In the late 1970s, community and Seattle School District planners worked on a 1990 building plan to be adopted the following year. Faced with shrinking enrollments and the need to desegregate, they recommended that a number of schools, including Cleveland High School, on Seattle’s Beacon Hill, be shut down and teachers and students be moved to other schools.

Cleveland students and supporters were proud of their school’s diverse ethnic makeup, low drop-out rate, and feeling of community, and they did not want to move. They organized a Save Cleveland High School Committee that included parents and residents of areas served. Five students were chosen to produce a public television program on Seattle integration. The “As We See It” program of students interviewing students was scheduled to run in January 1980.

Here, Eddie Releford, one of five students chosen to produce the program, sits in the school’s radio/television studio.

Caption information source: “Shutdown threatened at a school where desegregation works”, by Gaye Vandermyn, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 25, 1979, p. A14.