Kathleen Stake Brose
West Seattle High School
Class of 1975
Kathleen devoted nearly 10 years of her life in an effort to persuade the Seattle School District to cease using skin color as a determining factor in decision determining school assignments for schools in the district. In 2006 her case went before the US Supreme Court (Parents vs. The Seattle School District) and in June 2007 the court agreed that she was right.
Kathleen’s eldest daughter was denied her first 3 choices High Schools of choice and sent across the city to another school. Kathleen took it upon herself to find out why. So against all odds she formed her own 501-(C3) non-profit corporation, Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS), recruited members from all races, landed a law firm that agreed to provide Pro Bono services and sued the Seattle School District. She put together a website explaining why this action was taken and forced the SSD to temporarily stop using the racial tie breaker in the school assignment formula.
Over the next 5 years the District fought the case. Their attorneys prevailed in lower courts several times but PICS attorneys won key victories as well. When the 9th District Court of the US ruled in favor of the School District, Kathleen appealed to the US Supreme Court. They agreed the case had enough merit to discuss it further, and in December 2006, they heard the case. Kathleen went to Washington, DC to view it and was featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and several other networks. During the 6 year battle in the courts, Kathleen did dozens of TV and radio interviews. During this time she was portrayed as a racist and vilified in the press. She was ostracized and excluded from many events due to her stand that no child or person should be penalized because of the color of their skin.
John Japerse
West Seattle High School
Class of 1953
In his long career at Boston College, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and a visiting scholar at MIT, Dr. John Jasperse, a theoretical physicist, had a long career at Boston College, the Air Force Research Laboratory and was a visiting scholar at MIT. He displayed unusual versatility and sustained creativity in such diverse areas as condensed matter physics, the quantum mechanical three body problem, atomic and molecular physics, plasma physics, plasma turbulence, and the physics of the Aurora Borealis.
He published over 100 scientific papers in national and international journals, delivered 76 lectures at major institutions, co-organized 11 international conferences, and co-edited the “Physics of Space Plasma” from 1981 to 1998. Dr. Jasperse spent 30 years as the task leader of the Air Force office of Scientific Research (AFSOR) task titled Geospace Plasma Dynamics.
Under his leadership the Geospace Plasma Dynamic Effort has won the prestigious AFSOR Star Team award every year from 1991 to 2011. His two most scientific contributions have been (1) to find the collisional correction to the famous ”Landau Dampening Formula” discovered in 1946 by the Soviet physicist L. D. Landau and 2 to develop the first complete theory for the Birkeland current system (the Aurora Borealis) that include the effect of plasma turbulence.
The most recent and important application of his work has been in the area of “space weather” and its effect on military and civilian surveillance and reconnaissance systems.
