Sammamish families push to leave Snoqualmie Valley School District

Published 5:26 pm Tuesday, February 17, 2026

For 20 years, a northeast Sammamish neighborhood has been petitioning the Snoqualmie Valley School District to alter district lines, allowing them to move into the Lake Washington School District, which borders them on three sides.

On Nov. 13, Snoqualmie Valley’s school board chose to retain the territory, denying the petition for the fourth time.

Now, a few of the parents behind the petition are appealing the denial in King County Superior Court, a process that will likely go on for some time.

This territory of 65 homes sits on the edge of Sammamish city limits, off of 244th Avenue NE, just up the hill from SR 202. The families that live there are assigned to Fall City Elementary School, Chief Kanim Middle School (located in Fall City) and Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie.

Though part of the Snoqualmie Valley School District (SVSD), these homes are easily mistaken for being part of the Lake Washington School District (LWSD). Some parents said they receive mailers from LWSD and have seen real estate websites list homes in the neighborhood as being part of LWSD.

And, directly across the street, the neighbors are assigned to LWSD schools.

In fall 2025, only four out of 16 students living in this territory were enrolled in SVSD schools. Five attend LWSD schools, and seven attend private schools.

Parents of this Sammamish neighborhood cite quality of life as the primary reason they don’t want to send their children to SVSD schools. They say the commute is too long and on roads they deem dangerous, especially in the dark or during inclement weather. They say their only other options are to move, pay for private school, or attempt choice transfers to LWSD, which are not guaranteed year-to-year.

They also say, simply put, they are not part of SVSD’s community. Their lives happen in Sammamish, where they meet with friends, go to church, attend events and shop. It is difficult, they say, for their children’s school friends to live as far away as they do.

“We have no issue with the Snoqualmie community, but it’s not our community,” Kelly Dillingham said.

According to SVSD’s petition response, the board does not agree that changing the school boundary would have any great impact on these Sammamish families and their students.

Per Washington state code, five things need to be evaluated when considering a territory transfer such as this: student educational opportunities; the safety and welfare of students; the history and relationship between the petition area and the district; whether the schools are geographically accessible to the petition area; and the financial effects this change would have on both school districts.

The board’s recommendation document states that “while travel times to LWSD schools may be shorter, those differences do not constitute a safety or welfare concern.” And there are no “significant geographic or physical barriers” between these Sammamish homes and the SVSD schools they’re assigned to.”

“The service area has remained consistent over decades, and residents purchased homes with the understanding that they resided within the Snoqualmie Valley School District,” the recommendation states.

SVSD is also concerned that allowing this one territory to leave the district would encourage other neighborhoods on the outskirts of the district to file petitions as well, “leading to the gradual erosion of SVSD’s territorial integrity and complicating long-term facility and enrollment planning.”

“Granting the petition would not only reduce the district’s fiscal resources but also potentially undermine the efficient operation of schools such as Fall City Elementary and Chief Kanim Middle School, which depend on stable enrollment to sustain programming and staffing,” the recommendation states. “Furthermore, SVSD’s analysis shows that 51% of Fall City Elementary’s enrollment resides closer to out-of-district schools, further demonstrating a potential impact if additional transfers are approved.”

A decades-long struggle

In the last 20 years, homes in this neighborhood have been bought and sold. Babies have been born, while other kids have graduated and moved on.

But one thing has remained the same: the residents do not want to be part of SVSD.

Last July, three families here filed a 66-page territory change petition with the Puget Sound Educational Service District on behalf of the residents of Devereux, Trails at Camden Park and adjacent neighborhoods on the east side of 244th Avenue NE. The petition was supported by 78% of the homes, with no known homes in opposition.

Few of these Sammamish families send their children to SVSD schools. Many are in private school, while some have received choice transfers into LWSD. In the past, many families have also sold their homes, opting to rent just a few minutes away for access to LWSD.

Kaylena and Ryan Druckman received a choice transfer for the 2024-25 school year and sent their daughter to the nearby Rachel Carson Elementary for kindergarten. But choice transfers need to be renewed each year, and theirs did not get approved for first grade due to Rachel Carson being over capacity. (For context, Fall City Elementary is over capacity as well.)

