Schools attract students but lack diversity

By JOHN IWASAKI
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Good public schools and a choice of private schools are a drawing card to the area. Medina and Clyde Hill elementaries, which also serve Yarrow Point and Hunts Point and some students in Bellevue, regularly post among the highest test scores in the Bellevue School District, Barber says.

Chinook Middle School in Clyde Hill and three private religious schools -- Sacred Heart Catholic in Clyde Hill and St. Thomas Episcopal and Bellevue Christian in Medina -- round out the educational scene.

"The daytime (school enrollment) equals or surpasses our nighttime community population," says Wasserman, the Clyde Hill town administrator. "Our industry is kids."

Kathi Bulfin, a former president of the Medina Elementary Parent Teacher Student Association, describes the area in three terms: safe, friendly and "homogenized."

"We're lacking, to our detriment, in multicultural diversity," she says.

Last school year, Medina Elementary's enrollment was 88.2 percent white, the highest percentage among the Bellevue district's 16 elementary schools. Clyde Hill was fifth-highest at 80.3 percent.

It wasn't always that way. Frost's first-grade class picture at Medina Elementary in 1928 shows 26 children, 11 of them children of Japanese immigrants who grew berries and vegetables.

Bulfin says the area's sizable Asian community never grew back after the internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II.