Capitol Hill’s in-person events calendar is beginning to fill up including a new “homecoming” celebration planned for September to mark the arrival of Intiman Theater in the neighborhood.
The Intiman Homecoming street party is being planned as a ticketed event and will fill Harvard with performance, vendors, and celebration between Pike and Pine the weekend of September 18th.
The event will celebrate the theater group’s new partnership and programs at Seattle Central: Continue reading
Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange (Image: SCC)
After six years of leadership at Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College, Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange will leave her post this summer after being selected as chancellor of University of Washington Tacoma.
For Edwards Lange, the new post is an opportunity to expand her work from leading an academic institution dedicated to students in the core neighborhoods of a major city to an opportunity to shape learning for an entire growing city and region in the South Sound.
“Tacoma is beginning to experience a lot of the same things that Seattle did maybe 10 years ago,” Edwards Lange said. “An explosion in growth.”
First taking the role of president at SCC on an interim basis in 2015, Edwards Lange’s tenure leading Seattle Central has been most marked by the past year of challenges including the COVID-19 crisis and Black Lives Matter protests that shook the neighborhood. Continue reading
For the second June in a row, graduates from Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College had to celebrate their accomplishments with a socially distanced ceremony. For the second June in a row, they made the best of it.
CHS stopped by Saturday as SCC graduates marked the milestone with a celebratory drive/walk ceremony atop the school’s Harvard and Pine parking garage. Continue reading
The proposed Information Technology Education Center could eventually be part of the growing campus along Broadway
Coming decades will bring big changes to Seattle Central College with plans for several new developments currently being proposed.
The school plans to build a six-story Information Technology Education Center on Broadway with nearly 200 underground parking spots next to the Capitol Hill light rail station on Sound Transit property. The space, divided between classrooms, laboratories, and other student uses as well as office space, would be funded by the college from sources outside the state, architect Stephen Starling said in a meeting last week with the Pike Pine Urban Neighborhood Council.
On the site of the massive, 510-stall E Pine and Harvard parking garage, there would be over 500 beds of student housing. That existing garage would be demolished and rebuilt with about 260 parking spots, which would include charging stations for electric bikes and cars, and the housing built above. Continue reading
Intiman Theater, set to make a new home on Capitol Hill in an innovative partnership at Seattle Central hoped to create opportunities for BIPOC stage and performance workers, has announced a new leader to help guide its move into the new neighborhood.
Amy Zimerman has joined Intiman as its new managing director and will lead the organization alongside artistic director Jennifer Zeyl.
The nonprofit veteran will guide Intiman as it develops a new associate degree program emphasis in Technical Theatre for Social Justice at Seattle Central with training and roles for diverse designers, lighting techs, and theater crews.
The new partnership and program slated to start in fall of 2021 will put Intiman to work on Seattle Central’s stages inside Harvard Ave’s Erickson Theater and inside the Broadway Performance Hall and puts an end of the recent wanderings of Intiman productions and, hopefully, years of financial uncertainty.
The theater group hopes to raise $1.5 million as part of its move to Capitol Hill. You can learn more and donate here.
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(Image: Broadway Performance Hall)
Someday, actors will again put Seattle Central’s Capitol Hill theater spaces back to work. When the lights come up, the spotlight will fall on a new partnership for the Broadway school that will shine light on social justice — and equity in the vital theater roles behind the scenes.
Last week, the college announced it is making a new home for longtime Seattle arts group the Intiman Theater that will create a new associate degree program emphasis in Technical Theatre for Social Justice at the school — and help to provide training and roles for diverse designers, lighting techs, and theater crews.
“We look forward to working with Intiman to provide students with a pathway into the world of technical theater. This partnership is a vivid model of how to better serve our students and how to close the opportunity gaps in our community,” college president Dr. Sheila Edwards Lange said in a statement. Continue reading
By Ben Adlin
Seattle Central College will remain on lockdown as the fall quarter kicks off on Tuesday, with limited access to the school’s Capitol Hill campus and nearly all coursework conducted remotely. Stations will be set up outside building entrances to screen visitors for COVID symptoms, and an updated ventilation system is designed to swap out indoor air every three minutes.
