On a Monday morning in early July, Liz Mahlum walked through Grant’s large front doors for one of the first times in two years. It was sweltering and she was jittery, ready to set to work unpacking her new office.
But her morning would not be spent getting ready for school.
As she eagerly opened the door to the space that would soon become her second home, the first thing that hit her was the smell. Rancid. Hot. Overpowering. “In my head I heard my husband say to me, ‘You have the world’s most sensitive nose,’” says Mahlum. “‘It doesn’t smell bad in here. There’s not a dead mouse.’”
But her instincts were right. When Mahlum discovered the tiny, decomposing body behind an empty file cabinet she couldn’t help but chuckle. She had received Grant’s quintessential welcome home present.
“I laughed,” she says, “and then I went and got bleach wipes and plastic gloves and opened all the windows and got a fan to suck the air out.” By now, her problem solving skills are second nature.
After working as a guidance counselor at Grant for 10 years, Mahlum left the school in 2013 to pursue another counseling position at Scappoose High School.
“Leaving was probably one of the best things professionally that I’ve ever done,” she says now, “because it disrupted my belief system. As educators…we have to constantly reevaluate what we believe about education. It took me to leave Grant to see how I could be such a better advocate for students, and really how to use that advocacy in a much broader capacity.”
This fall, Mahlum is bringing her newfound insight back to Grant, this time as one of the school’s new vice principals. Her focus now, more than ever, is on the student body.
“Getting a promotion isn’t always about getting a new fancy office,” she says, nose still crinkled in remembrance of the dead mouse. “I could be anywhere in (this) building and my space and location won’t change how I do my job.”
Mahlum was born in Vancouver, Wash., but spent the majority of her childhood growing up in rural communities throughout Oregon as her father pursued a law degree.
One of four girls, Mahlum says that she didn’t connect the dots until later in life that her self-employed parents struggled to make ends meet. “I always thought it was frugal,” says Mahlum. “I didn’t realize that when we only got $100 for school clothes for the year that was because that’s all my parents could afford.”
Yet her family’s tense financial situation never defined their relationships. Her parents stressed the importance of education. “They always reminded me…that I was going to go to college,” says Mahlum. “But I also had to earn my way to college.” Basketball would end up becoming her gateway.
At a young age, Mahlum’s height seemed to skyrocket past your typical middle-schooler’s. By 13, she had reached 6-feet-2 inches. Her father had signed her up to play on a co-ed competitive basketball team, but she ended up being the only girl. Mahlum didn’t mind, but her heart wasn’t ever in the sport. She played because she had to.
“I don’t know what would’ve happened had I not gotten a scholarship,” she says now. “It was like, ‘You are going to get a scholarship and you will play basketball.’”
She steadily gained recognition and shortly after graduating from Thurston High School in Springfield, Mahlum was recruited to play Division I basketball at a number of colleges throughout the country. She chose Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif.
While earning her undergraduate degree and playing basketball, Mahlum, then 19, met her now husband, Adam Mahlum, who was a football player at St. Mary’s. Adam Mahlum vividly remembers the first time he met her.
“We were working out in the weight room,” he recalls. “I saw Liz — she was on one of those recumbent bikes — and, like, my jaw dropped. And I started drooling…I turned to my buddy Ryan and I’m like, ‘I’m gonna marry that woman.’”
It took months for him to work up the courage to talk to her. “I wasn’t good at small talk,” he says. “I finally introduced myself, and I of course knew exactly who she was. But she thought my name was Chad.”
After learning his name, the two eventually connected over their competitive natures and soon started dating. Then living together. They spent roughly a year after college in the Bay area before Mahlum decided she wanted to move back to Oregon and settle near Portland.
He followed her and they married. At the time, Liz Mahlum worked as an operations manager at Old Navy. Unexpectedly, the job helped her fit a missing puzzle piece.
