Rainier Beach High School wasn’t Naj Ali’s first pick. Like generations of students before, she’d heard the stories: that the school was underfunded, its student body was shrinking and its 1960s-era building was falling apart.
But she ended up loving her school community — so much so that she started showing up to school board meetings to join the ranks of hundreds of students, parents, staff and school leaders who for years pressed school district officials for desperately needed renovations.
“A part of our childhood and teenage years was taken by just fighting for what we so rightfully deserved,” said Ali, 25, who graduated in 2018. “We had to fight for what was right.”
On Saturday afternoon, Ali and about 200 other people gathered to celebrate how those efforts paid off: the official dedication of the Rainier Beach’s long-awaited new academic building and athletic facilities.
The four-story, 297,000-square-foot building sits adjacent to the old school, which will soon be knocked down to make way for a new performing arts center and parking lots. The new campus is expected to be completed in 2026 and was supported by about $275 million raised by a property tax levy passed six years ago.
Students officially moved from their old classrooms to the new building on April 21.
On Saturday, students, teachers, alumni and families filled the new school’s sunlit atrium, tried out the gymnasium’s glossy wood bleachers, peeked through windows of a robotics lab and stretched out on the new football field’s bright green turf.
A spacious multipurpose room can be used for standardized testing or converted into extra gym space, like a cycling studio or rowing machine room. Pops of Rainier Beach’s school colors — royal blue and bright orange — adorn the walls, lockers and furniture.
The new building features sustainable design elements, including geothermal wells that produce heat and photovoltaic panels attached to the building that generate electricity. Blue metal paneling and brick cover the school’s exterior. Soon, sunshades will be installed over its south-facing windows.
Common areas honor Rainier High giants. The athletics complex is named for Michael S. Bethea, who coached the boy’s basketball team for 32 years and helped 179 student-athletes secure full-ride college scholarships during his tenure. The basketball court is dedicated to former NBA player Jamal Crawford, an alumnus of the school. And the library honors Betty Patu — the first South Pacific Islander elected to Seattle’s school board and the mother of Rainier Beach’s principal, Annie Patu.
The new school, Principal Patu said at Saturday’s dedication, is “the crown jewel of the south end.”
Rainier Beach’s new chapter follows a hard-fought community campaign to save the school from proposed closure and to upgrade facilities that had seen little improvement since the school opened in 1960. In the years Ali was a student there, the old building’s windows were boarded up and tiles were falling from the ceiling.
When history teacher Evan Tomchick was hired 12 years ago, the student body totaled about 400 kids, he said. That’s less than half the current enrollment. He remembers “walking through the halls and just being like, ‘Oh, is there an event today? Is school out? What’s going on? Where are all the kids?’”
By then, though, momentum was building to modernize the campus. Students were organizing walkouts and protests, attending school board meetings and hosting fashion shows to raise money for the school — efforts they believed would pay off for generations to come.
That time is now.
Current students, Tomchick said, “are trying to really live up to the promise of the building.”
“We can kind of shed some of the baggage of the old school,” he said, “without shedding our identity. Without shedding our community as Rainier Beach.”
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