Edison School cooking class, 1955. The building is now part of the Seattle Central campus.
Item 168627, City Light Photographic Negatives (Record Series 1204-01), Seattle Municipal Archives via Flickr

The CHS Community section welcomes anybody to post items of area interest to the site. This week, we have some useful submissions about area schools to share. Those posts and a handful of additional Capitol Hill school-related news, below.

• Lowell changes: In addition to new attendance boundaries, an “advanced learning” program is planned to be part of Lowell Elementary’s 2014-2015 school year. This community post has more details of the newly centralized Spectrum Program at the E Mercer public school:
  Boundary changes will increase the existing attendance zone for Lowell to approximately double its size and will now include families who live in the downtown Seattle area between the Puget Sound waterfront and I-5 from Broad Street to James St.
  In order to create a centralized location for a Spectrum program in Seattle, Lowell will have a Spectrum Program beginning in the 2014-2015 school year.  The addition of the Spectrum Program will build heavily on the existing Advanced Learning Opportunities (ALO) instructional framework and incorporate the Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration and Reading (WIC-R) methodology to accelerate and target student success in math and reading.CHS wrote about the boundary changes at Stevens and Lowell here previously.
• SCCC name change? A Seattle Central student publication reports that the Seattle Community College system — and SCCC — are considering a name change to drop “Community” from their branding:
  The Seattle Community Colleges (SCC) Board of Trustees (BoT) is considering whether to drop “Community” from the name of SCCC and other community colleges in the district. Advocates of the change say that “Community” is inaccurate and outdated, while opponents say that dropping “Community” from our name implies dropping it from our mission.A rally planned to oppose the proposal is planned for the campus Wednesday.
• Preschool celebrates 50 years on Capitol Hill: In another CHS Community post, we learn details of the 50th anniversary of Prospect Enrichment Preschool. The school at 1919 E Prospect utilizes the Prospect Congregational United Church of Christ building:
  This story begins in the early 1960s when church members were discussing the church’s relevance to the world and in particular, its Capitol Hill and Central Area neighbors. Discovering that the Seattle School District lacked funding for needed preschool programs in the schools and that some children were entering kindergarten without the opportunity to attend preschool like their more economically advantaged peers was impetus for the Prospect community to take action.
  A small army of volunteers worked with the Seattle Public Schools to establish a non-sectarian preschool program with a strong curriculum. They contacted local elementary schools to identify families whose children would benefit from a preschool experience and went door to door in neighborhoods to recruit families. This dedicated team also recruited other volunteers to work in the classroom and to drive the children to and from their homes. A head teacher was hired, and in the fall of 1964, several years before the federal Head Start program began, the doors were opened to the first class of three and four year olds at Prospect Enrichment Preschool.