Editor’s note: Microsoft, which underwrites GeekWire’s Impact Series, is a longtime TAF supporter. The company was not involved in this story.

Back in the fall of 2002, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrapped up a luncheon speech at Seattle’s Rainier Club by asking a question that few people in the room expected — least of all the college freshman he directed it to.

“So you want an internship this summer?” he asked Miya McClain, as she remembers it.

She was Miya Sneed then, 18 and homesick at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. She had come home to speak for Technology Access Foundation, the Seattle nonprofit where she had gone from knowing nothing about computers to building software and leading a team of student interns. Earlier in the luncheon program, she had shown the crowd a scheduling system she built for TAF.

Microsoft had planned the offer in advance and already had her resume, but she had no idea what was coming. A Seattle Times photographer caught the look of shock on her face, and the photo ran the next day on the front of the newspaper’s business section.

That internship, the first of two, led to a full-time job at Microsoft after college. She spent eight years there before moving into product leadership roles at Nordstrom, Cisco and Smartsheet. Today McClain is senior vice president of product management at SumerSports, a sports analytics company.

“Most of my jobs came through connections with TAF,” she said, crediting the organization for repeatedly “opening doors I didn’t even know could be opened.”

That’s the path Trish Millines Dziko had in mind when she left Microsoft 30 years ago to start TAF with her partner, Jill Hull Dziko: teach kids of color to work with technology, and get them hired by tech companies.

But about eight years in, she saw a problem. TAF’s interns were thriving, she said, but many couldn’t get into college computer science or engineering courses because their high schools had already steered them into lower-level math and science.

To change that, TAF would need to reach students by sixth grade, inside the schools.

So TAF went into public education. The organization, which marked its 30th anniversary Oct. 1, now co-manages a public middle and high school in Federal Way, Wash., and coaches teachers in other public schools.

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Working with entire schools, rather than kids who signed up for a tech program, changed the goal, too. The focus now is on skills students can use in any field, whether or not it’s tech.

Students learn science, technology, engineering and math through projects that combine subjects and put classroom lessons to use. In 2020, for example, two students at TAF’s Federal Way school turned a gardening robot into a model 3D printer using a cake-frosting syringe, a threaded rod and a motor, as GeekWire reported at the time.

“What we want to make sure is, no matter what our kids do, we teach them to use STEM skills,” Millines Dziko said. “They have to critically think. They have to solve problems. … They have to communicate. They have to lead.”

The shift has cost TAF money. The organization has missed out on larger funding opportunities, Millines Dziko said, because it isn’t focused solely on tech and isn’t growing as fast as some funders would like. In the early 2010s, as education philanthropy flowed to charter schools, TAF couldn’t raise enough to open the additional schools it had planned.

“But we stuck with what was true, and what works for our kids,” she said, “and we’re still here.”

How it started

Millines Dziko grew up in New Jersey, raised by a single mother who cleaned floors for a living. She told the Seattle P-I in 1995 that she believed she’d been placed in a lower-level math class because of her race. She took summer-school classes to work her way into honors.

She studied computer science at Monmouth College on a basketball scholarship and began working at Microsoft in 1988 as the first tester on SQL Server. “She was always a force to be reckoned with,” said Bob Muglia, the longtime Microsoft executive who hired her, speaking with GeekWire at the organization’s 30th anniversary party in October. His foundation now supports TAF.

She later moved into a diversity role and took over Microsoft’s high school internship program, making it technical and filling it almost entirely with Seattle kids of color. When she pushed the company to reach students earlier, she said, “the attitude was, it’s not broken, so let’s not fix it.”

Then her partner, Jill Hull Dziko, a social worker in Seattle Public Schools’ behavior-disorder classrooms, brought seven or eight middle schoolers to campus. They were rowdy on the shuttle ride over and went silent when they walked into a room of high school interns testing a new handheld computer.

On the way back, Millines Dziko recalled, they were saying, “I want to be an engineer. I want to do what they did.”

