How does Snoqualmie Valley stack up? On the one hand, schools in the Snoqualmie Valley School District are high-achieving, award-winning institutions. On the other, they’re desperately crowded and understaffed, with a high teacher turn-over rate because of low teacher salaries. How are these both true statements?
Valley teachers are preparing to go on strike. On Friday morning, Sept. 6, potentially their last day of work before the strike, the union blog advised them to take any pets or plants with them when they leave their classrooms at end of day, because they may not be allowed back in for the duration.
Only a majority-approved contract with the Snoqualmie Valley School District can stop the strike, and only if it arrives by 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 8.
Lava lamps and cushy chairs began appearing in classrooms last week, but Animal, the drummer in “The Muppet Show” band, looked like he’d always been at the new freshman campus of Mount Si High School. Perched on a wall-mounted projector in one of the science rooms, the stuffed toy, looked ready to welcome the district’s largest freshman class in years, maybe ever.
About 475 students start their freshman year September 4 in the Snoqualmie Valley School District’s first freshman-only high school campus. That’s roughly the same number of students who were in the building last year, but then, it was a three-grade middle school, and one of three in the district.
A small flourish of color and life wedged between a city street and a state highway, Fall City’s Totem Garden is one scrappy patch of ground. Sun-baked Russian sage and Cape fuchsias flap in the wind of passing cars, and the ceanothus remains a vibrant blue, smelling faintly of lilac in the late August heat.
Bees are about the only visitors to the garden right now, but as a stop on Fall City’s Art Walk, the place draws plenty of guests, and fans each year.
It’s official, but not effective just yet; commercial trucks can’t park on city streets. Amendments to the city code on adopted by the North Bend City Council on Tuesday, Aug. 6, specifically ban parking on six city streets and in any multi-family residential area in the city for commercial trucks, except as needed for making deliveries, permitted construction projects, or emergency closures of the interstate highway.
Age 21 is a milestone for many young adults, and reaching it means official adulthood to them. For some, though, it’s a cliff, and reaching that age means going over the edge.
At least that’s how Sally Coomer of Carnation sees it, for individuals with developmental disabilities and their families. Up to that age, she explained, many such individuals receive state assistance with education and even job training, but at 21, most are no longer eligible. They can still get help, through organizations like the Special Care Agency, which Coomer and Cindy O’Neill co-founded, but Coomer says, their options are limited.
Joe the Buyer (not his real name) struck out at six different North Bend stores recently when he tried to buy beer. Clerks quietly, sometimes apologetically, turned the 18-year-old away at groceries, convenience stores and gas stations time and again. The enforcement officers working with him on the sting began to have high hopes for the rest of the night.
“If we get no buys tonight, that would be wonderful,” said Liquor Control Board officer Troy McCallister. He’s in street clothes, as is King County Sheriff’s Deputy Amy Jarboe, for the undercover operation, backed up by North Bend Police Chief Sgt. Mark Toner, in uniform.
Hours after her first hike to the top of Mount Si, Marina Druse was back on the mountain again. She and good friend Jake Thompson started out at around 4:30 a.m. July 14, headed again for Haystack Rock, where they’d watched the sun set the previous evening. With them this time was another friend, Adam Thalhofer, but the trio was not on a pleasure hike this time. They were on a rescue mission, to save a man’s life.
Despite her level-best efforts to avoid the spotlight, Susan Hankins of North Bend will dazzle the crowds this Saturday. As Railroad Days grand marshal, she’ll make her rounds in a Dazzling Sunset convertible, and, talking about it a week before, she was clearly hoping the car would get more attention than she would.
It could be a stationery shop. Fat yellow pencils, boxes of safety scissors and stacks of notebooks are heaped on tables and along the walls of what is normally the quilters’ room at Mount Si Lutheran Church. Today, though, and for the next few weeks, the room is school supply central.
Peggy Buckingham, a volunteer with the school supply drive and pastoral assistant at Our Lady of Sorrows, her church, drops off a few bags of pencils and such, then does a quick assessment of what’s there, and what’s missing.
Bree Loewen sees things pretty clearly, and acts accordingly. When she and her husband, Russell Anschell, found themselves in the mountains every weekend, they decided to move to North Bend. Since they are “heavy back-country users,” she said it only made sense for them to volunteer with Seattle Mountain Rescue. Because they have a 5-year-old daughter, she is a stay-at-home mom, and they avoid working on the same missions, to minimize their risks.
It all sounds logical enough, but that’s not all there is to Loewen’s commitment.
“It really comes down to ‘this is our community,’” she says. “We’ve been doing this for such a long time and I think people have really come to rely on us.”
Odor has been an issue at the North Bend wastewater treatment plant for years, but a new project approved by the North Bend City Council July 16 should cut the number of complaints.
The council awarded a contract for up to $72,000 to Gary Harper Construction, Inc. of Sno-homish for repairs and updates to a 10-year-old dryer, plus electrical and piping modifications needed to complete the repairs.
Next year’s school impact fee will be $8,000. Or $3,300 per multifamily unit. Either way, it’s a fee the Snoqualmie Valley School District won’t receive from any construction in the affordable housing area of Snoqualmie Ridge. And either way, it’s not a problem.
“We don’t really budget impact fees, because they’re unpredictable,” said Ryan Stokes, the district’s director of business services. Besides, the school district won’t receive impact fees from any affordable housing project on Snoqualmie Ridge, whether it’s the proposed Imagine Housing development, or another project.