RAY ANDERSON (in-person interview on July 11, 2025 at Arlington Historical Museum)
[LIGHTLY EDITED FOR CLARITY/READABILITY]
RA: Oh, Abigail. Spanberger. Oh, wow. And I, I was I’ve always done political things. So after we
spent three weeks in Pennsylvania last fall trying to support Harris/Walz. But of course, that
didn’t work. So after a month of grumbling back here, I said in December of last year, well, I’ve
got to do something. So I contacted the Spanberger campaign, and to get on the ballot, you
have to take a petition around and you have to have ten for governor in Virginia. You have to
have 10,000 signatures, including 600 from each of the congressional districts. So I
volunteered, and I went in December to the Arlington Democratic Committee, and I got over 30
people to sign up to be my workers. And we ended up with over 1,500 signatures to get her
towards the 10,000. So I got invited to a little activity because I was heading this little group. But
anyway, so I started at Wakefield in 1969. After two years, I said, well, this isn’t for me.
Wakefield was a big, comprehensive high school. Still is. As most every high school in the
country is the same, with the phrase “comprehensive high school” meaning it teaches
everything. It’s not a trade school. It’s not an academic school. It teaches all kids, all subjects.
So my grandfather lived here in Arlington and was a lawyer for the government for years. So I
said, well, I go to law school like my grandfather to become a lawyer because, you know, I’m all
of, what, 26 and still have planning my future, right? So I took the LSAT. Are you in school?
Chris Park: I’m going to be. I’m going to be going to Arlington Tech next year.
RA: Oh, great. Great. And what a junior? Junior year. Okay. So. The LSAT is the law school
aptitude test, like the SAT. And you’ve already taken that once. Okay. And I’m a terrible student.
Lower half of my high school class. But I’m a really good test taker. So I got a 95th percentile on
the law school aptitude test and got accepted at local law schools, and I said, okay, at the end of
the year 1971, I will go off and go to law school. My wife was working. And so, you know, back
then, one income could actually support a family. Not true anymore. We were driving from
Pittsburgh, where friends of mine lived and where I grew up, to Cleveland, where my parents
were then living, in our 1966 VW camper. And I’m driving. And I said, and we’re talking about
education. And I said, well, “Sarah, write this down.” And I dictated a five-page memo. And the
first half of it was what to do about changing Wakefield and addressing issues I saw there. But
the second half of it was, well, that’s not really going to get anywhere. So what we need is a
whole new school in Arlington. And so the second half of it was several pages of this imaginary
school. And that document got circulated around Arlington. And then in March of 1971, the
[Arlington] School Board was closing three elementary schools because they were building new
schools.
And so they had little schools to close, and they were having a public hearing to decide what to
do with the buildings. And back then, the School Board was not elected. It was appointed by the
County Board, and they had a hearing because if they didn’t have a use for it, they’d have to
give it back to the county. And so various people were asking for them to keep it and use the
building for something. The buildings were Woodlawn, Langston, and maybe Washington-Lee. And so I gave my proposal to the teachers’ union, had a guy named Bill K [spelling?]. And so
the teachers’ union said, well, “we want you to keep this and use these buildings for school
purposes.” And I got a call that night from a kid at Washington-Lee (that’s what it was known by
then) named Jeff Cowan. He was a junior. And he said, “you know, a lot of us have been talking
about new ideas in education. And we really like your proposal. Can you come over to my
house tomorrow night and talk to us about it?” And my first reaction was, well, “the Board would
never approve it.” Famous last words. Because that fits with one of your questions.
But I went over there to Bill’s, and there were about 20 people there because there were student
activist groups at the high schools and citizens who wanted to change things. And so we
suddenly had a whole committee. And two weeks later, we went back to the School Board and
said we want to formally propose this. We now have a County-wide committee. And we had a
student, teacher and parent from each of the three high schools then give a presentation. Now, I
didn’t know anything about, you know, Arlington’s community workings, but Jeff’s mother was a
big wheel in the Democratic Party and ABC [Arlingtonians for a Better County], which way back
then was more powerful than either the Republicans or the Democrats. It was Arlingtonians for a
Better County, and it had been started after World War II for the federal workers living in
Arlington who, because of the Hatch Act, could not be involved with the political party. That’s all
been changed now. So anyway, the Board listened to our proposal, and they had reached out to
a couple Board members. So in advance, they knew they were going to get a motion to ask the
[APS] Superintendent to review this, which they passed. And the Superintendent, Dr. Clark had
his staff look at it, and they came back a month or so later and reviewed it. And then on May
27th, they voted to approve it.