With no end in sight to the pandemic, college administrators expect the precautions to stretch at least into early next year. The school’s operations are limited by the Gov. Jay Inslee’s phased reopening plan.
“Until we get there in terms of public health, the number of cases, testing, everything, we’re not going to be able to bring back more people onto campus,” said SCC President Sheila Edwards Lange. “Initially we thought that we’d be in Phase 3 right now, to be honest, but we’re still in Phase 2.”
The concerns about the virus go beyond health. Last week a small group of demonstrators gathered in a parking garage on campus to demand that Seattle Colleges, which includes Seattle Central, establish a worker-led decision-making process, make cuts to the administrative budget to pay for programs and staff, provide free tuition for students and enact progressive taxes to fully fund colleges as the pandemic seems likely to bring budget cuts to the system.
Already the back-to-school season has brought fears—and growing evidence—of new coronavirus outbreaks. One recent study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, estimated that an extra 3,200 cases a day may have been caused in recent weeks by face-to-face instruction at U.S. colleges and universities.
To combat that spread, only a handful of Seattle Central’s course offerings this quarter will include in-person instruction. Most of those programs, such as nursing, carpentry and culinary arts, require in-class evaluation for accreditation or practical reasons.
And students in those programs, administrators said, will still see a number of pandemic-related changes, including an increased emphasis on remote learning. Nursing students, for example, will rely more on computer simulations instead of hands-on practice.
Most other programs, meanwhile, will be entirely remote, relying on video presentations, the online learning management tool Canvas and even, on occasion, good old-fashioned snail mail. Continue reading
Sounds like SPD did a sweep of the park at #Seattle Central College. There's now a fence around the lawn/park, and it sounds like there are still crews on site. Please check in on those in need in the area. Temperatures are climbing and shelter is vital. #seattleprotestcomms pic.twitter.com/KWlAcNpFsL
— Cortana, but ur dad calls me Katya (@CortanaV) July 21, 2020
The south lawn of Seattle Central is fenced off and cleared of tents after the city moved in Tuesday morning to clear the camp that formed in the wake of the July 1st raid and sweep of the CHOP occupied protest.
The college announced the clearance in an email to the campus. “After two weeks of working with homeless support services, speaking with organizers, and hearing from employees and neighbors, the college received assistance from the city of Seattle this morning to clear the illegal encampment at the South Plaza without incident,” SCC president Sheila Edwards Lange writes. The full email is below.
CHS is not aware of any arrests in the clearance.
UPDATE 5:40 PM: A city Human Services Department spokesperson tells CHS that the school was mistaken in reporting that the Navigation Team executed Tuesday morning’s clearance. “The operation today was SPD and not the Navigation Team,” the spokesperson said. “There may be some confusion around Navigation Team SPD officers being involved but they would be operating under their SPD chain of command and not in their roles as members of the Navigation Team.”
CHOP 2.0 is proving to be as tenacious as its predecessor.
School officials say they continue to work with camp organizers and the city for a voluntary clearance of the collection of tents and tables that has grown on the south plaza lawn of Seattle Central following the raid and sweep of the occupied protest from Cal Anderson and around the East Precinct.
The school says the camp has included an “open display of weapons on campus” and must be voluntarily cleared in days or the college will turn the matter over to Mayor Jenny Durkan, Seattle City Hall, and SPD.
“Seattle Central College supports the exercise of free speech, and we stand in solidarity with the protests against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter,” school president Sheila Edwards Lange writes in a letter to staff and students sent Wednesday morning. “Our South Plaza is, in fact, officially a protest area. But it is not a designated camping ground or a shelter space.”
In the letter, the school official describes a “settlement of tents and awnings on that site is growing and it’s taking on an aggressive and intimidating posture.” Continue reading
Remnants of CHOP at Seattle Cenral (Image: CHS)
There will be no rebirth of the CHOP occupied protest camp on Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College campus.
School officials say they will not allow a small camp of tents to grow on the college’s south lawn.
“We are currently working with the City of Seattle Police Department and navigation team to relocate the people camping on our property,” a spokesperson for the public community college told CHS Thursday. Continue reading
