Michelle Osborne
Michelle Osborne RHS ’75 came to Seattle as a 6th grader and immediately began navigating the racial politics of the city and its public schools during the era of voluntary busing. Every school she attended was virtually all white – McGilvra Elementary (her neighborhood school), Wilson Junior High, Thompson Junior High, and Roosevelt. She had some great experiences at RHS, making friends for life, doing well academically, becoming a staffer on the literary magazine, and running cross country and track. But she also had experiences that were harmful and overtly racist. One a serious example occurred in the spring of her senior year: her high school counselor admitted he had never bothered to send the required high school counselor forms to the colleges she’d applied to – because he didn’t think Michelle was college material. A graduate of Princeton University, Michelle received her law degree from UCLA. She is a former trial attorney who practiced in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a state court prosecutor who specialized in crimes of sexualized violence. She has served as the Race and Social Justice Manager of a large non-profit in Seattle, and directed a rape crisis center in California’s Silicon Valley. Michelle has chaired the boards of several nonprofits, and was an appointee to the Santa Clara County Commission on the Status of Women and to the State Bar of California’s Committeeon Women in the Law. She is now a board member of a Seattle-based law center which represents sexual assault survivors in court and administrative hearings. anecdotes about life at college in New York state.