So that’s seven weeks. And then we opened in September in Woodlawn Elementary (what had
been Woodlawn Elementary). So that’s the origins of what? Now everybody just says “HB” but
of course, it was only the Woodlawn program for grades 11 and 12 that first year. And then a
whole bunch of parents said, well, “what about at that point?” Junior high kids– [grades] seven,
eight, nine–because the high schools were [grades] 10, 11, 12. This is the old-fashioned way of
school divisions. But I got a call from the Associate Superintendent, Dr. Wilson, who is really the
the brains behind the school system back then. And he said, “Ray you know, we’re opening next
year, this new [grades] seven, eight, nine school that’s going to be kind of like your school. And
you’ve got [grades ] 11, 12, but we’ve got 10th graders. What happens to them?” I said, “well, I
don’t know.” “Well, you’re going to get them. Woodlawn is going to become [grades] 10 through
12.” So then the second year we were [grades] 10 through 12 through 1978. And in 1978,
[grade] eight. The school system had been shrinking in enrollment, and by 1978, Yorktown
enrollment was getting perilously close to just a thousand kids. (You know, it’s well over 2000
now.) And this is the behind-the-scenes, real reason why decisions are made–Yorktown would
no longer be allowed to play sports against other Northern Virginia high schools, because it
would fall below the enrollment level, and they would have to play small high schools out in the
Shenandoah Valley. So the Board said, “what are we going to do about that?” And there were
various proposals. And the one they came up with is the ninth grade in the high schools. So
Yorktown will pick up, you know, 400 or 500 kids, and then they’ll be saved to play sports. Well,
Dr. Wilson called me up again and said, “well, Ray, you will now be [grades] nine, 10, 11, 12. HB will only be [grades] seven and eight, and they’ll only have 100 or 150 kids. And that’s not big
enough to run a school. So, Ray, your school is going to merge with HB Woodlawn program and
open as a [grades] seven through 12 school in September. Now we have six junior highs in
Arlington. We’re getting rid of a third of the kids, putting them in high schools. So we’re going to
close the third of those six schools. So which do you want: Gunston or Stratford?” And so we
had a merger committee of the two schools planning for all of this. And we visited both buildings
and talked about it and we opted for the Stratford building.
And so the fall of 1978, suddenly it’s, you know, [grades] seven through 12. And we were there
from 1978 to 2019, much longer than it had ever been a junior high, because it was a junior high
from 1950 to 1978. That’s 28 years. So we were there for over 40 years. And then in 1990, the
School Board trying to be up to date and modern, said, “You know, we’ve left these seventh and
eighth graders all by themselves in what we call intermediate schools, but we’re going to take
the sixth graders from the elementaries and move them up to the intermediate, and they’ll
become middle schools.” That was the new thing back in 1990. And Al Gore, the senator at the
time, he and his wife organized a group called to protect leaving the sixth graders in the
elementary [schools]. But that didn’t work because, uou know, they had to do something. And so
then we became [grades] six through 12 in 1990, and which is still what it is today. Now, they’ve
tacked on a bunch of other programs in our building. So we’ve got the Shriver School for
multiple handicapped kids who can’t earn a regular high school diploma, either because of a
physical or mental disability. They’re about 50 kids. And that program has been going on for
ages in Arlington. And they moved in with us at the Stratford building in 1996 or 1997.
And the next 2 or 3 groups by five years, they were all gone. And it was now 1976, Jimmy
Carter’s President. You know, Nixon’s gone. Everything’s changed. And so we have gone
through kind of student generations about every five years. And for a while, we had the real
artistic kids who would come in the 1980s, mid to late 1980s. The high schools had gotten so
out of touch with reality that the brightest kids in our own high schools all wanted to go to HB
Woodlawn. And you know, these days, I don’t know, in reality, most of the kids come in as sixth
graders. And who’s really making that decision? Their parents? Yeah. But there are some
vacancies that open up in ninth grade, and you can get on a waiting list. And, you know, maybe
junior or senior year, a spot will open up and you’ll get in. So we started in a six-room
abandoned elementary school, Woodlawn, and are now occupying $100 million, five-story,
above-ground, two stories-below building in Rosslyn. Thatf’s pretty exciting. So, like this year is
the 53rd senior class.
CP: I like what you said about every five years it’s a new student generation and how, like,
schools were becoming more out of touch. Could you go deeper into [what] caused a lot of kids
to go to HB. Can you tell me a little bit more on how the school kind of accommodated for the
changing demographic?
RA: Well, the unique thing about it is that it allows the student to control their academic and
social environment, and that has remained consistent all the way along. And what it turns out to
be is that there are kids who just don’t fit in at the regular school and say, maybe I would fit in better at HB Woodlawn, or these days, maybe parents are saying that. So my kids all went to
Drew Model School. It’s not just a local neighborhood school in Arlington. And a whole bunch of
the kids from Drew every year would come to HB Woodlawn because Drew Model School
integrated the same year Woodlawn opened. It opened for elementary. And so it was a feeder
school, you might say (it isn’t anymore). But then you’ve got [Arlington] Science Focus, you’ve
got [Key] immersion, you’ve got [Arlington] Traditional, etc. I mean, how many elementary
school groupings do we have now? A bunch of them. So it’s really you identify with the system
of delivery of education, regardless of why you want that flexibility.
