At the end of World War Two in 1945, military servicemen returned to the USA and many settled in Seattle. The population of Seattle increased by 100,000 people between 1940 and 1950 due to the influx of returnees and new residents. Many young couples got married at this time and started families. Seattle Public Schools then began a desperate scramble to get ready for what they knew would be coming: a huge wave of children born after 1945, called the Baby Boom, who would reach school age in the 1950s.
The need of new schools was particularly acute in northeast Seattle, an area of a lot of housing development after the war. In the 1940s-1950s northeast Seattle was still semi-rural, outside of the city limits and still had a lot of vacant land which could become available for building houses. Developers like Albert Balch in Wedgwood shifted into high gear to build starter-homes accessible to military veterans via government-supported home loan programs. Neighborhoods like Wedgwood where Balch was building, became populated with young married couples.
This blog article will tell about the John Rogers School at 4030 NE 109th Street, one of the new schools which opened in northeast Seattle in the post-war years.