Mount Rainier High School

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Mount Rainier High School is a secondary school in Des Moines, Washington; named for Mount Rainier which can be seen quite well from the school. Mount Rainier serves approximately 1350 students and has been active since 1957. It was created to handle the overflow from nearby Highline High School, the district's first High School located in Burien, Washington. A new facility is currently being constructed and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2007. During the two year building process, students are attending school at the Olympic Interim Site, a former Junior High School.

Mount Rainier has many strong programs that make it an excellent school, foremost among these is the IB Diploma Programme. It has many outstanding sports teams including boys' basketball, swimming and dive, girls' volleyball, cross country, golf and tennis. In addition, it has a number of highly respected extra-curriculuar programs including a high caliber music program (especailly its wind and jazz ensembles), and a strong drill team.

Concurrent with the move to Olympic Interim Site, the school has embarked on a path toward converting the comprehensive high school into "Small Learning Communities". To date, however, this effort has failed to increase WASL scores beyond the state wide average gains in Reading and Writing. In science, WASL scores have actually declined (both in absolute numbers and relative to the state wide average) since the start of the Small Schools transformation. Math scores, one of the disciplines least involved in the Small Learning Communities since they have continued tracking students, is the only area in which scores have actually increased relative to the state wide average ^[1]

The conversion effort has also generated a substantial parent backlash characterized by many tense meetings throughout the 2005-2006 school year. This led to the development of two things: first, a suggested “Communications Model” that has never been implemented or discussed since the February 2006 meeting from which it was developed^[2]; and second, the creation of a parent listserv and website designed to keep parents informed about the threats posed to many of Mt. Rainier’s programs including various elective classes and honors classes to name a few.

As part of the small school transformation teachers have been working much harder outside of the school day, most of the work has been voluntary and unpaid. At the end of the 2005-2006 school year roughly 13% of the staff resigned, retired or left to work somewhere else. No school climate survey among the teachers has been conducted, but anecdotal evidence, and a significant change in the school leadership model (formerly known as the Task Force, but now called the Small Learning Community Council), point to significant frustration and “burn-out” among staff members.

Other schools in Washington that are a part of the “Small Schools Project” include: Cleveland High School, Clover Park High School, Evergreen High School, Foster High School, Henry Foss High School, Lincoln High School, Mariner High School and Tyee High School^[3]. One of the things all of these high schools have in common is that they all are among the lowest scoring schools in Washington State when it comes to standardized test scores^[4]. While proponents of small schools don’t see this as a problem, many others in the Mt. Rainier community wonder why they are modeling themselves after the worst performing schools in Washington state.

At the end of the 2006-2007 school year the grant funding many of these changes will run out. Prior to then, the school has set as one of its goals finding ways to make these changes sustainable, but skepticism about their efficacy and desirability remain.

Contents 1 New facility 2 Interim site 3 Small Learning Communities 4 Demographics 5 Athletics 6 Notable Alumni 7 External links 8 References

[edit] New facility

Highline School District's "Capital Facilities Improvement Bond" which passed in March of 2002 included allocation of funds to rebuild the aging Mount Rainier. The old building complex was demolished in the summer of 2005, with new construction appearing in the late fall of 2005. The project is scheduled for completion in time for the beginning of the 2007 school year (September, 2007). The Port of Seattle (operators of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, near the school) the Federal Aviation Administration and the State of Washington will all provide funding for noise insulation, a virtual necessity for a learning environment so near to a major airport.

[edit] Interim site

While the new site is under construction, students will attend Olympic Interim Site; this creates capacity issues, as Olympic was designed as a Junior High/Middle School and doesn’t have enough classrooms to serve all students. The northwest and south portions of the site were therefore bulldozed, and covered with small portable classrooms, in order to create a high School sized facility. The Interim Site is also home to one of the oldest photocopy machines in the Continental United States^[5]. Other technology includes a state of the art filmstrip collection^[6], mechanical pencils, and Apple IIe computer labs^[7].

[edit] Small Learning Communities

During the 2004-2005 school year Mt. Rainier began exploring the idea of converting into a collection of "small schools", or "small learning communites". This effort was consistent with a district mandate to convert all 4 Highline School District high schools into Small Learning Communities, or SLC's. Those schools include Mt. Rainier, Highline High School, Evergreen High School, and Tyee High School.

The Mt. Rainier plan to create SLC's included breaking up 9th and 10th grade students into 3 different theme based schools. These schools are called Exploration, S.T.A.R. and G.E.S.. Each school has a theme that the students are to focus on during the school year. It is hoped that by dividing students into these three smaller schools that their high school experience will be more "personalized". To further achieve this sense of personalization, Mt. Rainier is adding an Advisory Program during the 2006-2007 school year. During Advisory teachers will work with students to help them plan for life after high school, compile a portfolio of their class work, and complete a required senior project. Of these only the senior project is required by Washington State to graduate^[8].

Despite the small school moniker, class sizes at Mt. Rainier have remained excessively large, upwards of 40 in many classes. Total class loads of over 155 students make the goals of personalization and academic rigor difficult to effectively achieve. The large classes, and a crowded campus, also make passing time difficult to conduct peacefully.

[edit] Demographics

Ethnicity	White	Asian/Pacific Islander	Black	Hispanic	American Indian or Alaskan Native
Mount Rainier	62%	15%	14%	7%	2%
Washington State Average	71%	8%	3%	12%	13%

[edit] Athletics

Mount Rainier has been traditionally successful in boys and girls soccer, girls volleyball, and most notably boys swimming, which between 2002-2005 won three straight national titles. The Rams have also performed well in baseball, boys basketball, and have up and down seasons with football.

[edit] Notable Alumni

• Stanislav Fedetchkine, Aide to Lyndon Larouche
• Andrew Merrill, State Champion and Record Holding Swimmer

[edit] External links

• School Sponsored Webpage
• School Overview
• Highline School District webpage
• 2006-2007 School Calendar
• Directions to the School

[edit] References