Abe Bialostosky

ABRAHAM BIALOSTOSKY was born in New York City and moved to Oregon after serving in the Army Air Corps during WWII. He and his brother bought a 50-acre farm in Damascus where they both raised their families. They went to Lewis and Clark College together on the GI bill and received their teaching degrees in 1951.

Abe was one of the original founders and faculty members of the Metropolitan Learning Center in 1968. Prior to that, he taught at Cleveland High School for 15 years and was part of a team-teaching experiment called G-28 during his last years there.

The following essay was written by Abe's daughter Carol for the 50th Anniversary publication in 2018.

In the summer of 1967, he and Emil Abramovic hatched the idea for the first “free or alternative” school in the Portland Public School district. Abe’s ideas were modeled after A.S Neill's Summerhill School, a co-educational boarding school in Suffolk, England, founded in 1921 and considered the original alternative ”free” school. Abe and Emil spent endless hours that summer coming up with the written proposal for MLC to get funding from the Oregon State Board of Education. And it won’t come as a surprise that at the time this was where Abe’s brother was working.

Abe and Emil agreed on the philosophy and concepts, but what the plan should look like and how to implement it involved a lot of lively discussions. These continued into the first years of MLC and beyond with all staff members, parents, children, and the neighborhood trying to figure out what MLC was all about. Abe taught at MLC until he retired in 1976. He passed away at an early age in 1982, but the legacy of MLC lives on and is a testament to his forward thinking and ability to make dreams become reality, his love of teaching and helping children, and his chutzpah.