A CVHS grad may be the ‘next person’ from Howard U

When Birdie Bachman was in her mother’s womb nearly two decades ago, her grandmother, D.G. Garcia said a prayer, almost an incantation. She asked that God give her grandchild certain qualities.

“I said, ‘Dear Lord, I’d like her to have this and this, and could you sprinkle some of this? How about a little bit of that?’” Garcia told RANGE in an interview early this year. “When that child was born, she was the most magnificent human being I’ve ever seen.”

(Of Birdie’s brother, Baer, Garcia said, “He’s handsome, too.”)

One quality Garcia requested began manifesting in Birdie at an early age: an uncanny ability to “size people up” and, if needed, take action.

Since then, Birdie has built herself into an advocate of underrepresented communities in Central Valley schools, which have offered her not only a primary education but also a crash course in activism. She wants to carry that experience into a career as a human rights lawyer. In June, she graduated from Central Valley High School (CVHS) and on Monday will start classes at Howard University.

But it was a long road to get here — one she started on as a toddler.

In one of the earliest instances of Birdie taking action, Garcia painted a picture of baby Birdie having a playdate with a young boy at her parents’ home. The boy was hogging her toys, and even “nudged her” to get one of the toys for himself.

Birdie looked around the room and noticed the adults in the room weren’t doing anything about the boy taking control of her toys, Garcia remembered. She knew that sharing was a value everyone should practice, and took control of the situation.

“She walked up to him,” Garcia said. “He faced her. She asked for something, and he didn’t give it. … And the next thing I witnessed … she gave him the who’s-in-charge bump. They do it in football. They walk to each other and then they bump the chest, and then they go on about their business.”

Garcia had never before seen anyone — of any age — assert their power like that.

“She wanted to say, ‘Not gonna happen,’” Garcia said. “‘Not here, not with my toys. Because what we’re supposed to be doing is sharing.’ … And it never happened again, and they became good friends.”

There was sizing up, and then there was action. It’s a powerful — perhaps necessary — capacity for someone who was born to a white father and Black mother in Liberty Lake, a largely white city in Eastern Washington. The city is 90% white, compared to 78.5% in Washington state as a whole, according to Census data .

Perhaps Birdie’s sense of needing to assert herself stems from a strong family culture of participation in the public square. Originally from California, Garcia is a former Liberty Lake City Council member and a regular attendee at public meetings. With Birdie’s help, her mother Maria Garcia-Bachman organized women’s marches in Spokane for years. The three women attended a City Council meeting in December 2023 to oppose a controversial resolution allowing the body to control the city library after it had allowed a challenged queer book to remain on the shelves.

This kind of work is important in a community that didn’t orient itself around the experiences of Black people and other minorities.

Fledgling activism

Birdie’s early high school experience was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, at Ridgeline High School. During that time, she noticed signs of a community that didn’t value diversity when her high school canceled an assembly planned by the Diversity Club and instead had the students record a short video.

“There’s a known dislike for diverse clubs or clubs that don’t always [represent] the majority in this area,” Birdie said. “In Spokane Valley, not everyone likes us.”

Birdie later transferred to CVHS to finish high school. There, she dedicated herself to political education projects, starting a Students United for Reproductive Freedom Club and circulating a petition to address what she called “racial bias” at CVSD.

As a member of the Diversity Club, Birdie helped organize assemblies, including this year’s Martin Luther King Day event, which the school had scheduled for Friday, January 12. While planning the assembly, though, she didn’t know it would become another test of her ability to stand up for herself and her community.

On the prior Tuesday — as Birdie and her colleagues were finalizing the event’s details — she learned through the club’s adviser that CVHS was canceling the event, despite months of planning by the club and, Birdie said, approval from school administrators.

Marla Nunberg, a spokesperson for the Central Valley School District (CVSD), told RANGE the students were unprepared to execute the event. In place of an assembly, the administration wanted teachers to present a slideshow or a lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr., to their individual classrooms.

Birdie marched to the school office to confront the administrators who’d made the decision and convince them the club was, in fact, ready to host the student body to an MLK Day presentation. Over the next couple of days, Birdie and the Diversity Club students convinced the school to let the assembly go ahead. It was a normal high school event, if you don’t count the extra effort it took to get it over the finish line.

Fighting for the assembly

As she waited in the school office to talk to an administrator, Birdie texted Garcia-Bachman.

“I can’t talk much,” she wrote. “Waiting for a meeting. The assembly has been canceled. We’re trying to fix it. I’ll be respectful.”

Then she heard the school office phone ring, and Birdie knew it was her mother calling. She listened as the receptionist confirmed to Garcia-Bachman that the assembly had been canceled.

When they hung up, “the secretary looked at me and she said, ‘Birdie, you need to stop texting people. You need to stop telling people,’” Birdie told RANGE in an interview the week of the cancellation. “They didn’t want people to find out about this.”

Birdie met with Central Valley School District (CVSD) Dean of Students Jacqui Monks, who that day was the only administrator in the building. Birdie recalled that Monks “kept saying, ‘We want you to get it right. … We don’t think you’re prepared.’”

Monks did not return a voice message or an email from RANGE requesting comment and listing specific questions for this story. But Nunberg responded, insisting that the students had in fact been unprepared to deliver the assembly.

“They didn’t have any organization or details worked out of what they were doing,” Nunberg said, alleging the students didn’t know who would deliver which parts of the script.

Birdie said students were ready.

In an interview, she described the club’s preparation: “We have an advertising committee; we have an art committee; we have a script committee. Each of those groups had their role. We came together for the first couple of meetings, and we said, ‘What do we want our assembly to be about?’ And we basically decided that at the MLK Assembly this year, we want to focus on how our differences are what make us equal.”