She left Microsoft in August 1996 and put $150,000 of her own money into TAF. If she didn’t help others, she told the P-I the next year, her late mother “would want me to have my butt kicked.”

TAF set up in a Columbia City storefront next to a Taco del Mar. When they first opened the door, she said, they could see the basement through the subfloor, and the staff wired the network themselves. The first students started after-school classes in 1997, training for paid summer internships.

McClain joined the second class as she entered ninth grade, along with her older sister. Millines Dziko taught them to take apart a computer and write their first programs. “She’s encouraging, but she’s also very strict,” McClain said. “We all got jobs that summer, so obviously she taught us something.”

In 2000, TAF started a program for younger students called TechStart. At the anniversary party in October, Sherry Williams, TAF’s executive director of operations, who joined in 1997 as its fourth employee, told the crowd about a young girl who was afraid of math. The girl’s mother brought her every afternoon, and the girl kept working at it.

One day she walked in wearing a T-shirt that said “I love math.”

“Although her school wasn’t serving her, in our after-school program, she was being served,” Williams said. “And she knew she could do anything after that.”

Going into the schools

TAF opened a public school, TAF Academy, with Federal Way Public Schools in 2008. Mike Miles, one of its first ninth-graders, went reluctantly. The school looked way too small, he told the Federal Way Mirror the following year. “I didn’t want to have six kids in my class, but my parents made me go anyway.”

He was ahead in math, and the new school couldn’t offer the class he needed, so he spent his first year in the back of the room teaching himself from a textbook.

The next year, TAF arranged for him to take math at another public school down the street. Looking back as a parent, he said in a recent interview, he appreciates that the school was willing to “swallow your pride a little” and acknowledge that it couldn’t give him what he needed. He got the math education there, and where he is today, he said, is “better than what I ever could have expected.”

Miles, 32, graduated in 2012 with TAF Academy’s first class, earned a business degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and now leads data teams at a cybersecurity startup in the Washington, D.C., area.

He remembers sitting in a circle in social studies, discussing the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager in Florida, and learning to keep disagreements from turning into “a shouting match,” a skill he relies on in his work now.

Federal Way wasn’t the original plan. TAF spent two years designing a school for Seattle Public Schools, and in 2006 it proposed one for Rainier Beach High School, first as a replacement for the school and then as an academy inside the building.

Many students and teachers saw it as a takeover. Teachers worried the academy would drain resources from the existing school, and families objected that the district had discussed the proposal for a year without telling them. At a packed community meeting that November, there was shouting, and the PTSA president walked out with dozens of students, The Seattle Times reported.

“It was just the dumbest and the most frustrating thing I had ever been through,” Millines Dziko said in a recent interview. “I said we’re done, no more.”

Federal Way Superintendent Tom Murphy read about it, called her and came up to Seattle to meet. After a couple of hours, she said, he told her, “You belong in Federal Way.” TAF is now working with its fifth superintendent there, she said.

The hard years

The lowest point, she said, came around 2012, when TAF had to lay off staff for the second time. Education philanthropy was pouring into charter schools, a planned expansion into Renton had stalled for lack of money, she said, and TAF had just moved into a new building.

She recalled seeing reports that only a small share of major philanthropic funding went to nonprofits led by people of color, and she started asking herself a question. “Is me being a leader of this organization gonna hold us back from getting funding? Would it be better if we had someone who was white to lead the organization?”

She talked it over with Williams and Zithri Saleem, two of her top leaders, and “we almost went down that road,” she said. But she reconsidered. “That’s not the answer either,” she said. Instead, TAF had to “get out there and show them,” and find other people interested in its work.

Seattle came back around after Denise Juneau became superintendent. In 2020, the school board approved a TAF partnership at Washington Middle School in the Central District. Three years later, facing a budget shortfall, the district cut it, as GeekWire reported at the time. “It’s solely about money,” Millines Dziko told The Seattle Times then.

