By Tim Connor

Given that U.S. consumer debt hit an astounding $2.5 trillion just as the housing bubble of 2008 burst, it’s no wonder the debt collection industry has become a haunting presence in the lives of millions of Americans. According a recent survey, average credit card debt per U.S. household is over $16,000.

Not only has the debt collection business gotten bigger, says Gonzaga University Law School Associate Professor Alan McNeil, but those doing the collecting have gotten increasingly sophisticated in how it pursues consumers.

“These debt buying and collecting firms have always been around,” says McNeil, who supervises the law school’s Consumer Law Clinic. But, he explains, the collapse of 2008 set the stage for an extraordinary run on consumers’ pocketbooks. The debts have been on the books for two years, but now that the economy is beginning to recover and debtors are re-building income “it’s created an opportunity to move in and collect on those debts.”

“They have software that they’re using,” McNeil explains, “that enables them to find out as soon as people have jobs.”

And once they know a debtor has a job, they move in to try to collect.

“There are billions of dollars involved,” says McNeil, who emphasizes that the 12% interest rates that are routinely attached to post-judgment debts can be devastating to those who have to struggling families.

“It’s crippling the middle class,” McNeil says, costing people their inheritances and forcing them to sell homes.

The result is that at the GU law clinic, as well as at legal services entities like the Center for Justice, there has been an increasing number of low and middle income citizens seeking help from aggressive collectors.

McNeil’s primary advice to consumers battling collectors is  to show up and be present in court. It turns out, he says, that just as the ill-fated boom in mortgage bundling and securitization led to sloppy and even phantom paper trails, a similar pattern has emerged with the marketing and efforts to collect on consumer debt.

“Ninety percent of the time they [the collectors] are taking default judgments in the court because people simply don’t show up,” McNeil.

They’re not nearly as successful when debtors do appear to assert their rights and present their side of the story to judges.

“The lesson on these guys is not to give up,” says McNeil.

There are other lessons as well.

The National Association of Consumer Advocates offers helpful guidance on credit card and credit rating issues here.

The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the Federal Debt Collection Practices Act, offers the following Guide for Consumers in dealing with abusive and/or deceptive debt collectors.

Debt Collection FAQs: A Guide for Consumers from the Federal Trade Commission:

If you’re behind in paying your bills, or a creditor’s records mistakenly make it appear that you are, a debt collector may be contacting you.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, enforces the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), which prohibits debt collectors from using abusive, unfair, or deceptive practices to collect from you.

Under the FDCPA, a debt collector is someone who regularly collects debts owed to others. This includes collection agencies, lawyers who collect debts on a regular basis, and companies that buy delinquent debts and then try to collect them.

Here are some questions and answers about your rights under the Act.
What types of debts are covered?

The Act covers personal, family, and household debts, including money you owe on a personal credit card account, an auto loan, a medical bill, and your mortgage. The FDCPA doesn’t cover debts you incurred to run a business.

Can a debt collector contact me any time or any place?

No. A debt collector may not contact you at inconvenient times or places, such as before 8 in the morning or after 9 at night, unless you agree to it. And collectors may not contact you at work if they’re told (orally or in writing) that you’re not allowed to get calls there.

How can I stop a debt collector from contacting me?

If a collector contacts you about a debt, you may want to talk to them at least once to see if you can resolve the matter – even if you don’t think you owe the debt, can’t repay it immediately, or think that the collector is contacting you by mistake. If you decide after contacting the debt collector that you don’t want the collector to contact you again, tell the collector – in writing – to stop contacting you. Here’s how to do that:

Make a copy of your letter. Send the original by certified mail, and pay for a “return receipt” so you’ll be able to document what the collector received. Once the collector receives your letter, they may not contact you again, with two exceptions: a collector can contact you to tell you there will be no further contact or to let you know that they or the creditor intend to take a specific action, like filing a lawsuit. Sending such a letter to a debt collector you owe money to does not get rid of the debt, but it should stop the contact. The creditor or the debt collector still can sue you to collect the debt.

Can a debt collector contact anyone else about my debt?

If an attorney is representing you about the debt, the debt collector must contact the attorney, rather than you. If you don’t have an attorney, a collector may contact other people – but only to find out your address, your home phone number, and where you work. Collectors usually are prohibited from contacting third parties more than once. Other than to obtain this location information about you, a debt collector generally is not permitted to discuss your debt with anyone other than you, your spouse, or your attorney.

What does the debt collector have to tell me about the debt?

The Center for Justice has been hearing an increasing number of complaints from clients about aggressive debt collection. Here, volunteer lawyer Steve Llewellyn offers help at a free legal clinic at a Spokane community center.

Every collector must send you a written “validation notice” telling you how much money you owe within five days after they first contact you. This notice also must include the name of the creditor to whom you owe the money, and how to proceed if you don’t think you owe the money.

Can a debt collector keep contacting me if I don’t think I owe any money?

If you send the debt collector a letter stating that you don’t owe any or all of the money, or asking for verification of the debt, that collector must stop contacting you. You have to send that letter within 30 days after you receive the validation notice. But a collector can begin contacting you again if it sends you written verification of the debt, like a copy of a bill for the amount you owe.

What practices are off limits for debt collectors?

Harassment. Debt collectors may not harass, oppress, or abuse you or any third parties they contact. For example, they may not:

* use threats of violence or harm;
* publish a list of names of people who refuse to pay their debts (but they can give this information to the credit reporting companies);
* use obscene or profane language; or
* repeatedly use the phone to annoy someone.

False statements. Debt collectors may not lie when they are trying to collect a debt. For example, they may not:
* falsely claim that they are attorneys or government representatives;
* falsely claim that you have committed a crime;
* falsely represent that they operate or work for a credit reporting company;
* misrepresent the amount you owe;
* indicate that papers they send you are legal forms if they aren’t; or
* indicate that papers they send to you aren’t legal forms if they are.

