SPS has decided that the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC) will be phased out. At the elementary level, the plan is to roll it up from the bottom, while allowing students already in the program to finish. The timeline looks like this:
2023-2024 – the last 1st grade will be admitted to Cascadia (and other HCC schools)
2024-2025 – Cascadia’s cohort will be grades 2-5
2025-2026 – Cascadia’s cohort will be grades 3-5
2026-2027 – Cascadia’s cohort will be grades 4-5
2027-2028 – Cascadia’s cohort will be grade 5 only
2028-2029 – no more HC cohort, HC-identified kids will all be at their neighborhood schools or option schools in Gen Ed classrooms.
We are told that students will still be able to join the cohort at different grades as long as the cohort still exists – students do not have to come in as 1st graders. For example in 2026, a 4th grader who has never been in the cohort before could still join it (after being identified as HC).
It’s our understanding that Cascadia will transition to being a neighborhood school. We are told it will be a mixed school for awhile, with some neighborhood students coming in as the cohort diminishes in size. We do not know exactly what that will look like.
At the middle school level, the HCC program has been partially dismantled. There are still HCC pathway schools (Cascadia feeds to Robert Eagle Staff, Jane Addams, and Hamilton), but HC identified students take them same classes as Gen Ed students, and the only area where acceleration is still allowed is math. Cascadia students generally enter middle school 2 years ahead and math and are allowed to continue to the next course in sequence.
There are still HCC Pathway High Schools, though the HCC program technically ends with middle school. These exist because HCC students at those schools needed more advanced classes. The HCC Pathway high school for the north end of Seattle is Lincoln, with the IB Program at Ingraham as another option.
It is expected that the school board will get rid of the HCC pathway designation for middle and high schools as soon as they have the bandwidth to redraw all the school boundaries in Seattle, which is expected to be necessary to completely dismantle the cohort.
How will SPS support HC students in neighborhood schools? You can read what the district says about that here, but in summary they are hoping to add differentiation and a small amount of interest-based enrichment to regular classrooms.