“That’s kind of when I realized how much I really loved kids,” she says. She quickly determined that working the retail grind wouldn’t sustain her forever. In 2001, Mahlum enrolled in the school-counseling program at Lewis and Clark College and went on to get her master’s in education.
She landed at Grant and found that it was more than just a workplace. Grant English teacher Mary Rodeback remembers meeting Mahlum. She had a concern about a student and sought out Mahlum’s expertise. It set the tone for their relationship.
“She was remarkable in the way that she sort of pulled a team together to surround this student and the issue,” says Rodeback now. “It was evident from that experience that she was…incredibly devoted to putting her students’ needs first.”
“It took me to leave Grant to see how I could be such a better advocate for students, and really how to use that advocacy in a much broader capacity.” -Liz Mahlum
Mahlum continued to leave her mark at Grant. She spearheaded the adoption of a college-preparatory website called Naviance that helps students throughout the college application process.
She developed strong relationships with staff, sometimes going over to workout and shower at their houses between work and heading home in the evenings.
“We have joked all along that, you know, our guest room is the Liz Mahlum Suite,” says Rodeback, who would only half-jokingly offer Mahlum a place to stay if she was ever leaving Portland too late at night to make it all the way home.
But Mahlum grew tired of the commute back and forth to Scappoose. She wanted to spend more time with her twin daughters, and so when a counseling position opened in 2013 at the local high school, she decided to apply.
“It was kind of one of those things that I didn’t expect,” she says. “But you know, lessons in life happen for really intentional reasons. And had I stayed in Portland this whole time, I would’ve never gotten my administrative license. And so it’s interesting for me to think of how certain decisions can change trajectories.”
Life at Scappoose High School shifted Mahlum’s mindset.
“There were things that I missed about Grant and there were things that I did not miss about Grant at all,” says Mahlum. “When you’re in a space for so long, you can really develop blind spots about your practice.
“When you change communities and what communities value and what communities expect, it really causes you as an individual to kind of check yourself again and say, ‘Well, does this align to what I believe?’”
The most apparent difference between the schools was the sense of school cohesion a small student body creates.
Mahlum says that Grant felt somewhat disconnected by comparison.
“It’s interesting that you can be in an urban center that is so rich and provides so many opportunities, and as a result your student body can be scattered,” she says. “One of the virtues of being in a city is you have so many opportunities. There’s so much to do. Out here (in Scappoose), what’re we gonna do on Friday? ‘Let’s go to the football game!’”
She also noticed that students came to her with personal issues more than they did college-related questions, something she highlights is the opposite at Grant.
“The vast majority of our kids did not go to a four-year college,” says Mahlum of the Scappoose student population. “And that…was very powerful for me to experience that kids were still ridiculously successful and kids were doing amazing things that I never got to experience at Grant because the four-year college mantra and push is nearly exclusive there.”
The realization moved Mahlum toward getting her administrative license. Starting in August 2014 and ending last June, Mahlum took classes every Wednesday night from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Her goals for having an impact on systemic change served as motivation.
She got the call that she had been selected for the Vice Principal position in early June and has been working throughout the summer to start the readjustment process. She recognizes that Grant has a lot of room to grow.
“I would really like to find ways that we can celebrate other types of excellence,” says Mahlum. “Because kids do excellent things all the time, but society only wants to look at success that fits into different types of boxes. And we do a really good job of filling those boxes at Grant.”
For Mahlum, finding a balance between work and family is equally important. She sees it as one of her biggest challenges.
“I made a promise to my children and to my husband that when I’m home, I’m home,” she says. “I want to make sure and really honor what they need from me.”
It’s the week before school starts. The previously empty Grant halls are now starting to fill and chatter can be heard emanating from different opened doors as teachers and staff run around unpacking, preparing, strategizing for the first day.
“It’s like going home,” Mahlum says. “I get to go back to the people who really made me the educator that I am today…I would be being completely dishonest if I was to not say that I couldn’t have asked for a better first administrative job.”