Debt collectors also are prohibited from saying that:

* you will be arrested if you don’t pay your debt;
* they’ll seize, garnish, attach, or sell your property or wages unless they are permitted by law to take the action and intend to do so; or
* legal action will be taken against you, if doing so would be illegal or if they don’t intend to take the action.

Debt collectors may not:

* give false credit information about you to anyone, including a credit reporting company;
* send you anything that looks like an official document from a court or government agency if it isn’t; or
* use a false company name.

Unfair practices. Debt collectors may not engage in unfair practices when they try to collect a debt. For example, they may not:

* try to collect any interest, fee, or other charge on top of the amount you owe unless the contract that created your debt – or your state law – allows the charge;
* deposit a post-dated check early;
* take or threaten to take your property unless it can be done legally; or
* contact you by postcard.

Can I control which debts my payments apply to?

Yes. If a debt collector is trying to collect more than one debt from you, the collector must apply any payment you make to the debt you select. Equally important, a debt collector may not apply a payment to a debt you don’t think you owe.

Can a debt collector garnish my bank account or my wages?

If you don’t pay a debt, a creditor or its debt collector generally can sue you to collect. If they win, the court will enter a judgment against you. The judgment states the amount of money you owe, and allows the creditor or collector to get a garnishment order against you, directing a third party, like your bank, to turn over funds from your account to pay the debt.

Wage garnishment happens when your employer withholds part of your compensation to pay your debts. Your wages usually can be garnished only as the result of a court order. Don’t ignore a lawsuit summons. If you do, you lose the opportunity to fight a wage garnishment.

Can federal benefits be garnished?

Many federal benefits are exempt from garnishment, including:

* Social Security Benefits
* Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Benefits
* Veterans’ Benefits
* Civil Service and Federal Retirement and Disability Benefits
* Service Members’ Pay
* Military Annuities and Survivors’ Benefits
* Student Assistance
* Railroad Retirement Benefits
* Merchant Seamen Wages
* Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Death and Disability Benefits
* Foreign Service Retirement and Disability Benefits
* Compensation for Injury, Death, or Detention of Employees of U.S. Contractors Outside the U.S.
* Federal Emergency Management Agency Federal Disaster Assistance

But federal benefits may be garnished under certain circumstances, including to pay delinquent taxes, alimony, child support, or student loans.

Do I have any recourse if I think a debt collector has violated the law?

You have the right to sue a collector in a state or federal court within one year from the date the law was violated. If you win, the judge can require the collector to pay you for any damages you can prove you suffered because of the illegal collection practices, like lost wages and medical bills. The judge can require the debt collector to pay you up to $1,000, even if you can’t prove that you suffered actual damages. You also can be reimbursed for your attorney’s fees and court costs. A group of people also may sue a debt collector as part of a class action lawsuit and recover money for damages up to $500,000, or one percent of the collector’s net worth, whichever amount is lower. Even if a debt collector violates the FDCPA in trying to collect a debt, the debt does not go away if you owe it.

What should I do if a debt collector sues me?

If a debt collector files a lawsuit against you to collect a debt, respond to the lawsuit, either personally or through your lawyer, by the date specified in the court papers to preserve your rights.

Where do I report a debt collector for an alleged violation?

Report any problems you have with a debt collector to your state Attorney General’s office (www.naag.org) and the Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov). Many states have their own debt collection laws that are different from the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Your Attorney General’s office can help you determine your rights under your state’s law.

For More Information

To learn more about debt collection and other credit-related issues, visit www.ftc.gov/credit and MyMoney.gov, the U.S. government’s portal to financial education.

By Tim Connor

The most remarkable part of Guadelupe Nickell’s life over the past ten years is that, despite the frequent invitations, she didn’t give up.

She started in fine shape, or so it seemed. The substitute teacher and mother of four had just gotten her Master’s Degree and had laid out clear goals for herself.

“I was prepared to take on the world,” she says. “I was prepared to work and I was prepared to take care of my kids.”

Yet, something was wrong. Even though she’d kept herself in good physical condition with a strenuous running and bicycling routine, her body was betraying her. She started enduring bouts of fatigue, pain and a numbness that felt, at times, like paralysis.

Her doctors were baffled. Among other things, it turned out her neck had been badly damaged in a vehicle accident that had occurred years before, and now a bone spur was impinging on her spinal cord. She would eventually have surgery to repair her neck. But, still, her symptoms continued, the result of an as-yet undiagnosed inflammatory disease that affects her nervous system.

Today, thanks to a much-belated diagnosis, her commitment to managing her own treatment, and an amazing supply of positive spiritual energy, Guadelupe looks surprisingly healthy given all she’s been through.

Many times I would go in there and I was just so upset, and so drained and so tired that I wanted to give up. But Kelly didn’t want to give up. Then when we had that first appointment at Social Security, she just took over and it was like, ‘this girl is amazing!’—Guadelupe Nickell

At the door to her gray and white cottage near Corbin Park on Spokane’s north side, Guadelupe calls out in joy when she sees a familiar smile on her doorstep. The youthful blond in the black blouse and sweater is Kelly Owings and she is every bit as happy to see Guadelupe Nickell as Guadelupe is to see her.

Theirs is one of those improbable relationships—two people brought together under difficult circumstances who forge a rich relationship from their struggles together.

“I just loved your red velvet cake,” Kelly tells her, as they embrace on the doorstep.

The part of Guadelupe’s story that would bring the two of them together began six years ago. That was when Guadelupe had to persuade an administrative law judge that she was eligible—given her painful physical limitations—to receive the Social Security Disability Insurance payments she dearly needed to make ends meet. At the time, Guadelupe had just gone through a divorce and her health had deteriorated such that she was having difficulty walking, even with crutches and a cane. The judge ruled in her favor. In the years since, Guadelupe’s  health improved enough to where she could return to part-time work, something she was allowed to do under the rules governing her disability payments.

The stunner came last fall when, out of the blue, Guadelupe received a letter from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Years earlier, it turned out, she had unknowingly worked more hours than SSA rules for disability compensation allow. The breath-taking letter informed her she’d have to re-pay the government $5,000.

“I got sick to my stomach,” Guadelupe says.

