Community School founder Cindy McMahon retires after 5 decades of challenging traditional approaches to education

A lot has changed in the 50 years since Cindy McMahon started working in education. Some of it, she initiated herself.

McMahon is preparing to retire from her current role as principal of the Community School, a project-based option high school in Spokane Public Schools that she helped conceptualize and has led since its opening 12 years ago.

McMahon's career in (and out) of education can be marked with several clear "chapters," she said. There were her early years as a home economics teacher at Shadle Park High School, a six-year pause to raise her own children, once again teaching at Lewis and Clark High School, returning to school herself to get a Ph.D. in organizational leadership with an emphasis on education reform and, finally, putting that degree to use: opening the standalone Community School to serve nontraditional learners.

McMahon knew something in the traditional high school model needed to change soon after she started work at Shadle. She taught home economics, specifically in conflict mediation and childrearing, and wanted to take her students on field trips. Alas, she was restricted by rigid class periods.

"You're locked in by that hour," she said. "So to go out, I mean, I wanted to take my classes places, but I couldn't."

The high school system in which kids attend six class periods and are tested for knowledge acquisition needed an overhaul, McMahon decided, so she set off to see how to make that happen while at Gonzaga University.

"The two hardest organizations to change are the military and the public school system," she said.

In her graduate program at Gonzaga, McMahon traveled to visit nontraditional schools around the country, absorbing strategies much like those she would later institute at the Community School. Eventually, she worked at the now-closed Havermale High School, an alternative school meant for credit retrieval for those who may not otherwise graduate.

She said staff at high schools would transfer struggling kids to Havermale, often without telling them. She knew she'd never see half the names on her attendance list - kids who had already given up on school.

"That's why they called it 'Last Chance,' " she said. "It was a dropout center."

Despite perceptions, McMahon continued to advocate for the nontraditional student, said Tami Linane-Booey, teacher at the Community School.

"She got put in a place where these are the kids that this is their last chance, and she's like, "Yeah, but they're brilliant, and just because they don't fit in this box that you say they have to fit in, doesn't mean that they're not capable,' " Linane-Booey said.

For these kids especially, schools just had to be focused on the student's autonomy and agency, McMahon said - molding education to fit students instead of the other way around.

"We have to have alternative learning, so that kids would have some other way to get credits," McMahon said. "We're not going to do this, 'They didn't even choose, they just show up.' "

McMahon worked on a seven-person team to design a pilot program in Havermale that would then become the Community School .

After two years in 2014, Havermale closed, and the Community School had enough interested families for its own building.

Kids at the early Community School learned the same nontraditional way they do now. Absent class periods and textbook-based testing, kids learn in weekslong projects focused on a central question rather than subject area. Kids work in teams, picking up "durable skills," as McMahon calls them, rather than an emphasis on content.

"It creates growth in a lot of different areas: academically, socially, emotionally, all of that happens because it's so authentic," McMahon said. "That's a word you'll hear a lot when people talk about the learning here; it's authentic, because it's not out of a book, it's not from a lecture, it's not curriculum that you just have to remember and then goodbye, it doesn't mean anything. It really does mean something."

Lessons from the Community School stick, said a group of four friends who graduated in 2018 and 2019 but returned to the school to say goodbye to their retiring principal.

"Cindy had us presenting in front of hundreds of people as freshmen," said graduate Angela Paparazzo, referencing the annual end-of-year presentations students do to notable community members like the mayor or Spokesman-Review reporters. "Now it's so easy to talk in front of a bunch of people, like it really is that exposure."

As she sat down for the daunting task of writing her own album, graduate Bella Blair thought of it as one of her projects from her Community School days. She released the album, "25" on her 26th birthday, she said, relying on time management skills learned there.

"This place changed my life," Blair said. "I'm super dyslexic, so a normal school environment was killing me. I came here and I was like, oh, 'I write songs, I play ukulele, I like this, and I like that,' and they're like, 'Let's use those skills to help other skills.' Like for English, they let me write a song."

McMahon said among each of the chapters, her final "innovative" one at the Community School was her favorite. Looking ahead, McMahon said she'll be involved in a different capacity when the Community School transitions to a new campus and new name in the coming years.

She credits her staff for their buy-in to the school's model, getting to know each of their pupils and how to help them succeed. At the school, "we are all at the same table," she said of her staff.

It's the same sense of collaboration she hoped to foster among her students.

"We really do think the world needs to be much more collaborative, much more inclusive, much more supportive of each other," she said. "We're all in it together."

Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.

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This story was originally published June 15, 2026 at 11:40 PM.