Ingraham High School


Ingraham High School is a public high school, grades 9–12 in the Haller Lake neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA. Opened in 1959, the school is named after Edward Sturgis Ingraham, the first superintendent of the Seattle Public Schools. Since 2002, Ingraham has been an International Baccalaureate school, and also offers programs such as the Academy of Information Technology. Since the 2011 school year, Ingraham has also offered an accelerated model of the International Baccalaureate program, modeled on a similar program in Bellevue School District, allowing students in Seattle Public Schools' highly capable cohort. The IBx program was established to provide an alternative to the normal routing to Garfield High School, for the highly capable students. In 2013, Ingraham officially became an International Pathway school, continuing the immersion languages of Spanish and Japanese from Hamilton International Middle School, along with John Stanford and Mcdonald International Schools. In 2009, Ingraham was honored as a Newsweek magazine "Top High School".
On May 10, 2011, Seattle Schools Superintendent Susan Enfield fired the principal, Martin Floe. A week later, on May 18, after a series of protests, Enfield reversed her decision and Floe was reinstated.

The New Ingraham

An International School

Under the direction of the International Education department, for the 2013–2014 school year, Ingraham's official title changed to Ingraham International School to signify the first year of the Language Immersion pathway being implemented at the school and to strengthen the connection with one of its main feeder schools, Hamilton International Middle School.

Changes to the school

Many changes have happened at Ingraham over the past ten years. The International Baccalaureate program was established to bring a higher quality of instruction and academic focus at the school, and has grown from 7 to 81 IB Diploma Candidates, with over 50% of students enrolled in pre-IB or IB classes. Recently, the Seattle Public Schools board adopted a new assignment plan which dropped yellow bus transportation to the school with students instead using King County Metro. This has had a huge effect on the students who enroll at the school, with a huge decrease in the percentage of Southeast Seattle residents in attendance. This has led to a slow demographic change at the school to be focused more on its own North End attendance area and surrounding communities such as Ballard, Queen Anne, Wedgwood and Green Lake than it had been previously.

Clubs and organizations

Rocket Club

Formed during the 2006–07 school year, the club designs and builds model rockets. The team gained attention when it qualified to compete in the 2008 Team America Rocketry Challenge national competition, making the front page of the Seattle section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The team finished 29th in the competition. The rocket club's success in the TARC challenge in 2009 and 2010 earned it the right to participate in NASA's Student Launch Projects. The school fielded one team in 2009–10, and two teams in 2010–11. In 2015, the rocket club, having shrunk to two teams, sent both teams to TARC nationals, where Foxtrot placed 3rd and Delta 21st.

Notable alumni