Asked whether she could see herself working with Seattle Public Schools again, she said, “No.” The district has “way too many problems,” she said, and dealing with them “takes our energy away from places where we could be having impact.”

In 2024, TAF was among the nonprofits chosen in MacKenzie Scott’s open call, after a process that included peer review. TAF expected $1 million and got $2 million. “It wasn’t the money; it was the belief in our work,” Millines Dziko said.

TAF used $500,000 for operating needs it had been saving for and put the rest in a certificate of deposit, she said.

TAF reported about $4 million in revenue and $5 million in expenses in its Form 990 for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, and ended the year with about $11.4 million in net assets. Millines Dziko said the organization’s annual budget is now close to $7 million, and its fundraising team raises about 93% of it, mostly through grants.

What success looks like

TAF Academy had been recognized for test-score gains. It was named a School of Distinction in 2012 for improvement in middle-school reading and math. In 2016, the district cited three consecutive years of recognition as one reason for merging it with Saghalie Middle School. The combined school, TAF@Saghalie, opened in 2017, and TAF co-manages it with the district.

TAF@Saghalie’s four-year graduation rate for the class of 2025 was above 88.5%, compared with 82.6% statewide, according to state data. On state tests in 2024-25, 17% of the school’s low-income students who took the tests in grades 6–8 and 10 met the English language arts standard and 11% met the math standard, compared with 30% and 15% for low-income students in the same grades across Federal Way Public Schools.

Millines Dziko argues that standardized tests don’t measure what matters. They assume every student had a teacher who covered everything on the exam, she said, and “they demean kids,” charting their academic course as early as third grade.

TAF trains teachers to track each student’s growth and is building its own way to document it. Teachers score students from 1 to 4 against standards, backed by photos of projects and samples of student work. The data lives in the modern version of SQL Server, the Microsoft database Millines Dziko was hired to test in 1988.

The system is in the third year of a pilot. Only selected teachers are participating, and TAF is still working out how much time teachers can spend documenting students’ work while teaching, she said. TAF is bringing in an evaluator from the University of Washington Bothell to review the pilot, she said.

Millines Dziko’s goal is for every district in the country to use it, and for standardized tests to “go out the window,” with the money states spend on them going to teacher training instead. “I believe it will,” she said.

Miles liked the project-based learning but said he found gaps in his preparation when he got to college. “I took physics at TAF Academy, took physics in college, and I was not prepared,” he said. What he got in return, he said, was “a different way of thinking.”

TAF looked like a program for teaching technical skills, he said, but “they taught kids how to be people.” He tries to pass that on to his son, he said, including putting others first and using his gifts to help others.

What’s next

TransformED, TAF’s teacher-coaching program, places a full-time coach in a partner school for five years. It works with five schools now and plans to add 10 more over five years, at about $200,000 per school per year, Millines Dziko said. In September, TAF hired a former Atlanta principal, Donya Loyd Kemp, to lead it, as GeekWire reported.

Millines Dziko is wary of the rush to bring AI into classrooms. Students can use it to find sources, she said, but then they have to investigate those sources themselves. “It should be used as a tool to gather quickly, so I can now use most of my time doing the thinking.”

Millines Dziko said the region’s tech companies should invest in public schools as a way to attract and keep families here, not just with donated products and the occasional volunteer day. “That’s performative,” she said.

What she wants are lasting relationships, like the ones TAF has with smaller companies that come back to its schools every year to give students real problems to solve. As for the big tech companies, “I need them to be more about pouring into instead of extracting out of,” she said.

Millines Dziko turns 70 in July. For the past year and a half, she said, Williams and Joshua Halsey, TAF’s executive director of education, have taken on more of the leadership, freeing her to spend more time raising money and building relationships.

She doesn’t expect to stop working, she said, predicting that she’ll never retire.

At the 30th anniversary party, she hugged about three-quarters of the room, by her count. Looking around at her former students, many with kids of their own, it hit her.

“This is 30 years, man, and look at y’all,” she said, recalling the moment later. “Y’all are good.”

Fonte ==> GeekWire