The Druckmans had to appeal the decision in court. Their daughter spent the first few days of school in SVSD before being allowed back to LWSD for the remainder of the year.

Soon, they’ll be facing the issue doubly.

“My son is going to go into kindergarten next year, and there’s a chance that my kids end up in different schools,” Ryan Druckman said.

Saurabh Shrivastava and his wife have their daughter in private school. He said it wasn’t until they were about to purchase their home in 2018 that they learned their child wouldn’t be able to attend the schools right down the street.

But there was a territory change petition going on back then, too, that they assumed would be approved, so they signed the papers.

“That school is a mile away, where your high school that you’re assigned is 16 miles away. That doesn’t logically make sense, so that will pass,” he said of the territory change petition. “We went ahead with the purchase … and then we realized, oh no, that is rejected.”

Another parent in the neighborhood, Roman Kalmykov, said his family’s school assignment is a factor in whether he and his wife will have a second child. He’s not sure he wants to drive two kids to and from SVSD schools each day — a difficult task, he said, for working parents. He’s also not sure they can afford to send two kids to private school.

Only one of the Sammamish children in this territory takes the bus. The elementary school boy is the first to be picked up each morning and the last to be dropped off each afternoon, spending two hours daily on the bus.

The other children are driven by their parents, 9.5 miles one-way down SR 202, averaging about 15 minutes. The LWSD elementary school is a 3-minute drive and is a trek that children across the street make daily by foot or bike.

The respective buses from the two districts drive the same road each day to pick up their students — further proof that the district lines are “arbitrary,” petitioners say.

The city of Sammamish was not incorporated until 1999, and the territory in the petition was not annexed into Sammamish until 2009. At that time, the petitioners believe school boundary lines should have changed.

Since then, there have been three petitions to do so, all denied.

“This petition is the culmination of prior submissions in 2003, 2011 and 2018 for this territory,” the document states. “This resoundingly demonstrates a history of hardship and consistent need for boundary correction since these homes were built.”

‘The system is messed up’

A school territory transfer has to be approved by both school districts involved. In this case, neither school board approved the transfer, though one Lake Washington school board member — Mark Stuart — voted in favor of the petitioners.

The Lake Washington board discussed the petition and made this decision at its Nov. 17 meeting. The board members who chose to deny the petition cited over-capacity at each of the three schools the petitioners are requesting to switch to.

“My first responsibility is to the students currently enrolled in my district,” said board President Lisa Guthrie. “I cannot, in good conscience, approve a transfer that would further strain our already full schools.”

But Guthrie said she encouraged the families to continue their advocacy and commended them for their work on the petition.

“That pattern tells a story: when boundaries don’t align with actual communities, families find work-arounds,” she said. “Those individual solutions come at a cost to those families, to their communities and to public education as a whole.”

Guthrie said she believes the state law that guides this process “is fundamentally broken,” a sentiment that other board members shared.

“The system that has been imposed by the Legislature, I think, needs to be revamped,” said board Vice President Eric Laliberte. “There needs to be better comprehensive regional planning that considers capacity, demographics [and] districts holistically, not this piecemeal approach that has been imposed.”

Guthrie said that these decisions should go directly to the Puget Sound Educational Service, rather than having two districts take “adversarial positions.”

The petitioners do intend to address these issues with the Washington State Legislature. They are also appealing the petition denial in King County Superior Court, with a judge having recently been assigned to their case. The Snoqualmie Valley Record will publish developments as they come.

In the meantime, in hopes of providing other options for the petitioners and similar families, Superintendent Jon Holmen said LWSD would be introducing Guaranteed Choice Transfer Pathways.

“These pathways will allow families from outside the school district to be granted an elementary through high school pathway with the guarantee of acceptance, versus the year-to-year decision-making process,” he said.

Regardless of how long or what form it takes, these Sammamish families are committed to realizing the change they have been seeking for more than 20 years.

“The system is messed up. It’s absurd,” Ryan Druckman said. “Somebody, please, fix it.”