9239 20th Avenue NW
Seattle, WA 98117

Good teachers, lots of activities and extra curricular for kids, and good college prep opportunities from our church experience.

This is my child’s second year at North Beach. She has excelled past expectations thanks to her teacher and all the resources available to her provided by the school district and provided by the extra funds raised by the PTA. I want to move house, but I don’t want to remove my child from this school. I feel so fortunate that we are in such a good community with excellent schools.

I am writing from my own family's perspective. My child is smart, capable and attentive -- and students like this are utterly ignored at Whitman, save by a few very skilled and committed teachers. I cannot speak to other types of students or the school's or district's efforts to support them. But over three years at Whitman (one entirely remote during the pandemic, and we were willing to give the school a pass there), my child only worked hard and learned in only a few classes. The rest of the time she was BORED and unchallenged and routinely just left to read on her own, or watch videos on her phone, or whatever when she finished her work. That is unacceptable. Summary: - A few math teachers and one history teacher were excellent and managed to teach appropriately to the wide variety of skill levels of students in the class. Which is hard to do, I understand, but it should be managed better than this.- The rest of her teachers were not unpleasant. They just mostly failed to teach smart kids who learn quickly. She spent hours every day doing nothing. I don't think she read an entire book and did a thorough project/book report in English class over three years. (There was some in-class, out-loud reading; strange for an 8th grade class.) There was almost nothing substantive in science, over all three years, and no real hands-on experiments. - There is a serious lack of electives available. If your student does not do Spanish or music (highly recommend doing these, if your child goes to Whitman!), which continue through the whole year, there are simply not enough semester-long options for the kids to take. So they end up being "TAs," which essentially means doing nothing, again. No one told us that in advance. We were really disappointed with this school. We expected better from Seattle Public Schools. Highly capable students should be able to receive a solid education from their neighborhood school. We were not asking for amazing, just for pretty good.