47 schools on state's official 'lowest-performing' list

State officials on Friday released the official list of Washington's 47 lowest-achieving schools, which are eligible to receive three-year federal grants of $50,000 to $2 million per year.

Most are in Central Washington, including four in the Yakima School District and seven in the Pasco School District, which represents a little more than one-third of Pasco schools.

In Western Washington, the list includes four schools in Tacoma, three in Seattle, two in the Highline and Marysville schools districts, one in Bellevue and one in Tukwila.

Some school officials questioned the criteria used to make the list, yet most applied for the federal grants anyway because they are so lucrative.

One exception was Foster High School in Tukwila.

Tukwila School Board member Dave Larson said that's because Tukwila is in the second year of a state grant to improve all its schools, and wants to see what that yields before introducing more change.

"If you upset the apple cart on top of that, that's not usually productive," he said.

To win one of the federal grants, school districts must agree to overhaul their struggling school or schools in one of four ways: Close a school; replace its principal and at least half its staff; turn it into a charter school (which is not allowed under Washington law); or "transform" it. The latter has a number of requirements, such as tougher teacher evaluations, a new instructional program and more learning time for students.

The state compiled what's called the "persistently lowest-achieving schools" list by looking at three years of reading and math scores, and, for high schools, graduation rates. In general, most of the schools' test scores were in the lowest 5 percent of schools across the state.

A few of the high schools aren't in that category but ended up on the list because their test scores didn't meet the progress requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law, and they had graduation rates of less than 60 percent.

The list is limited to about half of Washington's schools, those that receive (or are eligible to receive) federal dollars from the Title I program, which have a significant numbers of students living in poverty.

The list isn't the same as another, high-profile federal list of schools in trouble — those that are judged as "needing improvement" under the No Child Left Behind law. That's because the criteria for rating the schools differ.

Applications for the federal grants were due last week, before the state's list was approved by the federal government. That approval came Thursday afternoon, said Nathan Olson, spokesman for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. The superintendent's office will announce March 26 which schools will receive grants.

The goal is to fund as many schools as possible, Olson said, but it's clear there won't be enough funding for all of them. The 41 that applied have asked for a total of $49 million for the first year of the three-year grants, and the state will have only $17 million to give.

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