I mean, I had another thing we did that was different and we still do. I say “we” because I’m still
connected to it a bit. We (HB Woodlawn) don’t have any guidance counselors. We take the
guidance counselor allocation that the School Board gives us, and we just buy more teachers.
And every teacher [at] Woodlawn has to teach six classes, but they only have about 100 kids in
those classes. So class sizes are small. That’s very attractive. But then they have to be a
counselor for about 15 kids. But the kids pick who the counselor is. Yeah. So again, there’s that
control in the hands of the students, and then the students can say, “I don’t like this class, but I
have to take it for graduation. So I want to do an independent study.” And you can do any class
[as] independent study, but you have to go to the teacher of that subject and present a plan of
how you will justify what you’ll do this coming year. The teacher will then give you credit. But it’s
there. Very few people do it on any given year, but it’s again part of the
you-can-control-your-environment. Another way is we started off with what we called the
elective system. This is back at the old Woodlawn building twice a week. So you had three other
free blocks where you didn’t have a class. And this was kind of dealing with the notion that a fair
amount of classroom work can become busywork. So this way the teacher can say, “Be sure
you pay attention in my two hours, because that’ll be on the test.” But otherwise, you educate
yourself personally by doing extended reading or whatever else. And so in English and history
and government, the kids would write proposals for a nine-week class and teachers would write
proposals, and then the kids would vote on them, and the ones that were most popular would
end up being taught.
And then the teachers would meet and say, “Okay, so what are the lists of courses? Who’s
going to do this one? Who’s going to do that one?” You know, and sometimes we would say
none of us can do Egyptian history. So we got a graduate student at George Washington
[University] who came in and taught the class, and we would say some of our teacher allocation
still do this and put it into an hourly teacher account. And then we would negotiate with a
graduate student to earn a couple thousand bucks. But then there had to be a teacher working
with them. So, for instance, I worked with the teacher of Egyptian history. I learned a lot. I didn’t
know much about Egyptian history.
On the other hand, one of my students had written a proposal for Middle East or modern Middle
Eastern history (basically, the current Middle East), and we all looked at each other. That is the
social studies teachers say: “Who knows anything about this?” Well, it turned out the kid who
wrote the proposal did a lot because his dad worked for the oil country and he had lived in Saudi
Arabia, and actually, he was fluent in Arabic. So [he] said, “well, I’ll teach it.” And then, of course, he had to have a teacher be with him to kind of make it look legal. We didn’t pay him.
He now teaches the same thing at a college in New Jersey. Smart kid. Smart. You know, college
professor now.
I once wrote a proposal called “Camping on Civil War Battlefields.” Like four people voted for it. I
put it in again the next year, and 20 some kids voted for it. So I got to teach it since I had written
the proposal, and I am pretty knowledgeable on Civil War history. I have an ancestor buried in
Stanton, Virginia, at the Union Cemetery there from June 5th, 1864; he was killed at the Battle
of Piedmont. So I’m up on history. I divided the class in half: half were Confederates, half the
Union. Our culminating activity was we went up to Gettysburg and lived in tents on the
battlefield for three days, and every night a park ranger came in and said, “okay, tomorrow
you’re going to be studying the first day of the battle” (it was a three-day battle). And, you know,
they had studied this already, but he gave them his official intro. But the kids had well, “will we
be able to plug in our hairdryers?” I said, “Well, we’re going to be living like the Civil War
soldiers. So no hairdryers.” They did say, “Can we go swimming somewhere?” We were driving
around [and] found a nice stream and stopped. And we’re going to go swimming in it. And then
the kids looked up and saw cows standing in the stream, and they said, “No, no, we don’t want
to do that.” We ended up at the YMCA in Gettysburg and they played water polo north against
South. And I sat in their hot tub and just watched. And then when we were all done, we went to
a diner there. And this girl came up to me and said, “Ray, I don’t think they’re making what I
asked for.” I said, “Well, what did you ask for?” She said, “Well, I asked for a milkshake. And
they’ve got this whirling machine in some metal cup that they’ve got in it.” She’d never seen the
old-fashioned kind of machine that would make a milkshake, as opposed to it being blended out
of it. You know, we had fun. So again, that’s giving students more control over their own
education. And colleges love to get our kids. Brown [University] will take a kid almost every year
just because they’re the only Ivy with no what are called “graduation requirements” or general
education requirements. Colleges have different names for 1 or 2 years worth of subjects you
should study. And so they look at Woodlawn kids who have been kind of self-advocating. And
it’s perfect. Fits with us.