She contacted a lawyer who referred her to the Center for Justice. Like countless others who need legal assistance in Spokane, Guadelupe first came to the Center to do intake interview. On her second visit, she was met by Kelly who, it turned out, was doing her first ever case involving Social Security Disability Insurance.

Not that Kelly minded. The daughter of an aluminum worker, Kelly had grown up in Oswego, New York, before going to Union College, a small, liberal arts college in Schenectady, New York. Kelly says that the opportunity to work on a variety of environmental and social issues  is one of the reasons she wanted to study law in the first place. She came to Gonzaga Law School after graduating from Union and, shortly thereafter, applied for an internship at the Center for Justice. Since last summer, Kelly has been working as what is known as a “Rule 9 intern,” a designation whereby the state Bar Association accords interns limited legal practice privileges under the supervision of a licensed attorney.

“At the Center you get to work with people who don’t usually get a lot of help,” Kelly says, “so when you can help them, they really appreciate it.”

If there was more pressure involved in Guadelupe’s case than others, it was because Kelly understood Guadelupe’s circumstances. Among other things, Guadelupe’s divorce had left her on the hook for the full mortgage payment on her home. Having to come up with $5,000 was going to be an extreme hardship, unless Social Security could be persuaded to change its position.

Kelly Owings (right) with Guadelupe Nickell

Kelly knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Early in the Center’s research on Guadelupe’s predicament, she and supervising attorney Jennifer Slattery had consulted a Seattle lawyer who was familiar with the process for appealing the sort of overpayment demand letter that Guadelupe had received from Social Security.

“I learned these decisions are rarely overturned in the early stages,” Kelly says. “They (SSA) usually deny you and you then have to go to an administrative hearing.”

Fortunately for Kelly, she was working with a client who’d kept her files current and intact. In going through the records, a couple things stood out to Kelly. For starters, Guadelupe had fully disclosed her part-time work income to SSA. Secondly, there had been no signal, at all, from SSA that anything was amiss.

Guadelupe had come to the right place, but she admits that her initial shock from receiving the letter had shaken and discouraged her. Still, she met regularly with Kelly and the two worked steadily to prepare for the initial conferences with the assigned SSA caseworker.

“Many times I would go in there and I was just so upset, and so drained and so tired that I wanted to give up,” Guadelupe says. “But Kelly didn’t want to give up. Then when we had that first appointment at Social Security, she [Kelly] just took over and it was like, ‘this girl is amazing!’”

Kelly was making the case that, under SSA rules and guidelines, Guadelupe should be released from the $5,000 debt because she had done nothing wrong, and because re-paying the money would be a serious hardship.

What Kelly found in the first meeting with the Social Security case worker, is that the agency’s file corroborated what was in Guadelupe’s file. She focused on unpacking the timeline, the paper trail, the absence of any evidence of wrong-doing on Guadelupe’s part. She advocated her point of view in a second meeting with the case worker, and tried to drive home the point of what a hardship it would be for Guadelupe to have to pay back the daunting $5,000 sum.

“Kelly is a force to be reckoned with,” Guadelupe says. “She really is. She’s very sweet and very kind-hearted but she is extremely smart and powerful in her own way.”

In various ways, they had each begun to brace themselves for a rejection from the case worker, and a future date with  a formal and contentious administrative hearing.

But that didn’t happen.

“When I got the letter that I didn’t have to pay,” Guadelupe remembers vividly, “I was at the post office. And I just started crying. I was just in tears, and I had to call Kelly and leave a message, ‘you did it!’”

Later that day, across town, Kelly Owings got Guadelupe’s message and, beaming with joy, immediately began sharing it with the crew of lawyers, interns, and office staff that work on Community Advocacy cases. All of them knew about Guadelupe’s struggle and how much the case meant to both intern and client. An impromptu celebration ensued.

Guadelupe Nickell describes herself as a very religious person and regards the Center for Justice as “an answered prayer.”

As for Kelly Owings, she says, “she’s a godsend, a miracle.”

–CFJ

It’s not every day you can be frugal, fashionable and help a good cause all at the same time but we’ve got just such an event lined up on Saturday, May 7th.

It’s the “Walk A Mile in Their Shoes” shoe sale to benefit the Center for Justice’s quietly awesome Community Advocacy program. Beginning at 9 a.m. at the Community Building, (35 W. Main) we’ll have well over 800 pairs of footwear up for sale at prices ranging from $5 to $20. The sale runs until 5 p.m., but you might want to get there early to snatch the best deals of the day. Of course, if you buy ‘em, you’re absolutely welcome to walk the block in them. There’s lots to see down here.

CFJ ambassador-at-large Suellen Pritchard this morning.

But I digress.

I’m in a hallway near the entrance of the Veterans Administration hospital in north Spokane where we’ve been invited to set up a table to talk about the Center for Justice. We were invited because the VA folks regularly invite non-profit organizations like ours who are eligible to receive Combined Federal Campaign donations to educate patients and employees about the sort of work we do. The handy thing about CFC is that federal employees can simply choose us from a list of CFC eligible organizations and have donations directed to us via payroll deductions. So, the sum of it is, we’re here both to educate and raise a little money.

Because this is happening as I write, I have to report that we have a three deep backup (temporary) of wheelchairs in the hall as Suellen Pritchard, our Community Advocacy director, answers a question. It’s been a busy morning and, fortunately for us, Suellen is not only the most knowledgeable person we have to explain just what it is we do, but she has natural people skills that make her a perfect ambassador. Plus, she works for a living.

We’re definitely getting the foot traffic this morning. Lots of visitors, lots of questions, lots of stories. Our big stack of Call to Justice, our newsletter, is now gone but we still have cards and brochures. I’m encouraged by how many people have heard of us and know about our work and want to offer encouragement. Most people who have never heard of us are intrigued and are pleasantly surprised to learn who we are and what we do.

We are forty feet from the main entrance but just twenty feet from the flu shot station on one side of the hall and the espresso stand on the other side. So, I guess you can get all kinds of shots before you wander back to where we are.

