Interview with Michelle Vo by Michelle Carter Smith
• Corbett School District Board of Directors from October 2015 to June 2024• Elected to Board Chairman in 2017
Although Michelle Vo's parents were from West Richland, WA, she was born in Pasco. The hospital in Richland would not allow her father to be present at the birth, so her folks made the trek across the river to Pasco. Michelle is the oldest of three children. Her parents live nearby and her two siblings are living in WA. Michelle spent her childhood in the Tri-Cities and loved to play sports and draw. She remembers looking through house plan books and architecture magazines, and then she would draw her floor plans. When she was in second grade, her parents divorced, resulting in various moves locally. She was outgoing and made friends easily at each new school. When she was in the fifth grade, she was in a mixed-grade classroom and was moved up to the sixth grade mid-year. When Michelle was only 14, she sought sponsorship with the local Rotary Club to be an exchange student in New Zealand. She says living for a year in a country that was very different culturally than where she grew up was a life-changing experience and built her self-confidence. Michelle continued to draw throughout her childhood as well as play basketball. In middle and high school, CTE (career technical education) was where she thrived, particularly in woodshop and drafting! She attended the state-level Technology Student Association competitions and won several awards.
After high school graduation, she attended the Univ. of Washington and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies. Michelle was accepted to the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) for graduate school. She applied for and received numerous scholarships and financial aid to attend UW but needed to take out several loans to attend graduate school. She says it was well worth it! She spent her first two semesters of her graduate program at the school’s Switzerland campus, then moved to their main campus in Los Angeles to finish her master's degree, graduating in 1997.
Michelle's first job out of school was in Santa Monica at a high-end design architecture firm as a part of their design staff. While there, she wrote out her personal goals, including her three "dream projects" to design schools, fire stations, and airports. She had a desire to work on projects that reflected her natural interests, and she enjoyed sorting out complexity, believing there is beauty in efficiency, organization, and simplicity. She designed public schools for five years, fire stations for five years, and airports for over 20 years! Community projects are of great importance to her. She has been with Hennebery Eddy Architects for 21 years where she is vice president and principal architect of the firm’s aviation projects. She oversaw the Concourse E extension at the PDX Airport which added gates E5-11 and is now the architect for the terminal expansion of the Redmond, OR airport. Michelle was interested in getting on the Corbett School Board to contribute to passing the bond with a balanced budget and use her expertise to help with permitting and design of the new Corbett Middle School building. All this ties back to starting her career working on public school projects!
Michelle's son Viking was born in 2009 and her daughter Norway was born in 2011. Tuesdae and Michelle met while she was living in LA, and they moved to Portland and married in 2007. They bought and remodeled their first home before their kids were born, then moved to Corbett in 2011. They wanted to live near Michelle's parents in the Gorge, but she needed to be close enough to work in Portland. They sold their Corbett home in 2016 after their divorce, and Michelle bought a different home in Corbett. When Viking was 4 1/2 years old, he was diagnosed with autism. Michelle educated herself and became a strong advocate for him to receive the services he needed. She fought the insurance company through their appeals process and won, staying up late at night to write a 122-page appeal document. After winning, she redacted personal information from the document and then shared it with local autism advocacy groups so it could become a template for other families of special needs kids to win their appeals.
Norway just graduated from CAPS where the unique environment allowed her creative skills to flourish! Michelle strongly advocates for mixed-grade classrooms and believes they contributed to Norway skipping a grade as Michelle had. Next year Norway will attend The Northwest Academy High School in Portland, and Viking will continue at his special needs public high school, Pacific Academy.
As a family, they love to be outdoors, especially near water. Traveling to warm places near water such as Mexico and Hawaii allows the family to surf, paddleboard, and swim together. Rob, her partner of five years, is her best friend and has two adult daughters. Together they purchased a home in the Gorge last year and are remodeling it. They admired the home when they first began dating, never dreaming it would one day be their forever home!