SUQUAMISH — As a classroom of peers looked on, junior Calina Lawrence watched her model windmill waver in the breeze of an electric fan.

After a few agonizing seconds the blades began to turn, and with a faint whir the windmill transformed into a red blur. As the blades spun, a fishing line tied to a spindle steadily elevated a weight off the floor and up to the table top.

“I was holding my breath that whole time,” Lawrence said as students lining the classroom walls broke into applause.

Lawrence wasn’t the only student who triumphed in on May 7 in teacher Bob Kirk’s environmental issues course, one of a passel of interactive classes taught at the Suquamish Early College High School. About 30 native students are enrolled in the school off Sandy Hook Road, where they earn both high school credit from North Kitsap School District and college credit through Olympic College.

The school is one of five in the state and 200 nationwide aimed at giving disadvantaged students, including low-income and minority students, a better shot at success after high school.

This is the second year the Suquamish school has offered a full course load for high school students in the Early College program, open to students from both the Suquamish and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes.

Suquamish Education Director Kari DeCoteau said the Early College program is helping the tribes focus not just on how their students do in school, but where they go afterward.

“This program is going to help us track that and measure success,” DeCoteau said.

At least one of the handful of seniors graduating from the Early College High School this year has been accepted into a four-year university. Chelsea Jones will receive a degree from North Kitsap School District and head to Western Washington University with 25 to 30 college credits already in hand.

“It was cool to get college credit for it,” Jones said.

The curriculum navigated by Jones and her classmates is vibrant.

They study all the same subjects as students in the rest of the district and classes are also reviewed by the Olympic College board. DeCoteau said teaching emphasizes all thre learning techniques — visual, auditory and physical.

“The approach is a very global and holistic approach to learning,” DeCoteau said.

In the environmental issues course, for example, students learn science by nurturing plants in an organic garden outside the education building. The windmill engineering project — part of a statewide engineering challenge — gave students a hands-on lesson in physics, renewable energy and perseverance.

“It was really frustrating because we had to be tweaking it all the time,” said Jones, whose windmill took a few tries to tow a toy fire truck across a mat Friday.

The classes are rigorous enough to meet college standards, but the school doesn’t just accept the best academic performers. DeCoteau said school advisors look for students who can benefit from its approach the most.

So far the program been dominated by juniors and seniors, but the school is hoping balance its enrollment with more freshmen and sophomores in coming years.

If students enroll as underclassmen, DeCoteau said, “we can guide them all the way through.”