Beautiful day out. The road on the north bank above the T.J. Meenach bridge is closed this morning, so I had to take the scenic route along Downriver Drive to get here. Lots of sunshine, fall colors and airborne pillows of fog and mist coming off the water. I was tempted to stop and take photos there, but I was supposed to be here and because I was coming from a long interview for an upcoming story, I was running late.

There’s a nice rhythm to this exercise. Lots of banter. They share their story, we share ours. Events like this remind me what a unusually friendly place the inland Northwest is, relative to other places I’ve been, and it’s certainly the case that the VA crowd has its own brand of camaraderie, as you’d expect.

Great, I was listening intently to a visitor and had my little finger on the delete button, so I just lost all the really funny, insightful and gripping material. This is my writing career in a nutshell. A speed reader returned a copy of the newsletter. But a woman who saw someone else reading it comes by and reclaims it.

Suellen wants to hang around to catch the noon rush, which I imagine will be the lightning round of introductions and Q and A.

In the meantime, she is trading verbal jabs with a vet on crutches who jokes that he woke up feeling ugly. She begs to differ. He insists he’s not getting better looking. She still begs to differ. He won’t let her win. But if you know Suellen you also know she has a way of getting the last word, or at least the last laugh.

–Tim Connor

By Tim Connor
Gwen Melcher and Rita Thompson have been at the Valley Montessori School long enough that small children who once passed through their doors now greet them warmly as adults. Gwen is Valley Montessori’s founder and owner. Rita, a former dance instructor, is the school’s director. The school itself is on the north side of a leafy street in the Spokane Valley with an idyllic play yard out back and a picturesque view, from the front, of the mountains rising beyond Liberty Lake to the southeast.

What you’d expect to see here is what Center for Justice lawyer Jeffry Finer found when he visited on a weekday morning in August. In three rooms of different sizes, young children were in the process of discovering their work for the day while Gwen and Rita moved lightly through and between the small knots of children.

Finer is best known as one of the region’s top civil rights lawyers. But he’s also a self-described “Montessorian” who, as a young father new to Spokane in 1986, discovered a thriving private Montessori school in west Spokane and quickly became devoted to the school and its unorthodox teaching methods. On this day, twenty three years later, he was visibly moved by the flashbacks he was experiencing, his face beaming as he recognized and explained to me the signature learning tools and methods he’d become so familiar with as a young parent.

“It was an emotional moment for me to walk in and recognize so many things,” he said, “including the little circle on the floor, symbolizing the earth’s rotation around the sun, which is something they use for birthdays.”

What you wouldn’t expect to have happen at the tranquil Montessori school in the valley is what did happen last November, barely a week after the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black President.

Worlds collided.

A thirty-five year old ex-convict, well-known to state and federal law enforcement for his

Gwen Melcher

association with white-supremacist organizations, had loudly staked out his belief system to Gwen Melcher’s face. Moreover, in what can only be described as a poignantly ironic twist, the man and his wife would pursue a complaint that the school had not done nearly enough to alter the Montessori teaching methods and classroom environment to accommodate a belief system, their belief system, that is drenched in intolerance.

The confrontation didn’t brew overnight. In the summer of 2007, a single mother with two older children approached the school because she was interested in enrolling her third child, a young son.

Part of what Rita Thompson remembers about the initial conversations is that the mother said the school had been recommended to her by friends who were members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. Rita thought this was noteworthy because Jehovah’s Witnesses regularly ask that their children not participate in activities they consider to be pagan in origin. An example of what Jehovah’s Witnesses would ask that their children not be exposed to is the same Montessori birthday celebration that holds such powerfully positive memories for Jeff Finer. It involves a symbolic walk around a circle, representing an orbit around the sun, for each year the child has lived.  There had been Jehovah’s Witnesses children and teachers at the school before and the issue around the birthday celebrations and others like Christmas and Valentine’s Day had been resolved little, if any, disruption.

“They’ll just walk out of the room for that,” says Gwen, “and then come back and help us serve cupcakes, or whatever.”

Rita Thompson

Rita thought it was a positive signal that the mother had spoken with Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d worked at the school and was still very interested in enrolling her son. As the enrollment process went forward the woman reported to Rita that there were several ceremonies, such as those around Easter and Christmas, that she wanted the boy shielded from. But, Rita says, “it was a very cordial thing.” When Christmas came, the mother asked her son to remind Rita not to ask him to make an artwork Christmas tree. There were other restrictions the mother relayed, including prohibitions on foods with pork and gelatin. The school was also instructed not to serve the son tap water, and the family provided a supply of bottled water instead.

By all accounts the boy flourished at the school and was adored by his teachers.

In early 2008, however, the mother began to talk about her plans to marry. As the summer marriage approached and the wedding occurred, there came a gradual ratcheting up of the pressure from the mother to scrupulously shield the boy from the prohibited activities. The new husband, a large, heavily-tatooed man, began to appear to drop the boy off in the morning, though he rarely, if ever, said anything to staff.

More conspicuously, Rita said, the mom began to quote her new husband about the rules being imposed on her son. She still recalls the day when the mother confided in her that her son had gotten in trouble at home and had started to cry when being disciplined. But that only made things worse. “We don’t allow our boys to cry,” Rita remembers the woman telling her. “Men do not cry.”

————–

Montessori takes its name from Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and educator who came to prominence by taking children thought to be “defective” and ineducable and helping them become better than average learners. Montessori’s guiding principle was what she called “spontaneous self-development” and its success as a teaching method is legendary. There are now Montessori schools all over the world, including the Woodland Montessori School that Jeffry Finer and his wife, Spokane physician Stacie Bering, happily discovered in Spokane in 1986. The method purposefully avoids a rigid curriculum and rejects a one-size-fits-all approach to learning. Rather, it asks that teachers prepare a learning environment and then react to the choices the children make so as to further stimulate and support the learning process. It also creates space for children of different ages to interact and learn from each other.

