Don O’Neill: I am guilty of bullying

This one was personal.

For the last 22 years that I have been on the radio, we have tried to use the platform we have been given to do good in the world. With our listeners, we have worked on over 123 projects, and collectively we have raised over $10 million in our various stints at radio stations throughout the U.S.

Together we helped a 90-year-old African American woman rebuild her home after Hurricane Katrina, we helped save a Seattle police detective’s life by buying stem cells the City of Seattle wouldn’t pay for, and we also bought a service dog so that an 8-year-old wouldn’t have to carry her oxygen tank around school.

My grandpa use to tell me “that you can’t help everybody everywhere but don’t let that stop you from helping someone somewhere.”

That is one of the platitudes I hope guides my life and I think it is embedded in both Ron and myself as humans and as broadcasters.

Most of the time when we jump in to try and help someone, we are guided by compassion, concern, and the desire to help the greater good. But sometimes I get angry, I get mad, and I get livid when I see inner-city children that have been forgotten, lied to, toyed with, abandoned, and marginalized. Sometimes it gets personal. When I see a bully, I become a bully.

Cleveland High School

That is exactly what happened at Seattle’s Cleveland High School over the past seven years. These kids and their community were lied to.

I have had a tone problem most of my life. As I have grown older I have tried to work with authority instead of always challenging it. But when it came to Cleveland High School, the superintendent, Larry Nyland, was no one you could work with.

At a recent event at Cleveland High School, I spoke with Nyland in person. I asked if he was going to publicly apologize for never getting the field built at Cleveland over the past seven years, even knowing the money was sitting in the bank. He said, no. I asked him if he had ever been to the field at Cleveland, he said no.

I asked him when the field was going to be built. He said he has people that take care of these things and I’d have to ask them. I asked him if he knew when they would start construction and he said he wasn’t sure. I asked him how the food was at the event and he said “great” and then he left.

Superintendent Nyland never addressed the packed gymnasium full of inner-city children and their parents. He had an opportunity to say he was sorry, but instead, he turned, and he left, and never explained why those kids didn’t have the same field that all the other children do throughout the school district. That’s cowardice, in my opinion. Someone needed to push back. Someone needed to be a bit of a bully on behalf of these children, and I don’t apologize for that.

We let it rip on the radio when it came to Superintendent Nyland and his staff. It wasn’t personal. It had to be done.

Nyland left in July and there is a new superintendent by the name of Denise Juneau. She not only enters the arena as the first Native American female superintendent in Seattle, but evidently, she also felt it was important to build a field.

As you can see from the photo above, under her leadership, after almost seven years, the construction for the field at Cleveland High School has finally started.

I’ll leave you with this: After their final game of the year last fall, I was asked to speak to the young men that play football at Cleveland. As we gathered together in the final huddle at Memorial Stadium, I told them that they were “my someone somewhere.”

I told them that we would not give up the fight for their social justice. I told them that they were not forgotten, and I apologized on behalf of our community for failing them. I told them we would not stop challenging Superintendent Nyland’s administration until the shovels were in the ground back at Cleveland and their cleats were on the field.

The shovels are in the ground at Cleveland. Big ones.

In a few months, it will be time for those kids to lace up their cleats. In the meantime, we will be watching.

So remember, you can’t help “everybody everywhere,” but who is your “someone, somewhere?”

I’ll see you on the radio.

~don

You can hear Don  O’Neill everyday at 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. on KIRO Radio 97.3 FM.

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