He Showed Me What One Person Could Do: A Tribute to Jon Ketler

Article By: Chris Unger

A message hit my LinkedIn inbox a couple of days ago from someone I’d met just recently, at an event in Boston. She thought I would want to know: Jon Ketler had passed away.

It hit me like a brick.

I sat with it for a while, not quite sure what to do with the weight of it. Here was a man who had given so much of himself — to kids, to a city, to an idea — and who had shared so liberally with me his thinking and his story over the years. Gone.

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade writing about the need for a revolution in education. When I go looking for proof that it’s possible — real, on-the-ground proof, not theory — Jon Ketler is one of the first names I reach for. He was one of the first to open my eyes to the idea that a single individual, with enough imagination and nerve, could plug into a public school system and build something far better than what most kids ever get access to.

It started with an art teacher who got restless.

In the early 2000s, Jon was teaching ceramics and sculpture in one of Tacoma’s big comprehensive high schools. He liked it. He liked the kids. But he kept coming back to the same nagging question: why teach art completely disconnected from people actually making art? Tacoma, after all, was home to working artists, glassblowers, sculptors, and institutions like the Chihuly Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum. Jon wondered what would happen if kids worked side-by-side with artists in their studios, as apprentices and collaborators, instead of just hearing about art from him for fifty minutes a day.

That question became the Tacoma School of the Arts — SOTA. It opened in 2001 with 170 students, in a collection of repurposed storefronts downtown: an old music store, a former post office, a performing arts center, connected by sidewalks and public transit. Students could earn PE credit walking between buildings. The whole city became the campus, by design.

Jon once told me how it actually started: he wrote the idea down so he could explain it clearly, then just started sharing it with anyone who’d listen. “Once you write it down, once you start sharing it with people, then you have to back it up by being willing to do it and to move forward,” he said.

The idea that students could work and learn across buildings throughout a downtown, mentored by working professionals instead of sitting through banal lectures with no connection to their lives — that idea blew me away the first time I encountered it, and it still does.

Then he did it again. And again.

A few years later, Jon and his colleagues asked whether they could build something similar rooted in science and math. Tacoma happens to be home to the largest city park in Washington state, jutting into the Puget Sound, full of marine life and old-growth forest. So that’s where they put it — SAMI, the Science and Math Institute, launched in a handful of portables tucked into that park, right by the water, so students could do original research alongside University of Washington marine researchers and intern at the zoo next door. Not much to look at, at first. But it meant kids were doing real science in a real place, not memorizing it out of a textbook.

Years later, with the help of a bond, those portables became a beautiful, award-winning, sun-filled building of wood and glass, right next to the zoo. I remember visiting it and just being stunned by the light.

Then came IDEA — the School of Industrial Design, Engineering, and the Arts. This is the part of Jon’s story I find myself telling most often, because it captures exactly who he was. This time, the district didn’t hand him a downtown storefront near artists or a park near the Sound. They gave him a vacant elementary school in the middle of a residential neighborhood, nowhere near the kind of business partners the model depended on. Given the history of SOTA and SAMI, that placement didn’t seem to make sense at all.

But Jon being Jon, he didn’t wait for the world to hand him proximity. He built it — inviting businesses into the building itself, free office space in exchange for mentoring students. A furniture company. An industrial designer. A skateboard company. A bike shop. If the school wasn’t going to be positioned next to potential partners, he brought the partners into the school. If the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad, Jon just rearranged the mountain.

Kristin Tinder, who co-founded and co-directed SAMI alongside Jon, later confirmed the story almost exactly as I’d remembered it: the team put forward an RFP to community groups, bringing businesses and resources “into a school… in a residential neighborhood.” Same idea, different geography, solved by flipping who moved toward whom.

Melissa Moffett, who ran community development at SOTA before helping build Next Move, described the same instinct — start doing the thing, let the proof follow: “That’s what John did when he started the school… once we were able to prove that this was something people really wanted, then the district started funding that program completely.” Her own approach, learned from watching him work: “We’re not taking no for an answer, we’re asking you how we can make this happen.”