“If a person were to grow up with a healthy soul, enjoying the full development of a strong character and a clear intellect, they could not endure to uphold two kinds of justice–the one protecting life and the other destroying it. Nor would they consent to cultivate in their heart both love and hate. Neither would they tolerate two disciplines–one aimed at building, and the other at tearing down what has been built.”–From Maria Montessori’s 1932 address, Peace and Education.

A central aspect of the Montessori method– what Maria Montessori called the “Lessons of Mankind”–is that it encourages curiosity about other people and teaches tolerance and respect for others and their cultures. It is not a philosophy immune from the world outside the classroom, nor was it ever intended to be. Maria Montessori was evicted from Italy by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the run-up to World War II because she refused to compromise her principles and turn her children into budding fascists.

“Montessori anticipates that this will happen in the real world,” says Finer, looking back at the trouble that was headed toward Gwen Melcher, Rita Thompson and the Valley Montessori School in the fall of 2008.

“When Henry David Thoreau was sent to prison and Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him, Emerson asked Thoreau, ‘Henry, what are you doing in there?’ And he said, ‘Ralph, what are you doing out there?’ And that’s exactly how I felt about the Department of Early Learning. ‘What are you doing out there? Why aren’t you in here supporting us?’”–Rita Thompson.

Going into fall season, there were visible preparations at the school for the Thanksgiving ceremony, which would feature a live-sized tee-pee and student-fashioned Native American drums. The mother noticed. She let it be known that this would be a problem for and her new husband.

“They basically asked if we could have [the child] removed any time we discussed races or culture,” says Gwen.

“At that point,” Rita says, “I thought I was going to explain to her, again, and reiterate what goes on in a Montessori classroom. I said, ‘you know, this is going to be really hard because the whole classroom is cultural. I don’t know where we would take him. Where would we put him if we removed him?’ And I said, ‘that just isn’t possible.’ And that’s when I got it.”

Gwen Melcher got it too.

It was hard not to get it. On October 24th, the boy’s mom brought a letter to school and chose to hand it to the school’s only African-American teacher. It was addressed, “To Whom it May Concern,” and entitled “NOTICE TO ALL STAFF ON RELIGIOUS STANDARDS/RESTRICTIONS.”

The letter bore the names of both parents and began by declaring that the family doesn’t allow its children “to participate in pagan holidays or in pagan/heathen cultural celebrations” and listed Halloween, Easter, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah as “examples.”

“We also believe in the Holy Laws of racial separation, See Deuteronomy 7, Leviticus 20:24-26 so we as Whites, only celebrate the cultures of our fathers, white indo-European cultures, i.e. German, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, British, French, etc. Any multi-racial or multi-cultural celebration we will have our children excluded from participation (sic), as our religious freedom allows us to be free from any foreign or alien religious influences, as protected by State and Federal law.”–Excerpt from the “notice” served on Valley Montessori last October.

The letter was clearly intended as a line in the sand. The parents were demanding that Valley Montessori change its teaching practices and its classroom environment to accommodate religious beliefs that could hardly be more antithetical to the Montessori philosophy. On a personal level, to the staff members who read the letter, it was like a shot to the solar plexus.

“Being the owner, it hit me so hard,” Gwen says.

“Gwen has principles. And no one ever promised that having principles comes cheap. Here’s why she’s a hero for me, she’s living her principles.” –Jeffry Finer

Melcher is the granddaughter of eastern Washington’s first Montessori teacher. Now, as in the fall of 2008, roughly a third or more of the nearly 80 children attending Valley Montessori are non-Caucasion or mixed race.

There’s another poignant fact. Not every private school, and not even every private Montessori school, accepts children whose tuition is subsidized by the state. That’s because in the state program what the state and the family will pay for early childhood tuition is significantly lower than the private tuition rate. But Melcher, who grew up in Pasco in a large family that struggled at times to pay the bills, has always been eager to accept kids from families who qualify for state assistance. Thus, at any given time, there are a handful of children at Valley Montessori who are there on state-subsidized tuition. The child in this case came into the school and stayed at the school with a state subsidy. In other words, there would have been no confrontation at Valley Montessori last fall were it not for Gwen Melcher’s open door policy.

The conflict that ensued, Gwen says, “really touched my soul. This is a man [the stepfather] who wants me to respect his religion but he doesn’t respect what we do. How am I going to tolerate that?”

The letter also inspired Gwen and Rita to do some research. What they learned frightened them. Rita’s son-in-law had connections in law enforcement and he helped put her in touch with a federal agent. The agent was immediately familiar with the stepfather’s name and his connections to militant white supremacists, including the late Aryan Nation’s leader Richard Butler.

“We come in here and she says, ‘I have to tell you this is the complaint.’ And I looked at her. I didn’t at first understand what she said. It took me a minute and then I looked at her and said, ‘I’m sorry Karen, I’m not signing that complaint. It has nothing to do with honoring a child’s religion. This has to do with intimidation, complete intimidation. They’re intimidating us, and they’re intimidating you. We will not sign that paper.’”–Gwen Melcher

Gwen’s response to the letter came two and a half weeks later in a letter she wrote to the parents.

“I have spent over 30 years carefully choosing and creating materials to enhance children’s knowledge about other children around the world,” she wrote. “Our love and hope for each child is strong that he will be able to grow in a world that supports acceptance of all mankind.”

The letter was polite, but it was clear-eyed about the clash of world views and what the implications were.

“I am requesting that [your son] be removed from our school. I am suggesting that you find an environment that will be more conducive to your religious belief.”

The boy’s mother was the first to read the letter that afternoon and, Rita says, the woman immediately became upset, waving the letter in Thompson’s face.

“I was telling her ‘I still don’t think you understand the Montessori philosophy,’”Rita says, “and she was yelling and saying ‘you’ll be hearing from our attorneys.’ And I said, ‘do what you need to do.’ I remember saying that. ‘Do what you need to do,’ and she turned around and stormed out the door. And that’s the last encounter I had with her.”

But there was at least one encounter yet to come. Gwen correctly expected it would come the following morning with the boy’s stepfather. She made a point to be at the school early, so that she would be there to handle the situation when the man arrived.

