Seattle Schools Community Forum

Great article in Crosscut about what is happening over on the Eastside with immigrant populations.  What draws immigrants to the Eastside and keeps them there, even when, like Tushara, they go to work in Seattle? Lee could be speaking for all of them when he answers, emphatically, with a single word: “School! I needed to raise kids, and Bellevue’s the place to do it.” It wasn’t just the Bellevue schools’ celebrated instructional quality (its average test scores place it among the top 10 districts statewide in math and science and the top 30 in reading and writing) or their ample tax base, which includes the wealthy lakeshore municipalities of Medina, Clyde Hill and the Points. It was the counter-intuitively congenial social environment of what was then an upscale, predominately white, monocultural community. In Bellevue and Newport, Pham found, he didn’t have to worry about his three kids being bullied or sticking with their own kind for protection. The frictio...

This article appeared in today's Seattle Times about the rise of minority populations at districts in the Puget Sound area. From the article: "But this past school year the Kent School District became the seventh Seattle-area district in which the majority of students are minorities, joining Seattle, Tukwila, Highline, Renton, Federal Way and Tacoma." This follows an overall trend in the U.S. where minority populations will become the majority of the U.S. population by somewhere around 2040 (it had been placed earlier at about 2030 but recently got put further out). From the article: "With the exception of Seattle and a few small districts, all the school districts in King and Snohomish counties have a higher percentage of minority students than they did five years ago. Tukwila, which had the highest percentage of minority students in the 2003-04 school year, has even more now — a nearly equal mix of whites, Asians, Hispanics and blacks. Earlier this year, The ...