The students had prepared speeches and printed 18 one-by-one-foot pieces of art displaying photographs of King’s activism. They even anticipated that crowd members — some of whom would sit in bleachers near the rafters — would not be able to engage with the presentation from a distance. So they decided they would ask the students to come to the stage and sign their names to a piece of art as a participatory element. Everything was in order on their end, she said.

But after telling Birdie the club was not ready, Monks told her there was “nothing I can do,” Birdie said. She suggested Birdie meet with the principal, and Birdie went home for the day.

Garcia-Bachman was angry. That evening, she sat down and wrote an email to Cindy Sothen, the executive academic officer for the Central Valley School District, to complain about the cancellation.

“I heard today the MLK, Jr. assembly is being canceled and am appalled it’s happening, and with such flimsy, offensive reasoning,” Garcia-Bachman wrote. “Ms. Monks seems extremely dismissive and I am shocked, not just by how she talked to the students who’ve orchestrated this assembly over the course of three months but also how she challenged them by saying assemblies have to captivate the young audience.”

She didn’t think it should matter whether the students were prepared; this was a learning experience that gives them the chance to succeed or fail.

“I was in high school,” Garcia-Bachman wrote. “You were in high school and I presume Ms. Monks went to high school. There were very few assemblies run by teachers and staff that captured my attention and it wasn’t without frequent reminders from the adults in charge that crowds quieted long enough to hear whatever it was the grownups needed us to know.”

Sothen did not return an email from RANGE requesting comment, but Nunberg said Sothen talked to Garcia-Bachman on the phone after receiving the email, which RANGE has read.

In her email, Garcia-Bachman proposed that CVHS administration hear the students out. They did. That Thursday morning, the students gathered their materials for the assembly and presented them to the school administration, including Louie.

“We basically said, ‘We’ve been prepared. This is our layout. We have everything here,’” Birdie said. “At one point they were like, ‘We actually need to physically see [the materials] to make sure you guys are ready. So we had people run up to the room, grab everything they asked for. We brought it down here. … But we were prepared.”

Nunberg did acknowledge the work the students did to get the assembly across the finish line, saying Birdie “worked to get the Diversity Club organized … and then they were able to have that assembly.”

Whether the students in the club had been prepared or not, under Birdie’s pressure, the school acquiesced, putting the assembly back on the schedule.

Garcia-Bachman saw a pattern in the cancellation. In her email to Sothen — sent the day she learned of the assembly cancellation — she wondered aloud about the district’s commitment to diversity, citing racist slurs her children had heard slung in hallways.

“My half-BLACK children have told me on numerous occasions about the use of the N-word around the halls of Ridgeline and CV … just like saying hello,”  Garcia-Bachman wrote. “Does the admin actually care? When was the last required diversity training? How many Black, Asian and Latino teachers/staff does the district employ? When’s the last time the district did a recruitment activity to seek out diversity.”

RANGE asked Nunberg the same questions, and she responded, saying the last diversity training the district held was in the 2022-’23 academic year. Last year, they did a different training focused on Social-Emotional Learning . Nunberg said this training hit some of the same aspects of diversity training, emphasizing a “sense of belonging together.” She also said individual school improvement plans are designed to include a sense of belonging and equity.

In a brief phone interview, Nunberg admitted that the staff of the school was not as diverse as the student body. She sent RANGE a detailed breakdown comparing racial diversity among staff with racial diversity among students at CVSD. The numbers show disparities.

While more than 20% of students are nonwhite, a little more than 3% of faculty represent a racial minority. The disparity was most pronounced for the Latinx community at CVSD — while 7.17% of students identify as Hispanic or Latinx, only 0.8% of staff do. A little more than 2% of students identify as Black, while about .9% of staff do.

Nunberg said the district is planning to address these gaps as a long-term project, noting an official strategic plan developed in January 2023, which can be viewed here .

“One of our initiatives underneath that is to develop and implement recruitment and hiring processes that promote a diverse representation of staff that reflects our student body,” Nunberg said, adding that any reported racist incidents are investigated through established school policies.

Becoming the ‘next person’

This past weekend, Birdie’s parents helped her move into the dormitories at Howard, the historically Black Washington DC university that’s produced some of the most influential Black figures in American history, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — the first Black member of the nation’s highest judiciary body — and Kamala Harris, who is currently the first Black woman running for the presidency at the top of a major party ticket.

Over the weekend, Birdie attended events where speakers talked to the incoming class about the grand opportunities that awaited. Stevie Wonder, whose granddaughter is part of her class, was at an event she attended Sunday night, she shared with excitement.

“They talked about Kamala and all of the amazing alumni, from Taraji P. Henson … and Tony Morrison,” a celebrated actor and Nobel-winning author, respectively. “They were talking about, ‘You are going to be that next person. You don’t have to think: oh, what if I am that next person? We are going to do that.'”

Birdie is particularly excited for the introductory courses she’s taking this coming term, which starts on Monday, in Black politics and Black feminist theory (though she’s not as excited for the lone math class she’ll have to take).

Birdie will major in political science with a pre-law track. She hopes to write for the student newspaper, The Hilltop and to spin her already robust credentials into a career as a human rights attorney. She believes her advocacy for the diverse students at CVHS will give her perspective as he moves toward her professional goals.

“I wouldn’t have wanted any of this to happen in the first place,” Birdie said. “But it teaches me so many lessons. The world is never going to be perfect, and you have to stand up for what you believe in.”

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