With close to one-third of the State's population, there are almost 20 individual School Districts in Washington's King County. The highest rated School Districts are generally considered to be in the first chart below. The largest School District on Seattle's "Eastside", with over 153,000 residents in the cities served by it, is the Lake Washington School District, which has four High Schools. The geographic boundaries for each of the four High Schools is shown with a dotted line on the map above. The Lake Washington School District serves nearly 23,500 students in the cities of Redmond, Kirkland, and part of Sammamish. A few Redmond residents in the southernmost part of the city are actually inside the Bellevue School District, which is also very highly rated. Similarly some of the residents in the southern portion of the city of Sammamish fall within the Issaquah school district which, as shown on the graph below had (in 1995) the lowest percentage [shown in blue] of students in the County who fall below the poverty line (208 students). The second, middle graph below shows that the much larger Seattle school district is at the opposite end of the scale in terms of the percentage of students falling below the poverty line (11,320 students represented about 18.5% of the Seattle School District's total student population).
Higher Education
Lake Washington Technical College offers a number of technical certificates and two-year degrees. With 45 technical and professional programs, the college offers a wide range of selections in health and human services, office technology, computers and electronics, transportation, and industrial technology and service. Ninety-two percent of students secure employment or continue their education after graduation. The Worker Retraining Program provides educational assistance and career planning to help dislocated and unemployed workers retrain in vocational fields and get back to work.
Bellevue Community College (BCC) is only 15 minutes from downtown Redmond and, with enrollment of about 20,000 students, the college plans its curriculum around partnerships with the Eastside business community.
The University of Washington opened its Bothell branch almost 15 years ago, in order to extend more learning opportunities to Eastside residents. UWB offers bachelors and masters degree programs for students who have completed two years of undergraduate study. The Bothell branch and the Seattle campus are about a 15-minute and 20-minute drive from Redmond.
The DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond opened in 1998. It offers degree programs for video game programming. Digipen also offers a two-year 3-D computer animation diploma.