For every action there is a reaction, and it wasn't long before some legislators started their attempts to close down TESC before it really got off the ground. By the late 1970s, these attempts became serious. And they seemed so real, especially since we were getting waves of refugees from other alternative schools that had closed, like Prescott in Arizona and Franconia in New Hampshire. But the earliest efforts to close TESC were comical, and mainly the result of a single legislator's actions. His name was James Kuehnle (pronounced "Keenlee"), a Republican from Spokane who manufactured swimming pools.

Rep. Kuehnle made a motion in Apr. 1973 to eliminate TESC from the budget (an 11 million savings at that time). He called Evergreen "a school for poets, nonconformists and revolutionaries." Rep. Barney Goltz, a Bellingham Democrat, responded on the floor with, "I don't know what Mr. Kuehnle has against poets," and then added:

There once was a solon named Kuehnle
Who very much opposed Evergreenly.
In spite of his song,
Mr. Kuehnle is wrong.
I think his idea's obscenely.

"Congratulations," responded Kuehnle, "You sound like a four-year graduate of that institution." (I wonder what Rep. Kuehnle would've made of the poem I described in pt. 23 of this series?)

Kuehnle's motion was defeated by a vote of 82 to 3.

The Spokane Rep. made a second attempt to shut down TESC later that year. This time he described the school as "an academic fairyland" and a place where students "build architecturally pleasing teepees." He was defeated in a voice vote. And Rep. Goltz got in another poem:

Mr. Kuehnle is back on the floor,
knocking down Evergreen's door.
He will not owe it
To any one poet,
But I think it's to be laid on the floor.

More serious attempts to shut down or drastically change the school would come later. In the meantime, these attacks were a tremendous aid in helping TESC students develop an espirit de corps and try even harder to make the experiment work.