Individual Crossroads Reflections

Maureen Ferry Cuellar

Class of 1987
Currently living in Spring, TX

This memory of my 7th or 8th Grade Trip to Washington DC in the 1980s is a great example of what made my Crossroads experience truly unique. While a lot of students across the US share in this rite of passage, I am almost certain that Crossroads was the only secondary school to come ready to gather public insights and data! In between art scavenger hunts at the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Natural History, we each had our own clipboard stacked with political opinion surveys to solicit responses from people on the National Mall. Arthur – was it called the Crossroads Institute of Public Opinion Polling or something similar?

I remember another public polling exercise we did around the site in St Louis/Clayton on Brentwood that would become The Galleria shopping mall. We knocked on the doors of those homes slated by eminent domain to be torn down for the future development, and asked the homeowners our polling questions. I think Arthur processed the poll because that is what he loved doing, and then invited the Developer to the school to hear our results and answer student questions.

I remember the Developer looked very imposing in his pinstripe suit, but he sat down in the main hall and we asked him all the hard questions we discovered during our polling. Crossroads gave me the courage and confidence to investigate complex problems and challenges of society, above and beyond what a traditional school curriculum can do. This has stayed with me. Thank you Crossroads!