The site is intended as a living museum, an archive and active repository for information and images. We want to give you access to a selection of everything we dig up and assemble concerning MLC’s origins, early years, decades of existence, people, legacy, significance, impact, and present day. For an introduction to the history, read Alisa Welch's essay and the story of Summerhill, and view Paty Baum's short documentary.

The site is also a way for us to actively seek the history that is in your heads. Please read the SHARE YOUR HISTORY tab for details. We like to call this quest the MLC HISTORY PROJECT. We hope it might be, in important ways, a community writing project. Show us your hidden writer! It is through "crowdsourcing" content, encouraging every one of you to add your perspective, that we will generate MLC's true history.

Posts are organized into six categories:

Stories, Photos+Video, People, History, Scholarship, and News+Events.

There are four subcategories under People: Founders, Teachers+Staff, Alumni, and In Memoriam (for those no longer with us). There, and in a few other places, one must click through a "jump" page to get to the posts—apologies.

To be easily scrollable, the HOME page shows just a few posts; to see more posts per page in any category, all at once, use the buttons on the home page or the NAVIGATE THIS SITE bar.

To see every post in the order created, go to LATEST POSTS and scroll through the pages. To return to the home page, use the HOME button, or the MLC logo, always at upper left.

We hope you find it easy enough to get around; if you have suggestions for improvement please let us know! Unfortunately, our web-builder, Hostinger, does not offer searchability. We'll do our best to make what you're looking for easy to find.

a website devoted to the history of the Metropolitan Learning Center, founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1968

WELCOME TO MLCALUMNI.COM

Please use the following links to other active sites that offer current news, information, and activity:

Portland Public Schools' site for current MLC information: www.pps.net/mlc

The Parent-Teacher-Student Association (PTSA) site for meetings, events, and fundraising: www.mlcptsa.org

The MLC Community Facebook page: www.facebook.com/groups/MLCPDX

The MLC Alumni Facebook page: www.facebook.com/groups/2219242971

The page for the Friends of MLC advocacy group: www.friendsofmlc.org

MLC's Wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Learning_Center_(Portland,_Oregon)

The MLC History Project was conceived by Alisa Welch, then PTSA Chair, in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary celebration held at MLC in September 2018—of which she was also the main organizer. Ideas were sifted at meetings in 2019 attended by Alisa Welch, Karl Abramovic, Lisa Abramovic, Paty Baum, Sam Lowry, and Sarah Berry. Developing the website was attempted several times by Sam Lowry before eventual success in 2025, thanks to Hostinger, and to advances in web-builder user-friendliness.

MLC logo by David Chelsea (Celsi) from a poster or magazine cover ... date+details forthcoming !!