“I was really frightened,” Gwen said. “But it just was kind of a personal thing for me. I was standing up for my personal beliefs. To me one of the most important things is that it [the racist creed expressed by the parents] was demeaning to the children who here and my staff that came in every day to teach those children. And so I felt I could not allow this to continue.”

It was for her own protection that she decided that she would not go into the school office with the man, but stay in the hallway, where other teachers could witness the encounter and call the police if necessary.

“He was yelling and saying it was his federal rights to have his child go wherever he wanted,” Gwen says. “And I said, well, that is true but this is a private school and I own the school and I make the policies. And then he said that ‘I know what Montessori is and Montessori is about acceptance of all children and all races and all religion.’”

Rita witnessed the argument in the hallway, the heat of it, and says the angry stepfather denounced Gwen Melcher as “evil” before he left with the boy.

“I have to say this for Gwen,” Rita says. “I’ve known her for thirty years and I admire her, but when she was in the hall, when the hall was like Dodge City, and he’s so big, and he’s so intimidating, and she’s just standing there, talking to him. And after it was all over with, he went out the door. And she followed him out to say ‘nobody better get hurt, not my staff, not my school, or my family because the authorities know about you.’ Then she came back in and I said, ‘Gwen, I can’t believe you did that.’”

“I was really frightened. But it just was kind of a personal thing for me. I was standing up for my personal beliefs.”–Gwen Melcher

After the dreaded conflict with the stepfather was over, Gwen called Karen Christensen, the licensing official assigned to Valley Montessori by the Washington Department of Early Learning, to report the incident. She says Christensen asked all the right questions about whether Gwen feared for her safety and for the safety of the children. But there was something else. Apparently the departing stepfather had quickly called his wife on a cell phone because what Gwen heard from Christensen is that the boy’s mother had actually called first. What Christensen told her, Gwen said, is that the mother had called to lodge the complaint that her son had been forced out of the school because of his religious beliefs.

The trouble that Valley Montessori was in with the state didn’t sink in right away. It just seemed incomprehensible to Gwen and Rita and others at the school that after weathering such an offensive and frightening encounter with a well-known white supremacist that they would be the ones being investigated.

But that’s exactly what was happening. And the timing of the episode added to the stress and pressure. Washington law requires that licensed day care centers be inspected and re-licensed by the state’s Department of Early Learning every three years. Christensen is the school’s state licensing officer and the school was due for its relicensing inspection and review in late 2008, just as the confrontation was escalating.

The review is very thorough to begin with and it includes criminal background checks on the staff.  Still, Rita Thompson was beside herself with Christensen’s continued focus on the incident on November 13th.

“This is where I feel that we were let down by the Department of Early Learning,” Rita says. “We turned to them to protect us, and they weren’t there. It was the opposite. There was the police and the federal agents and we were protected that way, but there was nobody saying, ‘are those children safe?’ This is a school with eight women and children 12 months to six years of age. That’s all. There’s no men here. We’re just out here. And nobody said, ‘let’s take a look at this and see who’s really being kept safe here. They didn’t care. And I kept telling the licensor that but she was asking, ‘what did you do to make all this change Rita? You had a nice relationship with [the mother], evidently [the son] was getting along fine. What happened that it all changed?’”

Rita says she eventually told Christensen that what she thought had changed was that a black man had become President and (judging from the traffic and tone of the racist websites Thompson had been monitoring since October) this was provoking white supremacists to be more active and forceful in pushing their beliefs.

Gwen and Rita say they shared with Christensen the information they’d gathered about the stepfather from their research but, still, the focus was not on the angry stepfather, but on the school and the questioning about what the school teachers had done to upset the parents.

“We were just dumbfounded,” Gwen says.

Finally, the questions ended. Christensen concluded her license review inspection in early December and found only four minor items (e.g. potentially dangerous loops in window blinds) that needed correction. Melcher readily agreed to make those fixes. After not hearing anything more from Christensen and the Department of Early Learning, they began to think the matter with the racist parents was behind them.

Not so. In early February Christensen returned and personally delivered the news that she had determined that the complaint lodged by the parents was founded. She’d concluded that Valley Montessori erred because it “did not honor a child’s religion.”

“Montessori is not a fantasy. It’s an approach that works with children in their developmental stages that’s realistic about the world and what it’s like. What was unsettling here is that the world was making some demands that put every other child’s experience at risk and put the director and the owner in an impossible situation.”–Jeffry Finer.

What Melcher says she understood during the meeting with Christensen is that in order to get her new license renewed for Valley Montessori she would literally have to sign the complaint form in front of her. The form would be her acknowledgment that she and the school had violated a state rule in the way they’d dealt with the racist family. She was stunned.

“It took me a minute,” Gwen says, “and then I looked at her and said, ‘I’m sorry Karen, I’m not signing that complaint. It has nothing to do with honoring a child’s religion. This has to do with intimidation, complete intimidation. They’re intimidating us, and they’re intimidating you. We will not sign that paper.”

Christensen, says Melcher, did inform her of her right to contest the finding but also left the unsigned form with Melcher in case she changed her mind and decided to admit to the finding by signing the form.

“Gwen and I talked about it and asked ourselves what would happen if we signed it,” Rita says. “Would it all go away? And then we looked at each other and just said, ‘we can’t sign that.’”

But what would they do? The form threatened civil penalties and “other licensing action” for “failure to meet licensing requirements.” There was a genuine worry the two shared that the state would move to revoke the license.

Acting on a “gut feeling,” Rita says she then approached one of the school’s mothers whom she knew was an attorney. The woman’s eyes widened as she learned, for the first time, what Gwen and Rita had been dealing with. Tellingly, the woman already knew of the racist stepfather by reputation, but she had no idea that he was the same man who’d been bringing the young boy to the school. She promised Rita an answer later that morning and by ten o’clock she’d called to tell her that the Center for Justice had agreed to represent the school.

Rita, Jeffry, and Gwen at Valley Montessori.

