Bonney Lake High School
public school
Bonney Lake High School is a public high school in Bonney Lake, Washington, United States, in the Sumner School District.
History
The Sumner School Board initially proposed a new high school in Bonney Lake in February 1999, to alleviate overcrowding at Sumner High School and also to qualify for increased state funding available for four-year high schools. The District formed a planning committee consisting of community leaders and district personnel to make programming decisions for the new school, and to work with architects on building design. Voters had approved a $44 million bond issue for Sumner High School stadium improvements and the new high school in Bonney Lake.
The Sumner School Board delayed naming of the new school because the city of Bonney Lake refused to require impact fees of the builders, potentially costing the district hundreds of thousand dollars. The district temporarily referred to the new school as "high school number 2". The school board eventually voted 4-1 to name the school after the City of Bonney Lake, ending the months-long controversy.
Bonney Lake High School opened in September 2005, and held a grand opening celebration on December 6, 2005. In October 2006 the roof of the new building began to leak, and it was replaced by Garco Construction of Spokane, the original contractor of the building.
The school joined "High Schools That Work", a program of reforms that include "professional training, planning tools, surveys and assessments to help start the programs".
The public source identifies “Bonney Lake High School” as public school. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bonney, Lake and High.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Bonney Lake High School”, the useful work is to connect “public school” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108907078. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2005 and 2006.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Bonney Lake High School”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Bonney Lake High School primary sources, Bonney Lake High School archive and Bonney research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Bonney Lake High School”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Bonney Lake High School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.