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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-curricular programs including a strong drill team and high caliber music program (especially its wind and jazz ensembles). 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 http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ 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 developedhttp://www.hsd401.org/mtrainier/SLC/ComModeSuggestions.doc; 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 http://www.smallschoolsproject.org/index.asp?siteloc=aboutus§ion=schools. 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 scoreshttp://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/. 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. 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 was completed in time for the beginning of the 2007-08 school year (September, 5 2007). The Port Of Seattle (operators of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, near the school) the Federal Aviation Administration and the State Of Washington provided funding for noise insulation, a virtual necessity for an efficient learning environment so near to a major airport. INTERIM SITE For the two years that the new site was under construction, students attended classes Olympic Interim Site; this created capacity issues, as Olympic was designed as a Junior High/Middle School and didn'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 Stateshttp://archive.lib.msu.edu/MMM/LA/01/i/LA01i015.jpg. Other technology includes a state of the art filmstrip collectionhttp://www.curzon.org.uk/collection/images/Filmstrip.jpg, mechanical pencils, and Apple IIe computer labshttp://www.1000bit.net/storia/images/apple/AppleIIe_platinum.jpg. As the new facility was completed in August of 2007, in preparation for the 2007/2008 school year, the portable classrooms were removed from the interim site as it prepared to house Aviation High School 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 communities". 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 Explorationhttp://www.newdeal.feri.org/images/ab95.gif, S.T.A.R.http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/centennial/pics/4_11_a_one_room_school.jpg, and G.E.S.http://www.thirdlayer.org/sw/school/pictures/rloopsch.jpg 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 graduatehttp://www.sbe.wa.gov/faqs/faq_pages/pathway.htm. 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. DEMOGRAPHICS ATHLETICS Mount Rainier has been recently successful in boys' basketball, boys and girls soccer, girls volleyball, baseball and most notably boys swimming. The boys' swim team has won 6 state AAA titles since 1991, most recently with three straight from 2003-05. The boys' soccer team won 3 straight AAA titles from 1987-89 and again in 1991, winning 13 straight games in that stretch. Most recently the team finished second in 2004, and made the state tourney 5 straight years, 2001-05. The girls' team finished second in 1984 and 1999. The team made the state tourney seven of eight years from 1997-2004, finishing 4th the last year. The baseball team has made the state AAA tourney four of the last five years, finishing 4th in 2006. The softball team finished 4th in the state in 2004. In addition, its track and field team has excelled in the past, winning eight straight North Puget Sound League boys' championships in the 1970s and a state AAA (large schools) championship in 1972 under coach Jim Kennett, and lead by record-setting high jumper Lee Braach. There is a current plan to name a new track for Coach Kennett. The boys' basketball team finished third in the state AAA (large school) championship in 1971, losing to Pasco in a record quadruple overtime semi-final. The team most recently advanced to the state tourney in 2004. The volleyball team made the state tournament four times from 1997 to 2002 The football team made the state AAA championship in 1990, losing to Tumwater. It made the state tournament last in 1996, and the playoffs in 2005. http://www.wiaa.com/history/school.aspx http://www.wiaa.com/history/champs.aspx NOTABLE ALUMNI
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