The call to the Center that morning had been fielded by Breean Beggs who quickly understood the urgency of the licensing issue. Bypassing the Center’s customary intake process, he scheduled an appointment for Gwen and Rita with Finer.

Like the woman lawyer that Rita had approached at the school, Jeffry Finer knew of the man that Gwen Melcher had stood up to in the school’s hallway. As one of the region’s most active civil right attorneys it was the sort of case in which he could easily imagine himself on the opposite side, representing the First Amendment rights of someone, even someone whose views he found offensive, if Finer believed discrimination or unlawful censorship had occurred. Moreover, as a Jewish parent who’d been actively engaged in his children’s education, Finer had lots of personal experience over the years pushing back against public school teachers and administrators who were insensitive to the needs and rights of Jewish students, i.e. scheduling exams on Yom Kippur.

Still, it didn’t take very long for Finer to see that, in this case, the facts and the law were clearly on the side of the school. He just didn’t know how long it would take to overturn the complaint and whether the reversal would take place in the upper reaches of the state bureaucracy, or in a court of law.

“When I met Gwen and Rita,” says Finer, “the quick impression I had is that they’d run up against the sometimes anonymous machinery that exists at any state agency, and the agency was making a fundamental mistake as to what its role was. As a consequence, the school was in danger of losing its license, which meant it was in danger of having to close its doors which meant that these folks and all their employees could lose their jobs and the kids could lose their program. So the stakes were high.”

In retrospect, Finer says, the worst case scenario of the license revocation was not as imminent as Gwen and Rita feared. But he couldn’t help but admire Melcher’s courage.

“When Gwen refused to sign that complaint she didn’t know that they wouldn’t pull the license immediately,” he says. “So just in terms of having moxie and standing up to the unknown and being brave, I have to give her a lot of credit. Before she had a lawyer to tell her that it was okay not to sign off on the complaint, she fundamentally disagreed with the state’s view that Valley Montessori had disrespected this child or his religion.”

As for Gwen and Rita, the relief they experienced from their meeting with Finer at the Center for Justice was overwhelming.

“Walking into the Center was like walking into an adult Montessori school,” Gwen says. “It was so peaceful and calm and we had been so tense. Our stomachs had been churning for the past three or four months.”

“Jeffry was just a godsend,” she said.

“After meeting with Jeff,” Rita says, “Gwen and I got in the car and we never said a word. We just drove to the valley and then just looked at each other. Because Jeff said everything that was in our hearts about Montessori, because he’s a Montessorian. He said everything that we’d been stumbling over. Everything that Montessori meant to us, it meant to him too.”

“The fact is good people make the difference. In all those dark moments in history when things went terribly, terribly wrong, the sociologists tell us that it is often because good people didn’t step up. Gwen and Rita stepped right up, to protect themselves and to protect their children, to protect their jobs, and to protect the other parents. And it’s really folks like them who are the buffer against the chaos that would be visited upon us if everyone minded their own business and ran around afraid.”

–Jeffry Finer

But simply invoking the Montessori philosophy wasn’t going to be enough to get the state to drop the complaint. For that, Finer would need legal arguments, and he and his clients would need even more patience to overcome what, to Rita and Gwen, felt like a cruel and surreal punishment for just trying to walk the Spokane Valley in the footsteps of Maria Montessori.

“I’ve lived in this area a long time and I’ve known about the Aryan Nations,” Rita says. “The white supremacy, the hatred. But I thought this sort of thing was going away with time and the demise of the Klan, that we were evolving from this. So, I was stunned when we did more research on this to find that this is happening right here, under our noses, in Spokane, Washington.”

Finer was not as surprised.

“Montessori anticipates that this will happen in the real world,” he said, “and she didn’t try to protect her kids from the world. Montessori is not a fantasy. It’s an approach that works with children in their developmental stages. It’s an approach that’s realistic about the world and what it’s like. What was unsettling here is that the world was making some demands that put every other child’s experience at risk and put the director and the owner in an impossible situation. Unfortunately, the lower levels of the state apparatus agreed with the parents. And that’s why a lawyer was needed. But for that, it wasn’t a lawyer problem.”

Within days of their meeting, Finer formally contested the complaint on Gwen’s behalf. But he knew that there were, as he put it, lots of “layers” to work through before the issue would reach the desk of someone with sufficient legal training to resolve it.

“The examiner interpreted the rule as her having to advocate for the parents perspective, no matter what,” Finer said. “And that examiner was wrong. That’s not what that rule says.”

The specific violation that Christensen had sided with the parents on was WAC 170-295-2030 (9), that requires licensees to: “Honor all childrens’ race, religion, culture, gender, physical ability and family structure.”

Finer directly challenged the complaint on the facts, arguing there simply was no evidence that “the school has taken a position against the child’s religion, nor disrespected, or failed to honor the child’s religion.” Rather, he wrote, the problem was that the child’s parents “demanded that the school accommodate [the stepfather's] religious views. Because of the scope of his demands (separation of races, ban against mentioning ‘pagan’ holidays such as Christmas, Hannukah, Martin Luther King Day, etc.) or studying cultures other than northern-European, the School is unable to accommodate the child’s father’s views.”

This was on February 20th. On April 30th, Alice Anderson, the state’s License Supervisor for the Spokane office of the DEL, upheld Christensen’s finding on the complaint. In her letter, Anderson said she did not find “a request from the parent asking you to change the curriculum” but that she did find requests to honor dietary restrictions “and find alternate work for their child during the activities, such as holiday celebrations or lessons on Native Americans. (Areas where the parent objected to the curriculum.)”

Finer responded May 8th with a formal request to reverse the decision. In it he reiterated his primary argument that there was no evidence, whatsoever, that the staff had in any way dishonored “the child.” But he also expanded on his analysis that the state licensing officials were fundamentally misreading the underlying principles of religious accommodation that stem from federal civil rights laws. Here the question is how far the school should be required to go to accommodate a religious belief.

“Reasonableness is the test for religious accommodation under the law,” Finer wrote. “The Department has not applied this test.”

