Sally Svitavsky

SALLY SVITAVSKY, one of MLC's five founding teachers, worked primarily with younger kids but in MLC’s mixed-age environment was known and beloved to all—maybe best for her regular excursions to the Lloyd Center ice-skating rink. According to her son David, Sally grew interested in helping start MLC partly to find a different type of school for him. He'd been unhappy in a conventional school, but at MLC, "I felt like I had been set free and I came alive," David wrote in 2018.

Before being selected as a founding MLC teacher in 1968, Sally, from Wisconsin, had team-taught at the University of Wisconsin Laboratory School, worked as a school guidance counselor in Green Bay, and taught kindergarten in Portland for nine years. "Sally felt that she had been raised with almost total freedom," Manny Bernstein wrote in the PhD dissertation he researched at MLC. "She felt that all decisions being left to her may have made her a bit too insecure, [and she] was rearing her own nine-year-old boy with somewhat less freedom" but she "believe[d] in non-coerciveness."

Sally and her son David, around 1970

In her pre-MLC teaching, Bernstein wrote, Sally would test kindergartners developmentally in her classroom; toward the end of her first year at MLC she was surprised to find the five-year-olds "reached the same developmental level her former pupils had attained, without any formal approach to education."

Sally, sadly, was one of the first MLC founders to move along, drawn by the growing body-work movement. She became a massage therapist and studied with Ida Rolf, Judith Aston, and Moshe Feldenkrais. After working for a physical therapist for a number of years she became a counselor, opening a marriage and family practice and running seminars. According to David, “she really loved this work and established an enthusiastic and loyal group of patients and students.”

Sally Svitavsky (later Euster, née Imray) was born in 1935 in Portage, Wisconsin, graduated from Portage High School, and attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she earned a BS in Elementary Education and an MA in Guidance and Counseling. In addition to her work at the UWM Laboratory School and as a guidance counselor in Green Bay, Sally created the first kinescopes for the Purdue Television Project. Sally married and divorced Reed College professor Charles Svitavsky and later married Bill Euster, in 1976. They moved to Seattle, then to Mukilteo, WA, in the early '90s, where Sally continued to lead Feldenkrais movement classes until late in life, and where she died in 2008.

According to her obituary, Sally's parents were Donald and Thelma Imray, and she was survived by her husband Bill, her brother John Imray and sister-in-law Penny Imray, her son David and daughter-in-law Lisa Svitavsky, stepdaughters Sharon, Carol, and Lisa Euster, and granddaughters Naomi Fisher, Clarity Euster, and Dana Svitavsky. A memorial remembering Sally's life was held on December 13, 2008, in Seattle, with a request that remembrances be made to the PCC Farmland Trust.

[Adapted from the essay by Sam Lowry and David Svitavsky in the 50th Anniversary publication]