Cleveland High plan for magnet school draws interest, but is there enough money?

Plans to turn Seattle's Cleveland High into a magnet school that focuses on math, science, engineering and technology drew hundreds of eighth-graders and their parents to an open house Saturday.

They included Sonja and Gerald Bradford, who said the new program put Cleveland on the list of prospective high schools for their daughter Brooke, now an eighth-grader at University Prep, a private school in North Seattle.

Yet even as the Seattle Public Schools recruits students for what it hopes will be a standout program, there are questions about where the district will find some of the money to get it started and whether it should proceed, given that other schools' budgets may be cut next fall.

Some Seattle School Board members are questioning a proposal to spend $800,000 so that Cleveland can use the curriculum and training offered by the New Technology Network, a national group of 41 schools, many of which also have a science-math-engineering-technology (STEM) focus..

"It feels like we're making a pretty big commitment in a difficult fiscal environment," said School Board President Michael DeBell, who said the district might consider a less-expensive, homegrown program instead.

"The Ballard Biotech Academy was launched with a very small amount of money from the school district, with funds from local biotech companies ... and an entrepreneurial push from staff members," he said.

The district first talked about turning Cleveland into a STEM school last year. Questions about costs aside, district staffers say the program will open next fall, even if it isn't part of the New Technology Network.

As an "option" school, Cleveland will no longer be a neighborhood high school for incoming freshmen, but one that students sign up to attend, with spaces allotted by lottery if necessary. The STEM program will be phased in, starting with freshmen and sophomores.

It's the latest effort to raise academic achievement at Cleveland, which has gone through a number of improvement efforts over the past decade, with mixed results.

This time will be different, said Cleveland principal Princess Shareef, in part because the school's teachers have been central in planning the new program, and because of the support that's offered through the New Technology Network.

In all New Technology Network schools, students learn primarily through assigned projects rather than the more traditional lectures. Cleveland teachers would be able to use projects developed and tested by teachers in other network schools, Shareef said, as well as receive a lot of support and training.

"If we want to do this correctly, we're going to need the professional development that the New Technology Network affords," Shareef said. "I hope, hope, hope that the board approves it."

Catherine Brown, the school's academic dean, said board support for the New Technology Network contract would show Cleveland staff that the district is willing to "support us for real this time."

At a School Board meeting last week, district staffers said they still need to find $180,000 of the $730,000 needed to run the Cleveland STEM program next year. The district also is depending on using $500,000-$700,000 from a capital levy that will be on the ballot in February. In all, the district plans to spend $2.6 million to $2.8 million over the next four years on the program.

The staff is looking for outside help but have no commitments yet.

One possibility is the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, which has just announced a $400,000 grant for Delta High, a STEM school in the Tri-Cities area that opened last fall. The foundation is considering whether to invest in the Cleveland project, said senior program officer Anson Fatland.

Even if the program is funded completely through existing revenues, however, Chief Academic Officer Susan Enfield said it won't siphon dollars from any other Seattle school.

But some question whether that's the case, and whether the New Technology Network schools are as good as advertised.

While the district points to high graduation and college-enrollment rates at some New Technology Network schools, retired Seattle teacher Dan Dempsey said students at two network schools — Sacramento New Technology High School and Los Angeles School of Global Studies — score low on end-of-course exams in algebra and geometry.

Parent Meg Diaz said the district should wait a few years to make sure it can fulfill all the other promises it has made under its new plan for how it assigns students to schools. And she questioned the district's assertions that the program won't take money away from other schools, saying Cleveland's share of state money for struggling students appears to be going up.

School Board members Harium Martin-Morris and Steve Sundquist, along with Enfield, plan to visit Sacramento New Technology High School on Tuesday.

Martin-Morris said he shares concerns about the costs of the school but also thinks the district should be investing in the southeast part of the city.

If the district works to expand opportunity and equity throughout the district, he said, "can we afford not to make this kind of investment?"

Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com