Don't miss opportunity at Rainier Beach High

A program proposed for Rainier Beach High School focusing on science, mathematics and technology is a promising idea that deserves more attention than it is getting.

The TAF Academy at Rainier Beach would be an offshoot of the Technology Access Foundation, an after-school program focusing on technology education. Co-founder Trish Millines Dziko has spent the past decade pushing academic rigor to children in south Seattle and hopes to move her efforts into schools, starting with Rainier Beach. But the proposal has been greeted with heated opposition and charges that Dziko is trying to sneak a charter school into our midst. Efforts to create such schools have been voted down repeatedly by Washington state voters.

The charter argument is a distraction. The TAF Academy at Rainier Beach is the product of educational creativity and smart public-private partnerships. At the technology foundation, 100 percent of participants graduate from high school and nearly all go on to college.

This is the kind of success Rainier Beach sorely needs. That the foundation is contributing a large share of the program's costs should make the plan palatable to the budget-conscious Seattle School District.

Rainier Beach cannot, and should not, be allowed to continue as is. The school has made incremental progress over the years but remains one of the city's poorest-performing schools.

Its performance on the latest Washington Assessment of Student Learning test is a wake-up call. Only 27 percent of Rainier Beach 10th-graders passed the math portion and just 3 percent passed science.

Some students do fine work at Rainier Beach, but more complain of the challenge of learning in an environment marked by chronic textbook shortages and few rigorous classes.

Opponents of the TAF Academy can't have it both ways. They can't complain Rainier Beach is marginalized while they discourage laudable efforts such as those by Dziko.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of several foundations backing TAF. A point made by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and featured prominently on Tech Access' Web site goes to the heart of what should drive the debate over this plan:

"Once we realize that we're keeping low-income and minority kids out of rigorous courses, there can be only two arguments for keeping it that way — either we think they can't learn, or we think they're not worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong."

The Seattle School Board has been too quiet on this issue. The board must come in from the sidelines and take ownership of a fair, workable accord between TAF Academy and Rainier Beach.

Otherwise, this moment will become a missed opportunity.