November 13, 2008
A family-friendly zone: The School of Law’s Claire Sherman Thomas Remote Learning Center
Eric and Melissa Harwood are a married couple with a 10-month-old son named Alex. They’re also third-year students in the UW School of Law — both of them. But they don’t stress too much about how to take care of Alex and still get to class, because at the law school these days, it’s possible to do both at the same time.
How? By using the Claire Sherman Thomas Remote Learning Center. The center is a room equipped with six monitors on which students can watch classes via a closed circuit network. All it takes is a professor who is willing to wear a microphone.
For the Harwoods, the availability of the center made it possible to have their son while they were still in law school, and for Melissa to continue her education without a break after the birth.
“For the last 10 months we’ve used [the center] almost every day during the week for a combination of things,” Melissa said. “We’ve used it to watch our classes, we’ve used it as a place to be with Alex so we could trade off and go to classes. That’s the way we use it mainly now. One of us will be with the baby in the room and the other will get to go to class.”
A remote learning center was one of the things on a wish list presented to the planning committee when the new William H. Gates Hall, where the law school is located, was still on the drawing board.
“I do a lot of counseling with students, so I’d heard students talk about times when they’d had to bring their kids to class,” said Sandra Madrid, assistant dean for students and community development at the law school. “The professors here are so inclusive and they were flexible, but kids can be distracting not only for the parents, but for other students. So we thought having a room like this would be a great idea for student parents.”
After the idea was accepted, former Dean Ron Hjorth was talking to Kate Sako, a 1988 graduate of the school, to ask if she would be interested in funding one of the new building’s rooms. Sako was immediately attracted to the remote learning center.
“It jumped out at me as a unique and important addition to the school,” she said. “I was impressed that it was part of the building’s design.”
Sako, who was not a parent in law school but now has one child and is expecting another, decided to name the room after “one of my heroes,” Claire Sherman Thomas. Thomas was on the faculty of Women Studies when Sako was an undergraduate, and Sako served as a TA in one of her classes.
Thomas, who retired in 1995, can remember a time when bringing children to a law school would have been unthinkable. She graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1949 — one of two women in the class, and though she’d done well in school and passed the bar right away, she was unable to find a job. Later, she applied for a job in economics research for a bank (her undergraduate degree was in economics) and the hiring official told her straight out, “You have every qualification I’d want for someone in this job, but I would never hire a woman.”
When Thomas began teaching at the UW in the 1970s, after her children were grown, she subtitled her class, Women and the Law, “What I Didn’t Learn in Law School.” That’s because, she said, her law school training included nothing on women’s rights or gender discrimination. She eventually wrote a book, Sex Discrimination in a Nutshell, to help fill the void.
Now she’s pleased to see her name on the center, and even more pleased that women are having an easier time pursuing legal careers than she did.
The center includes more than just the classroom monitors. It also has a sofa and a couple of upholstered chairs, a sink, refrigerator and microwave and some toys for the kids. There are two private interior rooms where nursing mothers can breast feed their babies or express breast milk. One of the private rooms has a crib for sleeping babies.
But beyond all its amenities, the center offers something else.
“The best thing about the room was the synergy that happened with the student parents there (both mothers and fathers),” said Lisa Kremer, a mother of two who graduated from the school in June. “We’d start talking about how to manage our babies, or how to manage our classes, or how to get through a difficult reading assignment. It turned into a wonderful place for bonding and support among students who are parents.”
Kremer was and the Harwoods are members of Parents Attending Law School, or PALS, one of 42 student interest groups at the school.
It’s all a major draw for prospective students, Madrid said. “We have a lot of people who visit, either in person or on the Internet, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen anything like this at any other law school I’ve visited.'”
Last year Sako and Thomas came to visit the center at Kremer’s invitation. “It was so exciting to have them there and be able to tell them how grateful we are for the room,” Kremer said.
No doubt the kids are grateful too, though many of them aren’t big enough to express it. But their participation in Mom or Dad’s education is recognized. On graduation day, they’re invited to walk across the stage with their parent, and each child gets a miniature diploma without ever taking a test.
