Perhaps former student Ava L. ’25 encapsulated Mr. Daren Salter best when she said, “I think he’s the type of person who is best described in anecdotes.” A history teacher at Lakeside for over five years who taught classes from American Studies (AmStud) to the elective Protest and Popular Music, Mr. Salter not only dealt in stories — those of our nation and world’s past — but inspired them in his students as well. In early February, he passed away after a long battle with cancer. Yet, in many ways, Mr. Salter is still here. As former student Emani B. ’25 says, “It’s unreal to believe someone so alive isn’t here with us physically anymore, but Mr. Salter is so vivid and vibrant in our memories that he’ll be with us and the Lakeside community forever.”
Indeed, Mr. Salter was truly alive. “I remember finding out his age, and being so shocked, like so shocked. I thought he was in his early 30s or one of the youngest teachers I’d ever had, because he brought so much energy with him into the classroom,” recalls Eva T. ’24.
This was also true when he wasn’t teaching, at moments when theoretically, he should have been disengaged. “When I think of Mr. Salter, I’ll envision him poised at the table in the back of our AmStud classroom on an English day,” says Ava. “Even if his computer was out — grading papers or planning lessons — I could always tell that he was listening. He couldn’t resist drawing connections to historical events or chuckling in response to our discussions and if one of my comments got Mr. Salter to interject, it was an instant affirmation.”
Even in the more mundane moments of the job, his colleagues fondly recall his dedication to his students and to his craft. “For somebody who has been a teacher for as long as Mr. Salter was,” Mr. Nau comments, “he’s had some of these conversations [with students over papers or projects] 100 times. I think it would be entirely human if, some days, you were exhausted and like, ‘Oh my gosh, this conversation again?!’ And he was never like that. He was always there for the students who showed up and present for as long as they needed him to be.” That concluding sentiment is one certainly shared by his advisory, as advisee Cailyn C. ’26 recalls: “I think the greatest impact he had on me was how he made me want to do my best, always encouraging and supporting me and giving me the push I needed to always bring my best self to campus every day.” (The sentiment is also perhaps shared by his advisory because Mr. Salter had a long-standing tradition of bringing them their favorite candy on birthdays, as Cailyn adds.)
Yet just as Mr. Salter’s dedication was interpersonal, it was also inherent in the work he did behind the scenes. Despite joining the department in 2019, Mr. Salter quickly established himself as a foremost figure. When the history teachers went on retreat to revise its curriculum, for example, Mr. Salter was a team lead for the US History class, “stewarding” the work alongside his colleagues. What distinguished much of his work during that process was his attention to inclusion in the foundations of the redesign. “Daren was really good at baking it [efforts around DEI] in,” remembers Mr. Nau. “Even just the ‘levers of change’ architecture of the US history course is really around this embedded idea of…‘levers of change AND furtherance of justice.’…He took work that could sometimes be very fraught and made it seem like the most natural thing we could be doing.”
The result, as Mr. Nau notes, came full circle to the depth of connection Mr. Salter sought to forge with students around him: “And I just feel like he’s someone who did it in ways that I think that, even if the students didn’t see it in a way that they might name it and articulate it, they definitely saw it in the sense that sharing an office with him and hearing kids come in — all different types of students saw Daren as someone who saw them and understood them, and that even if he didn’t necessarily share experiences with him, they saw him as someone who they could connect with and relate to and share who they were with him.”
Nara C. ’25, a student in Mr. Salter’s US history class last year, supports this sense of Mr. Salter’s approach with his own experience. He describes a meeting wherein Mr. Salter had taken the time to carefully emphasize diverse perspective in the context of the Pueblo Revolt to better understand the intentionality of the rebelling American Indians: “This moment remains clear in my memory because I was so fascinated by how Mr. Salter had widened my vision of historical analysis through a single assignment.” According to Nara, evident to him was a feeling of Mr. Salter’s devotion — to the material and to his students.
This consideration that Mr. Salter exemplified for students and colleagues around him, though, was a product of his willingness to gain their trust and appreciation, accomplished through his profound vulnerability.
One of the most noticeable aspects of the AmStud classroom was the meme wall — a bulletin board adorned with historically-themed jokes that each year’s students would create as they navigated the curriculum. Overwhelmingly, however, the board was dominated by embarrassing, captioned images of Mr. Salter and Mr. Christensen. As Eva — an avid contributor to the meme wall — recounts, “At one point in the year, I think I had more photos of Mr. Salter on my phone than of my own dad….That’s not something I think teachers owe: It’s very intrusive, very personal, to get a 0.5 of your teacher and have it posted on your classroom wall all year. But he offered that to us, and he let us get to know him and who he was, which is special, especially from a professional perspective.”
