Overlake School Changing -- It's Rapidly Becoming The Place For Kids Of High-Tech Execs

REDMOND - "New England," the crisp white buildings whisper. "East Coast prep school," they murmur.

Nestled on a hillside amid towering Douglas firs, with a sweeping view of the bucolic pastures of east Redmond, The Overlake School's cluster of green-roofed wooden buildings seems lifted from an ad for a New England private school.

Looks deceive. Old-school tradition does not drive Overlake; increasingly, it's the school where Redmond's high-tech barons send their kids, and a touch of the Northwest corporate culture has rubbed off in the classroom.

The school's board of trustees includes two past presidents of Microsoft: Jim Towne and Mike Hallman. Wayne Perry, vice chairman of AT&T Wireless Services and one of the Seattle Mariner owners, also sits on the board, as does Metropolitan King County Council member Jane Hague.

Demanding parents send their kids here. Board president Towne says the school must offer the latest in computers, science and math teachings, or parents threaten to take their kids elsewhere.

Last year, two-thirds of the senior class received the Washington Honors Award, given to the top 10 percent of students in the state. They are headed to such schools as Vassar, Stanford and the California Institute of Technology.

Overlake took a risk recently when it built a $3 million Math/Science Center without all the funding in place. That kind of chance is one of the reasons Towne calls Overlake an

"entrepreneurial school."

"We're running this place like we'd run a company in many ways," Towne said.

The new "head of school" - not headmaster - is Francisco Grijalva. He has a doctorate in educational technology from the University of San Francisco, where he studied and evaluated educational software, and spent the past five years as headmaster of an American school in Florence, Italy. He also has taught in Japan.

Grijalva comes from a diverse background - his mother was Filipino, his father Mexican. He was picked from 200 applicants from private schools around the world.

The selection of Grijalva and the opening of the math/science center are watersheds, but they also come at a time of growing maturity for Overlake, as it evolves into the kind of school its founders envisioned.

Students wear no uniforms and call teachers by their first names. There are no reserved parking spaces for administrators. Graduation requirements include 15 hours of community service, doing such things as serving at soup kitchens or picking up roadside litter.

The curriculum includes an outdoor class, where students hike, kayak and go winter camping. This summer, a class of students wired the campus for access to the Internet; now their charge is to teach their teachers how to use it.

"Overlake wants to achieve the academic rigors of an East coast academic school, but also wants to give its students that freedom to explore and test," said board member Martha Dankers.

When it opened in 1967, longtime Overlake headmaster R. Dean Palmer wanted to create an elite prep school modeled after Seattle's Lakeside School. But initially, just 26 students enrolled in the Overlake Country Day School. Instead of top scholars, the students who came there had reading problems, social problems, dyslexia. "Part of the school's early success was to be successful with these types of kids," Grijalva said.

There's little competition with Lakeside because "the bridges quite frankly determine who comes to Overlake," Towne said. "We're trying to service the Eastside."

Students with dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder still make up part of the enrollment; the school offers them one-to-one tutoring after class. But now, "We have a greater and greater number of kids with very high qualifications coming to the school, swamping the school," Towne said.

The school serves students in grades 5 to 12 and will have an enrollment of 340 this fall. About 60 students are on scholarships. This year, of the 205 who applied for the school, 120 were accepted.

The school anticipates a 10 percent growth rate in enrollment each year and has ambitious building plans for its 64-acre campus, but does not plan to grow beyond 500 students.

At Overlake, there's a dose of the spirit that has made Northwest companies - especially the hard-driving high-tech companies of the Eastside - so successful.

"A high percentage of these kids have computers at home and their dads are writing software, and the kids are writing software," Towne said. "The kids we get are used to seeing their parents work hard, and the kids work hard, too."

The students say the high-tech influence doesn't make this school different from any other - except, perhaps, in small ways. "When I go into the computer room, I notice the seventh-grader sitting next to me knows how to type much better than I do," said Conor Risch, a senior.

The school has struggled to attract girls. This year for the first time, the ratio of girls to boys among new students is 50:50, but the overall student body is 58 percent boys.

Emily Riley, a senior from Seattle, thinks the school's emphasis on math and sciences means there's too little time spent on humanities, English and the arts. "I've been disappointed with the focus - I think we need to branch out, be more creative," she said.

Grijalva also wants to beef up the school's support of the arts. Future plans include the construction of a performing-arts center.

The school has tried to develop diversity; students of color account for 22 percent of the enrollment. "It reflects the real world, to the extent that a school that charges $10,000 to $11,000 a year can do that," Grijalva said. The school has a flexible admissions policy that allows administrators to pick students who are writers, poets, musicians - not just high achievers, Grijalva said.

"Selection is not based solely on academics," he said. "We're here to serve a broader community than just elite academics."