Before becoming M-A’s librarian, Catherine Burton-Tillson, better known to students as Ms. BT, was a Sacred Heart Schools student in the Class of 1987. She navigated the early days of a newly co-ed campus, the skateboarding culture of Menlo Park, and the journey of discovering who she wanted to become.
Burton-Tillson moved to Menlo Park in the middle of sixth grade and attended Sacred Heart School for high school. Back then, the school looked very different. “Class of 87 was the first class with boys. We didn’t have football. We didn’t have any of the athletic programs that there are now,” Burton-Tillson said. “My class was 30 students—pretty small. I think we had seven boys.”
Despite the small class size, the academics were intense. “Sacred Heart was very rigorous,” she said. “We didn’t have the kind of schedule that you guys have here at M-A with all the different titles. I don’t think that I put my full effort into school.”
Outside the classroom, Burton-Tillson found joy through sports and community. She joined the swim team for three years, played softball, and—most memorably—hung out with her friends who skateboarded. “A lot of hanging out and skateboarding in the community. That was a big thing back then,” she said.
Burton-Tillson remembers her high school education being rooted in Jesuit values of service and tolerance. “The nuns for the classes we went to were Jesuit nuns, so they were really based in service to others,” she said. “We actually took a world religions class taught by a nun, and that was where I got exposed to other ways of looking at being spiritual.”
While Sacred Heart was small, her social world extended beyond campus. “The people that I hung out with during high school were very diverse,” Burton-Tillson said. “I had a couple of close friends at Sacred Heart, and they had friends that attended M-A, and some of them attended Mid-Peninsula. I had a pretty varied group.”
Burton-Tillson also remembers resonating with the rebellious archetype of The Breakfast Club’s Allison Reynolds. “If we talk about The Breakfast Club, which is now a vintage movie for you guys, I tended to be a little more on the Bender side,” she said. “That kind of student, someone who was focused on finding out who they were and disregarding what people’s expectations were.”
Her favorite high school memories revolve around the local community and the skateboard scene. “We would go down to downtown Palo Alto, which is still a thing you all do right now,” Burton-Tillson said. “There was a place near Mr. Sun that looked like the front of a theater, and back then, it was an actual theater. A lot of music groups played there, and there were movies. We all tended to gravitate to that location.”
While she doesn’t recall any particularly bad memories, Burton-Tillson admits that her independence came with challenges. “I definitely was an unsupervised teenager and there weren’t really adults making sure I stayed on track and did the things I needed to do,” she said. “I am always curious about what my life would have been like if I had had someone giving me a little more guidance.”
“My after high school plan was to marry my [then] boyfriend and live with him in East Palo Alto but going to college changed everything,” Burton-Tillson said. “It’s a part of my journey that served me well in being an AVID teacher.”
Her transition to life after high school deeply shaped her work as M-A’s librarian today. “It definitely informed my work here as an educator,” Burton-Tillson said. “I like to be available to students who want guidance, for them to know that they can come to me if they need a different perspective, or if they just don’t have that adult guidance, that the library is here to provide that kind of ‘what are we going to do?’” she said.
Burton-Tillson believes that her high school experience also helps her connect with M-A’s diverse student body. “Growing up in this community, we have a lot of different people who come from different places, different economic levels, different backgrounds,” she said. “My high school experience absolutely made me the educator that I am today, because knowing all of the cities that serve M-A, I feel like I have a perspective on what those communities are and what’s important to them.”
Looking back, Burton-Tillson gives her high school years an eight out of ten. “It was super fun. It was challenging being unsupervised and not having guidance about what I was working toward. But during that time, I was allowed to just be whoever and do whatever, and it was just hanging out with my friends all the time,” she said.
If she could offer advice to her teenage self, Burton-Tillson says she’d take school slightly more seriously. “I think that I would probably have taken my academics a little more seriously because I, for sure, could have done much better,” Burton-Tillson said. “But I also know that the path I was on back then led me to being here, so I don’t think I would really change anything.”
