Eastlake is one of three high schools on the Sammamish Plateau, all close in proximity along 228th Avenue. Skyline High School, in the Issaquah School District, opened in 1997 and is about 1-mile (1.6 km) south of Eastlake. Between the two public high schools is Eastside Catholic, a private secondary school that relocated to Sammamish in 2008.
In the fall of 2012, Lake Washington School District converted its four senior high schools (grades 10–12) to four-year schools (grades 9–12), moving the freshman class for the first time from the Jr. High to the district's High School.[4]
Eastlake participates in the Running Start program. Eastlake students in the 11th or 12th grade can enroll in college-level courses at Bellevue College, CWU Sammamish, Cascadia College, or Lake Washington Institute of Technology and earn high school and college credit concurrently. The Lake Washington School District pays the college tuition for a specified number of credits taken; students are usually responsible for fees, books, and transportation.[6]
Completed in January 2006, the school has a multi-purpose sports facility. It features two lighted synthetic surface fields operated by the city of Sammamish in cooperation with the school district. The 400-ft by 350-ft field accommodates baseball, softball, Frisbee, lacrosse, and soccer activities for adults and students year-round.[7]
Eastlake High School has a number of clubs and student organizations.[10] These include a number of honor societies such as Computer Science Honor Society, Physics Honor Society, National Honor Society, Math Honor Society, French Honor Society, Spanish Honor Society and Science National Honor Society, as well as career and technical organizations (CTSOs) like TSA, DECA and HOSA, whose chapters send a number of competitors to internationals every year. During the 2018-19 school year, 29 students competed at DECA's ICDC, while 25 students competed at HOSA's ILC.[11] In 2020, Eastlake High School students were elected to represent Washington stateatTSA[12] and HOSA.[13]
Eastlake was the only school in the district to have a FIRST Robotics Competition robotics team (in 2016 a team at Lake Washington High School was founded). The team, formerly known as Top Gun and rebranded in 2020 as Pack of Parts (1294), started in 2004. They qualified for the first time to go to the World Championship in 2014. Again, they qualified and competed in the quarterfinals of the Newton division in 2017.[14]
In 2018, the orchestra was nominated for Outstanding Performance by an Orchestra by the 5th Avenue Theatre for Mary Poppins.[15]
