Pretty much the best high school EVER.

I spent most of my high school career at Tacoma School of the Arts (more affectionately and conveniently known as SOTA).  You apply in the spring of freshman year and start as a sophomore.  (Your first semester, you're referred to as a "froshmore.")
I didn't take AP or Running Start classes, but that was okay.  SOTA didn't deprive me of an education, but rather, it taught me what it means to have an education.
All of the regular classes (math, Spanish, etc.) are taught, but they not only offer lots of art classes, they give you eight periods (block schedule) to take everything you need/want.  To break that down, if you were to take all of your core classes (math, science, history, and english), Spanish, and health/PE (which, incidentally, can be gained through dance classes) every semester you'd still have room to take two art classes.  It's a pretty good deal.

One of the things I really enjoyed about SOTA was the way they handled the humanities.  Instead of breaking up english and history, they combined them and taught humanities twice as often--in other words, you had humanities every day instead of every other.  Have you ever tried to study the Odyssey without the religious and political background?
The other unique thing they do with the humanities is combine all three years, and then they rotate year to year.  For example, my friends who didn't go to SOTA studied ancient cultures sophomore year, then world civilizations, and American civ their senior year, but my classes were civ, world, ancient.  The students a year behind me would have studied (in this order) world, ancient, civ.  What this really meant was that the sophomores were in class with seniors, which pushed them to think about the material at a higher level.  The teachers push you harder, as well, so much so that even in the honors program in college, I'm writing fewer (albeit longer) essays than I was at SOTA.



And then there are all of the arts classes.  Just of the top of my head, these are some of the art classes that were offered when I went there:
-creative writing
-acting
-lighting design
-hip-hop
-modern dance
-choreography
-ballet
-orchestra
-choir
-songwriting
-photography
-graphic design
-video
-drawing
-sculpture
...you get the idea.
Some of the teachers are full-time, and others are local artists that teach one or two classes.
No matter what class you're in, though, they try to connect them.  We studied poverty through theatre, based dances on Greek myths, made instruments in physics, combined the life drawing and anatomy classes, discussed current political events in graphic design...the list goes on and on.

m.