Evergreen Reporter

Seattle’s Washington Middle School will no longer have the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC) program to offer specialized classes to gifted students. 

This comes after the Seattle School Board agreed in January to partner with a nonprofit to improve the school's curriculum by eliminating HCC. 

This development, the publication Reason says, should encourage parents should push for school choice. Reason reports that Superintendent Denise Juneau and others see the program—which has been predominantly filled with white and Asian students—as a form of “redlining,” and want the program gone despite its success.  

Approximately 1.6 percent of HCC students are African American, but Reason notes that parents of those students support expanding the program, not closing it down. The publication states that instead of engaging with the parents of minority children, School Board Director Chandra Hampson claims those students are being “tokenized” to ensure that the program is maintained.   

Minority student parents have asked the board to consider how eliminating the program will impact children who perform at grade levels above their current assignments, and how their boredom in standard classrooms might affect them and other students.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat claims that he heard of an administrator telling a parent that HCC leads to “opportunity hoarding by the privileged.” In a January 17 column, he wrote that "educational opportunity isn’t a capped resource (at least it doesn’t have to be). In the HCC program, for example, there aren’t a fixed number of slots, like in, say, admission to a selective college.”  

Reason urges parents to use the Seattle School Board’s decision to eliminate the HCC program as a way to push for school choice.

“Parents should be able to respond to Juneau's blunt dismissal of their children's needs by taking their business elsewhere,” the publication writes in a story in its April 2020 edition.