Middle College High School Comes to Capitol Hill

Sept. 22, 2025: Credit and Re-Post from the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog.

By Matt Dowell

Families with high schoolers seeking a collegiate head start have an option back in the neighborhood for the start of the 2025-2026 school year. Middle College High School, which offers Seattle Public School system students a tuition-free college education as part of their four-year high school program, has relocated to Seattle Central’s Campus after a year in Rainier Beach.

At Middle College High School, classes of around twenty students spend their 9th and 10th grade years earning high school credits. In their 11th and 12th grade years, they enroll in Seattle College’s Running Start program where they begin earning college credits and potentially an Associates Degree while they finish high school. Though any SPS student can attend MCHS, their primary aim is to “increase the college success of students that are the first in their families to attend college, those impacted by systemic racism and/or those impacted by poverty.”

MCHS has two campuses – North, co-located with North Seattle College, and South. The South campus had been at Seattle University for 12 years before temporarily moving to Rainier Beach’s Alan T. Sugiyama High School at South Lake last school year. But Seattle Central feels more like their ideal home.

“I’ve been trying to pursue this long term move for three years,” MCHS Principal Keven  Wynkoop told CHS. “It’s the place where most of our 11th and 12th graders attend Running Start.”

MCHS’s proximity to the college is at the core of its offering. SPS students from any high school can use the Running Start program to gain college credit at one of the Seattle Colleges, but only MCHS provides high-touch on-campus support to such students.

“By being on campus, we can give them a leg up,“ said Wynkoop.

That support relies in part on ties between the high school and college staffs.

“At North, we’ve developed really close relationships with the college’s Running Start advisors. We really make sure they’re partners.“

“We hope to grow that relationship at Seattle Central.”

Wynkoop says that MCHS could be a good fit for teens who want a quieter, more focused high school experience than the traditional path.

“Big high schools are great for lots of students, but if they’re looking for something that has less noise that gets in the way of learning, we are a great option.

There’s specific attention paid to building skills that are essential for navigating college that kids from families who’ve attended college can learn within the family. But the kids sought by MCHS would often have to learn these lessons on their own without the school’s support.

“It starts in 9th and 10th grade. We build student agency, they do their own goal setting and future planning. But it really sets off when they start to attend college classes.”

“All of the things that families who have gone to college have figured out, we break that down.”

“For example, the syllabus is really important. We show them how to use that document to calendar their lives. Now you have 10 hours of class a week but 30 hours of homework. That adjustment is a huge transition.”

Sometimes it’s even simpler stuff that stops a kid from succeeding in college, and MCHS helps with that, too.

“You’d be amazed how difficult it is to keep track of passwords for the things they need to use at the college.”

“We show them how to reach out to professors when they’re sick. Just a lot of little skills that others who attend college have help with.”

Last year’s move to Rainier Beach led to a dip in enrollment for MCHS. While the school won’t specifically recruit Capitol Hill kids, the return to the neighborhood is in some ways a return to its source of students.

“When we were at Seattle U, we had really healthy connections with middle schools in the area,” Wynkoop said. “Washington, Meany, and Mercer were really filling up our cohorts. But moving to Rainier Beach – all the sudden we were farther than most wanted to go.”

“It’s been a little bit of a slow burn to get numbers back up. We have openings right now for 9th and 10th cohorts.”

MCHS’s first campus opened in 1990 in the north plaza of Seattle Central Community College to serve 100 students. “Middle College High School will have no sports teams, no school yells and very few extracurricular activities,” said a Seattle Times article marking the event.

According to Wynkoop, it’s the only Pacific Northwest member of the Middle College National Consortium, a national organization that provides “resources, mentorship, and opportunities for collaboration to middle and early college high schools, allowing educators to develop and maintain successful college and career programs”.

The program grew out of initial success at the Middle College High School at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, which opened in 1974, blending high school and college classes for students who dropped out or were at risk of dropping out at the end of ninth grade.

Seattle’s MCHS grew to five locations across the SPS district before consolidating to today’s North and South campuses.

For students considering enrolling, Wynkoop says it’s never too late.

“September 3 is the first day of school, but we have ongoing enrollment.”

To learn more about the school, contact Wynkoop at kswynkoop@seattleschools.org.