And as if three schools weren’t enough, Jon and his team also helped build and run the Next Move internship program — available not just to students at SOTA, SAMI, and IDEA, but to every high school student in Tacoma Public Schools. Again: mind blown.

The Man Behind the Schools

What I remember most, though, isn’t the buildings. It’s Jon himself — endlessly generous with his time and his story, always willing to let me visit, always willing to talk it through.

Going back over the last several years of messages between us, I was reminded of the time he hopped on a video call with colleagues — Monica, Alexa, and Britney — to talk with my education entrepreneurship doctoral students about how these schools came to be. The four of them were huddled together in a small office on the second floor of a beautiful old marble post office building the school had leased after the post office moved to newer digs. A handful of people crammed into a repurposed government building, cheerfully explaining how they’d rebuilt public education from the inside out.

On that same call, they talked about something that doesn’t show up in news coverage: how hard they worked, on purpose, at building a culture that could hold this together. Monica put it bluntly — you can’t just build the culture once and hope it holds. “You have to really maintain it all of the time.” And Jon named the philosophy underneath it all: “It’s been really important from the very beginning to be building something that people have ownership of, and to realize that we’re never finished — a culture about change, about continuing to look at things differently and continue to push forward, and not be settled with what has been accomplished.” That, maybe more than any single building, is what he actually built.

And when I started my podcast — my first foray into that world — I made sure Jon was part of the second episode, on how schools like his actually get built. He sat alongside Trace Pickering, co-founder of Iowa BIG in Cedar Rapids, and Ben Owens, who helped build Tri-County Early College in rural western North Carolina. Three communities, telling nearly the same story: find what your community already has, and build the school around it.

Why His Passing Hit So Hard

Jon belongs, in my mind, to a small group of people I think of as giants. Trace Pickering and Shawn Cornally, who started Iowa BIG. Ben Owens, Adam Haigler, and Ben Pendarvis at Tri-County Early College. Tom Trigg and Mike Slagle, who built the CAPS program in Blue Valley. Chip Linehan and Laura Shibilla, who dreamed up Building 21 while getting their doctorates at Harvard. Larry Rosenstock and Rob Riordan at High Tech High, who both sketched out the idea in their minds while teaching in Cambridge MA. Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, who started the Big Picture Schools in response to Peter McWalters request for a new vocational school in Providence RI. Matt Wunder, Don Brann, Chet Pipkin, and Nicole Assisi, who co-founded the Da Vinci Schools in Los Angeles.

People who saw a new possibility and galvanized the relationships and resources to make it real. People focused on the learner first, not the curriculum — who believed students doing real work on real problems that actually interested them could change everything.

We can talk about state policy that might support this kind of innovation, or the philanthropies trying to fund it. But what amazes me, every time, is the individuals who by hook, by crook, by ingenuity and sheer courage, get it off the ground anyway — without waiting for permission or perfect conditions.

Jon was one of the first to show me that up close, back in 2013. Before that, I’d only read about schools like this. He let me see it in action — and on that same call, he offered what I’ve come to think of as his real charge to the rest of us: “Find a place, find a context, find some friends, and find a way to water the seed… get inspired by them.” Not copy them. Get inspired. That’s the whole argument of my life’s work, in nine words.

So, thank you, Jon, for being who you were — and for giving me the time to tell your story. I’m sorry that your family, your colleagues, and the city of Tacoma have lost you. But I’m immeasurably grateful I got to know you at all.

It is people like you — with a vision, a heart, and the imagination to build something — who count. And who remind the rest of us what’s actually possible, if we’re willing to go build it.

As the person who alerted me of Jon’s passing said:  “ He really impacted how I see the function of schools and how we can see our community.”  But then, something even deeper:  “It’s pretty hard to think about a world where he is not here to chat.”

Will miss you, Jon.  And thanks for all you did, not only for the youth of Tacoma, but for the colleagues you made friends with, and the inspiration you afforded others.  Including me.

Chris Unger is a Teaching Professor in the Graduate Programs in Education at Northeastern University, including the Doctor of Education program, and Director of the LEARN Lab. His work focuses on the design and proliferation of learner-centered, agency-focused schools and the support of change agents in education.