录的持续连接

Besides her family, Hanson traces her interest in education to the time she spent at welcome新2登录. She had gone to public school and didn’t know if she could fit in at a boarding school. “My mother tells me that in October I wanted to leave and go home, 我一点都不记得了, 但她说我得待到感恩节,汉森说. 她找到了自己的立足点和朋友圈, and just as importantly came to love spending time in the science lab under the tutelage of biology instructor Jim Morrill P’87,’89.

“My experience at welcome新2登录 is filled with those small moments where my friends helped me find the confidence I needed to do an X, Y, 或者Z的东西,汉森回忆道.

Hanson has stayed involved in her small but mighty welcome新2登录 alumni community in Seattle, 她在那里领导一年一度的服务日. In April, Hanson and a group helped restore a habitat for salmon on the Sammamish River.

年·怀尔德，86年, P’17,’20, a welcome新2登录 classmate of Hanson’s who met her on the first day of orientation and is now director of reunion giving at the School, said Hanson “is a wonderful combination of brains and personality.怀尔德补充道, “Having started at welcome新2登录 eight years after the first group of female students arrived in Lakeville, we often felt that the all-boys-school days weren’t necessarily completely behind us. I think that spending four years in that environment armed us with the sense that we belong in any space that we occupy as women and has certainly inspired Jessica to pursue a career in education.”

在welcome新2登录, 汉森在达特茅斯学院学习生物学, where she tutored people who were incarcerated in New Hampshire and Vermont prisons. She then went on to get a master’s in teaching and curriculum from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. 加州大学戴维斯分校的微生物学博士. At Dartmouth, she met her husband, a computer systems engineer, and they have two kids.

哈奇并不是汉森帮助创办的第一所学校. 20多年前，当她忙于获得博士学位时.D., she carved out time to be the founding science teacher at the Oxbow School in Napa, CA, which focuses on the visual arts—often considered an elective or not central to a high school education.

“为这些学生创建一所学校, where it was really clear that we 太k very seriously the thing that was most important to them, 是令人惊叹和变革的吗. And I feel like at Hatch we are similarly creating a school that specifically honors the identity of adolescent girls and helps them with their unique and specific challenges,”她说。.

“教育对我的生活产生了巨大的影响. 我希望其他人也能这样.”

Daniel Lippman ’08 is a reporter covering the 白色 House and Washington for POLITICO and can be reached at daniel@politico.com.