Women of the Year: From help with financial aid to racist remarks, Shadle Park counselor April Eberhardt ensures kids have ‘the respect of being listened to’
April Eberhardt’s cell phone started to ring.
She’d just arrived at a North Spokane Starbucks to be interviewed about being named one of 2024’s Women of the Year, but she answered and paced around the coffee shop as she tried to discern with clarity the voice on the other line.
It was one of her students at nearby Shadle Park High School, calling the college and career counselor’s Google voice phone number in a panic after they and others were just called racist insults while waiting at a nearby bus stop.
Frazzled, she promptly left to make sure they were OK and get them somewhere they felt safe.
Around a half-hour later, she returned to her interview after seeing them to a nearby community center to write a report of the incident with a trusted adult, someone they met through Eberhardt’s coordination in her role at the school.
A Black educator in a city where they’re a stark racial minority, Eberhardt feels compelled to stand up for her kids when they need a champion. Every week it’s something different, she said.
“There’s kids who would’ve said nothing about that, which allows a problem to perpetuate. It’s important for good health of a community, because silence should never be the expectation when things aren’t right. Ever,” Eberhardt said. “That breeds a horrible culture of suffering that we don’t even need if we teach kids how to be strong. And if we’re strong for them like we need to be, we empower them at the same time.”
Frustrated and a little unnerved, she sits down at the coffee chain to recount her personal background in schools, her passion for education and advocacy therein, and how it led her to where she is now – taking personal calls from her kids in crisis after school hours.
‘Like black-and-white TV turning into color’
Throughout her professional life, Eberhardt has worked in many roles in several places around the globe as a military spouse traveling based on her now-retired husband’s deployment.
Through Southern California, North Dakota, Germany and now Spokane, Eberhardt has always felt a pull towards working in public education.
“I’m doing the job of the adults that had the most impact on me,” Eberhardt said.
She recalled her first day in a public high school with an all-Black student body and mostly Black staff in Pittsburgh, where she grew up. It was a stark contrast to her previous majority-white private school in Pittsburgh, and as soon as she entered her new school, it was jarring, but she said staff warmly welcomed her and eased her transition.
“The first day I walked into the building, my vice principal looked at me, and she said, ‘You look just like your dad,’ ” Eberhardt recalled. “She had graduated with my dad in 1967. I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never had that happen.’ ”
It wasn’t until her sophomore year that she had her first Black teacher after enrolling where the rest of her family graduated. She compared the transition to when televisions started including sound systems that vastly improved the sound quality on each program.
“That’s what it was like for me when I switched schools, like in stereo,” Eberhardt said. “Or it was like black-and-white TV turning into color television.”
She went on to teach in emergency positions, moving frequently with her husband’s deployments. At a middle school in California, Eberhardt organized a recurring college and career fair for her kids who pictured themselves working in entertainment and sports. She ensured their exposure to other career paths, planning for air traffic controllers and service members to speak with students.
“When they saw particularly Black men in uniform, their response was way different. That’s when I realized representation is so powerful,” Eberhardt said. “I had kids wanting autographs from people who work government jobs. My knuckleheads, I call them, the ones that gave me the most grief, they wanted to help me that day.”
‘The little engine that could’
To Eberhardt, college and career readiness means more than résumés and college applications; she addresses needs outside of her job description. She’s an unrelenting advocate for her students, whether it’s at the financial aid office or loudly standing up for kids in the face of racism.
“I’m pretty direct, and it puts people off, but I don’t know how to be anything else,” Eberhardt said. “I will fiercely advocate for what’s right, and I will call out what’s wrong. The hope is that in doing that, it’s not to bring division, but to bring full understanding; if you don’t see what I see, you won’t know unless I tell you.”
She models self-advocacy perfectly, said her former Shadle coworker Susan Poindexter, who worked in Spokane Public Schools 38 years before what she called “retiring” – teaching classes at Gonzaga University and subbing in Spokane schools.
Eberhardt landed in Spokane on her husband’s final deployment, settling with their three kids in Medical Lake and accepting her current job at Shadle, where she’s worked for eight years. Since moving here, she’s assumed several undertakings, chairing the education committee on the Spokane NAACP and serving as interim editor for the Black Lens newspaper, which receives some volunteer production assistance from current and former members of The Spokesman-Review newsroom, but is independent from The Spokesman-Review.
In her nonstop efforts, Eberhardt had to be “the little engine that could,” Poindexter said of her vocal personality shoved inside her short stature.
The two worked together for five years, Poindexter becoming Eberhardt’s mentor and “work mom.”
