THERE ARE 50 private high schools in the greater Seattle area. Some have sprawling tree-lined campuses, others are urban enclaves nestled among the bustle of downtown. Championship football teams, award-winning mathletes, budding artists, future humanitarians, and technology whizzes have all found homes at some of the city’s most prestigious academic institutions. And while your options are vast, narrowing the field to the school that best suits your child’s needs is no small task. So we went back to high school, walked the halls and sampled some of the most exciting programs and extracurriculars. Which school is best? It’s all about finding the right match.
Wi-Fi High
Unless you hail from the future, your high school chemistry class was nothing like the chemistry class—heck, any class—at Eastside Preparatory School. Students curl over touch-screen tablets and scrawl equations, which they submit with the press of a thumb to the chem teacher, who projects the entries onto a large screen for close scrutiny. The school, founded in 2003 by parents working at Microsoft and other local tech companies, takes its gadgets seriously. Assignments are posted on the school’s intranet, synced to students’ tablets, and are completed, graded, and returned without the use of printers. Even art is relatively paperless, with a “digital reality” course—filmmaking with digital cameras and stop-motion animation—attracting more students than the old-school paint-brush-and-canvas classes.
Parents are the driving force behind Eastside. “A couple of years ago I was asked to put together a three-year plan for the rollout of new systems to bring our school up to a higher standard,” says director of technology Jonathan Briggs. “The parents raised the money in one year and challenged me to implement all of it immediately. ” Eastside Prep graduated its first senior class in 2009. Those 11 students will likely fill their parents’ shoes at the top tech companies.—HM
Real Initiative
High school senior John Curry voted for the first time on November 2. But we bet he knew more about what was on the ballot than you did—especially when it came to Initiative 1098. The 18-year-old volunteered to campaign for the initiative to create a state income tax for the wealthy. “Volunteered” might not be the right word. Northwest School, on a tree-lined street in Capitol Hill, requires seniors to spend 18 hours working for a political cause before they can graduate. Not that Curry’s complaining. Though the gig entailed phoning voters who often hung up on him, the canvassing paid off. “Those times when you connect with the voter and tell them something that they don’t know—that to me is what this whole project is about.”
Part of a humanities class that also includes politics, the program furthers students’ understanding of the real-world applications of the Constitution, says teacher Daniel Sparler: “There is some resistance to the requirement at first, but by the end of the experience there is a lot of ownership among the students.” And for some students, the real-world applications become immediately apparent. Hannah Rempel joined a campaign against Initiative 1107, the proposal to revoke the sales tax on certain foods and beverages, only to realize, while watching a news segment on the initiative, that her family would be directly impacted. In the segment, her father, who works in the health-care industry, was interviewed, commenting on how much the initiative would affect his employment. The initiative failed.—CD
Published: December 2010
Lakeside can admit great chess players…and therefore stack a team. Would be more impressive for Garfield or some other public school to do well in chess.