When it comes to public education, there is much to celebrate. Educators, parents, and communities are working together to achieve excellence. Washington State’s fourth and eighth grade students continue to perform well above the national average in reading and mathematics. Students in our state consistently score higher than the national average on the ACT. And on the SAT, students had the highest average scores in the nation among states where more than half the eligible students took the test.
I’m barely middle aged, but I think I’ve always been old school. I prefer e-mails and phone calls to 140-character texts and Tweets, and books… as books. There’s no replacement for the smell and feel of newsprint and ink.
Consider me a late adopter. It took years for me to get on Facebook. Friends, I reasoned, are the people you spend time with in person, face to face. Digital friends? We have a word for that: Strangers.
Yet eventually I bowed to the inevitable. Turns out I was wrong about Facebook, proven so by the folks I hadn’t thought about in years who ‘friended’ me. We’ve had some pretty deep conversations, all without a spoken word.
I don’t know anyone who is looking for a way to pay more taxes. However, I do know people who would love to leverage their expenses and investments with 30- to 40-cent dollars. If you could save 60 to 70 percent on your investment dollars, wouldn’t you seriously consider it? If you worked for an employer who was willing to match each of your dollars with company dollars placed in an account for you, wouldn’t you take advantage of that offer?
In discussing the proposed sales tax increase with North Bend-area small-business owners, I began to get a very clear picture of the business climate in our community of approximately 5,700 people.
To be fair, there were several business operators that didn’t anticipate the sales tax increase would produce any negative impact on business. However, the majority of businesses I contacted indicated that taxes are already too high, and the proposed 0.2 percent increase would further subdue our already-tepid local economy.
It was a bittersweet moment, watching and listening to Minna Rudd dial up support for Si View Metro Parks District.
To be sure, watching one of our last remaining democratic rituals unfold is a heartening sight. In today’s increasingly impersonal, vote-by-mail environment, the phone banks that folks like Rudd run are one of the last person-to-person connections remaining between and among voters.
But it was also a moment of tension. A lot is riding on Si View’s two ballot measures, Props 1 and 2. The two measures—one of which requires a challenging 60-percent supermajority—would preserve the parks district from massive cuts due to the state property tax cap. And yet Rudd’s tool that night—a county registered voter call list—was an imperfect one. So many of the voters had moved, dropped their land lines, even died, that many of numbers that Save Our Si View volunteers were calling were useless.
Nearly 70 years ago, it was Harold Keller’s big task to provide an up-and-coming logging town with athleticism, sportsmanship and culture.
As director of the Snoqualmie Falls YMCA, Keller earned grudging respect at first, finally acceptance and praise for the way he knit the fabric of the mill town together. His son Ward remembers how the strict father was pranked on Halloween by hard-bitten sons of loggers for his uncompromising take on rowdy behavior. But Keller won people over to his methods, and worked tirelessly to provide many avenues to recreation and activity for his charges.
Do you want to fill a Town Hall sometime? Just announce a meeting to discuss a proposed hydroelectric project anywhere on Washington State rivers. The knee jerk reaction is almost always not just “No!” It’s “Hell, No!”
Snoqualmie’s seven council members can’t carbon-copy each other on e-mails anymore, thanks to Jodi Warren.
The Snoqualmie City Clerk takes the spirit of transparency rules very seriously, so around the time she started at City Hall, she banned the practice of multiple c.c.s. She did it because such e-mails between elected officials who vote on public matters are a form of discussion. That discussion is supposed to take place in chambers, not on computer keyboards.
Warren’s ban is worth considering in light of some recent discussion over ways that elected school officials are staying in touch.
Does your mental picture of a senior center conjure up easy chairs, crochet crafts and old folks sitting around playing dominoes? If so, it’s time for a fresh perspective.
It turns out that the notion of the center as an old-timey social club for the elderly is a bit out of date. Trade the crafts for Wii bowling and the easy chairs for dance lessons.
I know it’s hard to believe, but the fall is already upon us. As evidence, I submit that at least one person in our office has already been temporarily felled by flu.
So it was surprising, but perhaps not unforeseeable, to find that Snoqualmie Valley Hospital is already selling flu shots.
Bouncing down Boalch Avenue the other day, I did a double take when I saw the cyclist headed the wrong way at me along the shoulder. Then I saw the full-size pickup headed my way in the opposite lane.
Normally, I rely on sparse traffic and occasionally borrow part of the other lane to thread the cratered surface of the torn-up, wetland-plagued road. This time, it was a slow-motion running of the gauntlet. All three vehicles squeezed by, but I had to wonder whether the cyclist was aware of the Snoqualmie Valley Trail a few hundred yards north, wide open and welcoming.
It was my idea to go through the trash. All Jeff Borgida needed was a little prompting.
Once I opened the blue bin, Borgida, Eastside general manager for Allied Waste, started pointing out the little mistakes—bagged paper, lids on bottles—and showing how I could recycle more stuff, better.
Until a few weeks ago, I had rarely considered what happens to garbage, post-Dumpster. Small town news is so often consumed with the future—growth, education, votes, movers and shakers—that there’s not always time for the grimy stuff like trash.
For me, Sept. 11, 2001, began with a phone call. Get up, my editor urged, and get over here, because something terribly significant had just happened. Everyone I knew, every stranger I met was glued to their televisions, watching images of planes crash into New York’s iconic Twin Towers and the Pentagon. As the morning lengthened, disbelief turned to a stunned numbness. Surely it couldn’t get any worse. Then the towers fell. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks, and more would have perished, too, if those on board United Airlines Flight 93 hadn’t resisted the hijackers, causing the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania pasture.