Throughout her almost 40 years as a teacher, none hold a candle to Eberhardt when it comes to tenacity and “standing up for the underdog,” Poindexter said, sometimes facing retaliation.
“She taught (advocacy) by modeling it because it was true to herself; regardless of the pushback that she was going to face for standing up to what she believed in, she still did it,” Poindexter said. “I think the students saw that Mrs. E doesn’t back down from something, even though it might cost her a great deal.”
She pays particular attention to more needy students, like recent refugees and immigrants who may be learning English, students of color or students facing poverty or homelessness.
With her East Coast outspoken nature, Eberhardt is quick to ring the alarm when these kids face injustice.
“There’s some things that people aren’t ready to hear, but they still need to be said. April would be the one to say it,” Poindexter said.
In their corner
Former Shadle student Dante Crawford vividly recalls his first encounter with Eberhardt. An “independent student,” Crawford spent his childhood “house-hopping” back and forth from Spokane and Shelton, on the West side, inconsistently staying with extended family as neither of his parents were in his life.
A teen without parents and a stable living situation, Crawford sought Shadle’s career center for help getting a state ID so that he could get a job.
Eberhardt bent over backwards to secure Crawford a state ID when he didn’t even have his birth certificate, tracking down his extended family to sort out some required information.
“She even got me connected to my dad’s side of the family that I had been trying to do for 17 years, and this woman did it in one,” Crawford said.
Eberhardt’s advocacy for Crawford didn’t end there.
“I’d been buying my own clothes or wearing the same clothes constantly because I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a lot of school supplies or anything like that, and she definitely helped me get all of that,” Crawford said. “That’s like a sliver of all she’s done for me.”
Like she’s done for many, Eberhardt stood up for Crawford when he faced racism in school. On one occasion, a staff member called roll and read the name of Crawford, the only Black student in the class, in an obnoxious fake “Blaccent,” he recalled. The microaggression embarrassed Crawford, who didn’t know how to react at the moment.
Eberhardt not only validated Crawford’s anger, but ensured he reported it to administration and helped him write an account of the incident.
“I do actually have somebody in my corner that will take immediate action if something is wrong,” Crawford said. “Having her do that was a huge help to not only my conscience, but a little bit of standing up for myself to have some self-worth. Now I’m able to actually stand up to people who do stuff like that.”
Even when Crawford left Shadle, moving to Shelton again, Eberhardt kept in touch. She helped the first-generation college student through the daunting application process and more. She paid for transportation from Shelton to Central Washington University and hotel rooms in Ellensburg, where he’s now enrolled studying French and law.
“I’m so used to letting people go, not really having anyone I can completely trust or rely on, that I can ask for things, help me do stuff,” Crawford said on a break from doing homework and applying for jobs. “To have April come in and completely change my whole world around, because that’s essentially what she did, means the world. I can’t even explain.”
Shadle graduate Nazanin Walizada also struggled to trust adults around her school when she emigrated from Afghanistan in 2019 speaking no English. It wasn’t until Eberhardt pulled her into her office her Junior year to talk about the SATs that she first felt seen.
“I felt very happy that it wasn’t me going to someone, someone else came to me,” Walizada said. “I feel like the connection between us started from there; I felt it there, that this is the person that if I ever need help, I can just go to them, no matter what it is.”
And she did. Her senior year, Walizada ran for ASB president at her school, a formidable feat for the introvert who was likely the only Muslim student at Shadle. Eberhardt proved to be a valuable partner in her campaign, helping her rehearse speeches after school and again advocating for Walizada when she felt she wasn’t being listened to by other staff.
Though she got second place in the election, Walizada credits the campaign and Eberhardt with building up her self-esteem into the person she is now, in her second year studying biochemistry at the University of Washington with the hopes of becoming a cardiovascular surgeon.
She’s started a new endeavor, in the early stages of forming a club for Afghan students that she plans to morph into a fundraising effort for girls in Afghanistan to get scholarships for an American education.
“If I didn’t learn that in high school with the help of Mrs. Eberhardt, I would have not been able to start a whole club at this big university of 60,000 people,” Walizada said after her classes let out.
Crawford and Walizada each struggled to find the words to explain their meaningful relationship with Eberhardt. She’s like family, they both said, and both keep in touch while at their respective colleges.
Eberhardt hopes to graduate well-rounded pupils who don’t just know school skills, but can use their own voices when they’ve been wronged – and cure any imposter syndrome to boot.
“They have to do it in high school when things happen, because people will take advantage of you. People will use you, people will not hear you, and people will erase you if you don’t speak up,” Eberhardt said. “You deserve to be heard. You deserve to have your needs met, and you deserve the respect of being listened to.”