Issaquah Schools Superintendent Ron Thiele weighed the decision carefully last year and presented his opinion to Tiger Mountain Community High School staff in January. He knew this would trigger a torrent of feedback. And it did.

But when the time came for Thiele to give his recommendation to the school board, on June 26, his opinion hadn’t changed: in the face of low graduation rates and more stringent state graduation requirements, the alternative high school would need to close.

At a first public hearing (audio recording linked) for the matter held Sept. 10 in the district administration building — a second hearing was held Wednesday.

“The truth is most Tiger students are not earning a diploma and are not meeting standard on the tests,” he said. “When we do an analysis of the students it isn’t just because of the test, it’s usually a combination of credit deficiencies and not meeting standard on the assessments. For the last three years we’ve had a graduation rate — an on-time graduation rate — that has been in the 30s, below 40 percent. On an extended — five years of high school — we’re only about 50 percent.”

That compared with a 92 percent on-time graduation rate districtwide, Thiele continued. The school had been formed before state testing factored into graduation requirements, Thiele said, and, furthermore, at an average of four credits per year students simply weren’t earning enough credits each year to match the 22-credit graduation requirements.

The board listened to more than a dozen speakers, many of them parents of current and former Tiger Mountain students.

The first of them — Mitchell Reed, a parent of a Tiger Mountain graduate — suggested the district was “putting the cart before the horse.”

“The school population is down at Tiger Mountain,” Reed said. “The graduation rate is low, it is down. Kids are performing below other schools. All those things are true. While the … school population has declined over the past decade, it is really interesting to note that the population of Issaquah and Sammamish has increased rapidly during that same time frame.”

Reed went on to say that he believed the AP and IB programs were serving the top learners of the traditional high schools well. But all students weren’t traditional learners. Extrapolating from the district’s 95 percent extended graduation rate, he estimated about 300 students weren’t graduating the traditional model, versus Tiger Mountain’s less than 100-student population.

“[These students are] often years behind their peers, academically,” Reed said. “And many, as you already know, come from disadvantaged, unstable homes. In fact, some of the children depend on Tiger Mountain High School for their only real meal of the day … is it any wonder to the board that their test scores are below traditional comprehensive high schools? How could it be otherwise?”