“Removing this child at every instance involving a prohibited topic would be impossible,” Finer wrote. “Even determining the parents’ boundaries presents problems. Well-known American holidays, on their face considered secular, would be a challenge to manage. For example, the Thanksgiving holiday is based upon the hebrew festival sukkot. Is this (sic) permissible for the child to partake in a lesson on Thanksgiving? Seemingly so, as it arises from the portion of the Bible cited with the approval in the family’s written directives. (The old testament feasts are found at Leviticus, Chapter 23). Does the child remain in the room while teachers discuss Abraham Lincoln’s using the Hebrew festival as the template for the Thanksgiving holiday, but get removed when the discussion brings up Native Americans and their role at the holiday?

“Another example. The family forbade symbols of race mixing. Can the classroom include a photograph of the current President–a child of a mixed race marriage? Just how does one accommodate this family’s religious demands and teach a multi-cultural program with a finite budget, a set number of staff, and just so much class space?”

“What I say to some of the parents who are really firm on what they want for their child in the way of academics is, ‘it doesn’t matter if your child can add and subtract, or do division, or do the decimal system, or reach chapter books. If they don’t walk out of here with a sense of respect and responsibility for other peoples’ space and other people, it doesn’t matter, does it?’”–Rita Thompson

Finer’s argument still wasn’t sinking in at DEL, however. On June 11th he received a letter with six checked boxes from DEL’s eastern Washington assistant area service manager Deborah O’Neil, succinctly reaffirming the violation, and pegging the infraction to Gwen Melcher’s November 11th letter and Melcher’s message to the parents that the Montessori environment “cannot possibly be the environment that you are looking for,” for the child. That message O’Neil concluded, violated the rule about honoring the child’s religious beliefs. She also claimed that Gwen Melcher had a conversation with Karen Christensen in which she told Christensen that “she did not want to exclude the child any longer” from the school’s activities.

Finer’s next appeal on Valley Montessori’s behalf was to Karri Livingston, the eastern Washington Service Manager for DEL. He reiterated his earlier arguments and strongly objected to the quote attributed to Melcher in O’Neil’s letter which, he wrote, was either inaccurate or out of context because “Melcher’s objections were to the new and unreasonable demands that, on a moment’s reflection, were inimical to a Montessori classroom’s operations.”

This time the message got through. What Finer had hoped would happen, had happened: through the administrative appeal process, the controversy had reached a level where a state lawyer assigned to DEL was called upon to review the facts of the case, and the agency’s decisions. Assistant Attorney General Nicole Koyama got involved to help Livingston prepare her response. As the appeal went to Livingston, Koyama and Finer were able to talk on the phone about the specifics of the case and the history of Valley Montessori’s efforts to work with the boy, the mother and her new husband.

“It sounded like it took her very little time, reading the materials, to realize what had happened,” Finer says. Koyama concurs with Finer that one of examples that resonated with her was his question of whether a photograph of the bi-racial President Obama could be displayed in the classroom without conflicting with the parents’ demands.

But Koyama also realized something else. The Assistant Attorney General says there is a related state rule (WAC 170-295-6010, regarding rules on discrimination) that should apply to the case and which required that the dispute be looked at in accordance with the “reasonable accommodations” guidelines referenced in federal law.

“When we looked at the facts that were specific to this complaint,” Koyama said, “we were of the belief that the facility had attempted to make reasonable accommodations available to this family.”

“Looking at the sentences in that letter [Gwen Melcher's November 11th letter] in isolation does cause concern,” Koyama added. “But the broader situation needs to be looked at and considered. And that’s what we did.”

On July 13th, the state notified Finer that Livingston, with Koyama’s assistance, had reversed the agency’s ruling on the matter by finding the complaint to be “not valid.”

In preparing this article we sought to interview Livingston and Karen Christensen about the events and circumstances that led to the initial finding that the school had violated the state rule. We also submitted questions in writing that the agency chose not to respond to.

Notwithstanding her July 13th letter to Finer reversing the agency’s initial finding on the complaint Livingston said, “I’m caught in the middle of a legal action.”

The boys parents are still angry, Livingston said, and “I can’t positively say it [the controversy] is over.”

“I’m in a bind about what to say,” she added. “But I feel I shouldn’t comment based on the possibility of further legal action.”

When asked if she would give permission for the interview with Christensen, Livingston said she would not and that, for the reasons cited above, she said she would ask that Christensen not comment on the case.

Although Gwen Melcher and Rita Thompson were relieved by Livingston’s letter, it’s clear the episode has had a lasting effect on them and the staff at the school that witnessed it.

They feared for their physical safety and, at the height of those fears, they were bewildered and demoralized that the state was investigating the school for misconduct.

“I can tell you how it felt for me,” Rita says. “When Henry David Thoreau was sent to prison [for civil disobedience in refusing to pay a poll tax] and Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him, Emerson asked Thoreau, ‘Henry, what are you doing in there?’ And he said, ‘Ralph, what are you doing out there?’ And that’s exactly how I felt about the Department of Early Learning. ‘What are you doing out there? Why aren’t you in here supporting us?’ That to me was a major blow.”

“First it was very frightening,” Gwen says, “and then it was disappointing. But we just had to get through it. Then when we met Jeffry it was like everything had been lifted. We felt, ‘okay, we really didn’t do something wrong.’ Even though we knew we really weren’t in the wrong. But the question was still there, what are we going to do if we don’t have a license?”

“Ultimately the right result was reached,” Finer says. “The system, quote, ‘worked.’ However, as is often the case, it took a long time. And in that time there was a lot of anxiety, grief, worry, and some real harrowing moments. I think Maria Montessori would say, ‘that’s what happens, you can prepare the environment but you cannot promise that every day is rosy.’

“If these folks did not have access to the Center for Justice, if they’d had to pony up thousands of dollars, if they had been frightened enough to just give in, this would have had a bad outcome and it would have been a shameful outcome. And I won’t say the system always works. But here’s a fact, it did work. It just took a while.”

–CFJ