Photos — personal, if not more meaningful — also featured prominently at his desk. Similarly, they were a chance for him to proudly share insight into his life with those around him. As Mr. Nau recalls, “When I was in the ICU with him, there was a big group of people: his brothers were there and his family.…But when I was in the ICU with all these people, I knew who all of them were, and I knew stories about all of them….Because of pictures on his desk or things he shared with me, I walked in and I was like, ‘You’re the older brother, you’re the next brother,’ I knew because he was always talking about his family, always talking about his friends.”
And when there wasn’t a clear picture — when there wasn’t necessarily an explanation at hand — Mr. Salter didn’t shy away from embracing his own uncertainty. He was transparent, and he leaned in. “I think Mr. Salter was the kind of teacher who made you realize you should never be ashamed of your curiosity,” Eva comments. Ava adds, “He became interested with us: if we had a question or a crazy hypothetical, he took it seriously and wasn’t afraid of deviating from our plan to explore it. Mr. Salter transformed every inquiry into a little nugget of adventure for our class to partake in together.”
Such sacrifices of his time and of his privacy, as many interviewees noted, weren’t expected of teachers. Rather, it was a choice Mr. Salter consistently made, and, as Eva reflects, “It made me feel like I could trust him and be accepted by him. For that reason, later on, I could go to him for advice and stuff, because I knew that he appreciated me.”
But for as much as Mr. Salter was willing to let students and teachers in on his life, there was always something new to discover. “One of my favorite memories of him was his sharing of something I knew very little about — his Mormon upbringing. He came and spoke to my religious studies class about the beliefs he carried with him, especially about heaven being a place where you go to be with your family. The idea that you get to share eternity with the people you loved on earth was singularly beautiful to him,” history teacher Ms. Rawles shares.
Students and colleagues would come to know Mr. Salter by many names over his time at Lakeside (history teacher, dad, Giants fan, etc.). In the spring of 2023, he added a new one to the list: “conquering hero,” as Mr. Nau puts it lightly, when he single-handedly won the Spring 2023 Staff v. Students Basketball game by making a few game-saving plays at the end. Although his knee was later injured, thus ending a basketball career that had started in high school, Mr. Salter enjoyed his sports retirement in his role as advisor, leading hula-hoop contests, as Cailyn recalls, on the first advisory of each year.
Others, like Emani, describe fond memories not of conquering basketball hero Salter, but of Judge Salter as he walked in wearing an official judge’s gown with a gavel in hand the day of her junior year AmStud mock trial final: “I was definitely nervous for our mock trial, until Mr. Salter sat with me and helped me to strategize and truly understand the case. Sitting with him and getting to ask him questions brought me so much ease, and I loved getting to hear all his insights…. It was because of Mr. Salter’s encouragement and support that I did an independent study on sports law, why I am currently taking the Freedom, Crime and Law elective, and am interested in continuing to pursue a study of law. That was the case for so many of us; Mr. Salter helped us discover a love for history.”
That was indeed “the case for so many of us,” and not just when it came to history. As Mr. Nau describes, “I don’t know quite how to phrase it, but he was passionate about things in a way that he was unapologetic for, which is not to say that you should be apologetic about things you are passionate for, but even something like music: If I were to attempt to become a musician, I would be very self-conscious about it and very cagey about sharing it, and he wasn’t that way.”
Ultimately, it would be Mr. Salter’s love for music that would come as one of the greatest surprises to his students, and, simultaneously the thing most people knew him for. A student of African American history at UW, and captivated by the music that emerged out of the ’60s and ’70s — as Ms. Rawles describes — his desire to teach expanded far beyond his beloved elective Protest and Popular Music. “There was a time when he did a whole presentation on Nirvana [in AmStud], and you could tell it was such a deeply personal lecture for him, and it was so different from anything else because he seemed so eager to talk about something that he was passionate about,” says Eva.
But having written and performed dozens of songs, leaving a lasting legacy on Apple Music and Spotify, Mr. Salter was a musician in his own right as well. The students of Protest and Popular Music were lucky enough to discover that when he played guitar and sang to them during class, but others could just as easily discover his musical prowess simply by talking to him. Emani recalls conversations with him about artists like Bob Marley, Nirvana, Kendrick, Billie Eilish, Bob Dylan, Lana del Rey, and others. “That man had impeccable music taste,” she adds.
Even though Mr. Salter isn’t physically with us, he very clearly lives on in the old stories he was so graciously willing to share with the rest of us, and the new stories he crafted throughout his time at Lakeside. As members of his family have shared on his Spotify page, “Through music, his love for his family and friends, his profound sense of justice, and his brilliant way with words will be understood by all. Most importantly, his voice and soul will live on forever.”
