Welcome to IGNITE!

IGNITE is a Seattle Schools program, created for Seattle Schools in November 1999. Funding is provided by federal Carl Perkins dollars, which is federal funding for Non-Traditional education for women and minorities. IGNITE now contributes to the funding of IGNITE as well.

The program has been running in all of the 12 Seattle High schools since 2000. We have expanded to middle schools, more each year. After winning the National Best Practice from the National ACTE, Association of Career and Technical education organization, the Directors of the National ACTE, the National Women's law Center, and NAPE, National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, in 2007, many other schools both nationally and internationally created IGNITE programs of their own, using the comprehensive toolkit created by the founder of IGNITE, Cathi Rodgveller M.S. Ed. Cathi has been a teacher and School Counselor for 30 years. She has taught every grade level, and doing IGNITE is her passion.

Seattle Schools now views IGNITE as a Premier program and best practice for educating young women about STEM careers. STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) educators from anywhere, both nationally and internationally can contact the founder, Cathi Rodgveller, for information on how to start their own IGNITE group. Cathi has created a comprehensive toolkit on how to successfully run your own IGNITE program, which can be found on this website. The book will soon be offered on Amazon and we will announce when that is available.

Please look around our site to learn more about IGNITE and how you can be involved.

Sign up for our newsletter to keep up on all the IGNITE news.

Our previously published newsletters are available online.

We welcome your donations, because educating young women to gain skills in these fields should be a priority in 2012. Federal funding is drastically being cut each year and we rely on donations to keep our program running.

Visit our bulletin board to post volunteer opportunities!