School tries to bridge techno-gender gap

The Eggs-traordinary Separator, Anna Wheeler explained yesterday, is designed to crack open an egg and divide the white from the yolk by means of a string, a pulley and a pin mounted on an incline.

In her classroom at the fledgling Seattle Girls' School, Anna illustrated the concept with a near full-scale model she's readying for the school's Invention Convention tonight.


	Jasmine Horton, a sixth-grader at Seattle Girls' School, works on a model of her invention, the "Lean Mean Mat Cleaning Machine," and said it will be used to help clean car mats. Helping her is classmate Hannah Ricketts. Gilbert W. Arias / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"I'm working on drawings of it," she said.

Anna is one of 31 sixth-grade girls in the inaugural class at the private school, which opened in September at South Jackson Street and Martin Luther King Way South. Last summer, blackberry bushes and brambles covered the corner lot; now the school's L-shaped prefabricated building sits there, beneath a steel billboard tower.

Seattle Girls' School is envisioned as a middle school, expanding to include grades five through eight within three years. And its curriculum focuses on math, science and technology, all in a setting that's boy-free.

"Girls in middle school begin to lose their voice, they lose confidence and they lose self-esteem," founder and headmaster MarjaBrandon said.

"It particularly begins to show when they drop like flies out of science, math and the technology-related fields.

"The idea was to give them a school of their own where the science and math and technology were integrated with everything and to make it interesting for them."

Private-school parents aren't the only ones worried about the techno-gender gap.

A Seattle public school program called IGNITE (Inspiring Girls Now in Technology Education) brings female technology professionals to high schools to encourage girls to consider high-tech careers.

"In our experience in the Seattle School District, the girls have not been signing up for the more-advanced computer classes," Cathi Rodgveller, the career counselor who started IGNITE in 1999-2000, said. "We're changing that."

At Franklin High, for example, half the students now enrolled in the Cisco computer-networking class are girls; the norm has been three or four girls in each of the Cisco classes of 25 to 30 students offered in city high schools.

"We want girls to understand technology in a way that boys already know," Rodgveller said.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has played an indirect role in the launch of Seattle Girls' School, with his charitable foundation providing $500,000 in start-up money. Half that amount was contingent on the school achieving its goals of a 50 percent enrollment of girls of color, a 50 percent employment of faculty of color and a location in the Central District -- all of which was accomplished, Brandon said.

The parents who organized the school raised more than $100,000, Brandon said. Tuition is $9,600 a year, and nearly half the students receive financial aid.

Seattle Girls' School is an independent institution with no religious affiliation, unlike Holy Names Academy in Seattle and Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bellevue, both Catholic girls' schools. And it is unusual in its focus on science and technology.

"It began with a group of parents who thought this education option wasn't available for their girls in Seattle," Brandon said.

Students are divided into four sections, and yesterday morning each group worked on a different element of the inventions project: a 3-D model, a schematic drawing, a 30-second radio/TV commercial and a computer presentation on the school-supplied laptops.

Jasmine Horton, a student from Seattle working on her model of a car mat cleaner, attended Madrona Elementary School last year.

She likes Seattle Girls' School better.

"We do hands-on projects," she said. "They just gave you a book and expected you to do it."

Jasmine said the lack of boys in the school "doesn't really bother me much."

Her classmate Anna definitely prefers the one-gender arrangement to the co-education at her old school, the private Chestnut Hill Academy in Bellevue.

"Boys in my classes before had always been disruptive and rude," Anna said. "I wanted a school without interruptions and stuff."

And Morrow Woods, who moved to the girls' school from the private Valley School in Seattle, said, "I seem to be able to get more stuff done.

"In my old school, boys usually in math and science, they would always have their hands up first," Morrow said, while fashioning a model of her light-and-buzzer wallet-theft preventer.

"I like this because there are no boys that you, like, have to compete with."

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

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