Voters to decide Feb. 8 on middle schools’ future

BY CAROL LADWIGStaff Reporter

Art teacher Ruth Huschle loves her classroom at Snoqualmie Middle School. The sprawling space has plenty of storage for materials, enough surfaces to stash works in process as they dry, two com-puters and a printer, and room for up to 24 students to work at any one time.

It’s perfect for a class focusing on cre-ative expression.

“I don’t have to modify what I’m doing within the confines of this space,” Huschle said.

In two years, Huschle will lose her classroom. Like all SMS teachers, she’ll be moving out of the building to make way for the freshman learning center, but she doesn’t know where she’ll be going.

That decision is in the hands of Snoqualmie Valley School District resi-dents, who will vote February 8 on a $56.2 million school bond. If they approve the bond, SMS staff and roughly 500 middle school students will get a new building. If not, they get reassigned to one of the two remaining middle schools.

Despite the uncertainty of the election outcome, Huschle, also a parent in the district, is fully in favor of the decisions that led up to it.

“We have to do something,” she said.

Crowding fixMount Si High School has space for

only 1,725 students, and is near capacity now with 1,500 students. Meanwhile, the three middle schools have a combined capacity of about 2,000 students and a combined enrollment of only about 1,400.

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Mackenzie Kulsrud and Kelli Christopherson visit their lockers between classes at Snoqualmie Middle School. A February 8 bond would build a new SMS on Snoqualmie Ridge.

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Public hearing called on comp plan change

BY SETH TRUSCOTTEditor

For more than a decade, King County law has strictly limited commercial change in Fall City. Without a sewer and dependent on septic systems, Fall City business-es often face uphill battles when they move or develop. Growth is out of the ques-tion.

“Because there’s no sewer system in place, and no pros-pects to get one, we’ve denied every commercial rezone request for years,” said Paul Reitenbach, Comprehensive Plan Project Manager for King County’s Department of Development and Environmental Services.

Doing business in Fall City could get easier, thanks to a new push to change the Fall City Sub-area Plan as part of the lead-up to the 2012 Comprehensive Plan update.

A fresh look at Fall City regulations—business and environmental policies, parking and sign rules, and how they affect the commu-nity—is the topic of a public meeting, 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 31, at Chief Kanim Middle School, hosted by the county.

Last year, residents, busi-ness owners and the Fall City

New rules for Fall City growth?

School in motion

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Roads, property overflowed by weekend surge BY SETH TRUSCOTT

Editor

First came the storm, then came the sightseers. Rows of cars crowded the Snoqualmie Falls overlook,

occupants coming for a glimpse of the swollen cataract on the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday. Other drivers grabbed cameras and gathered near the entrance of Snoqualmie Falls Golf Course in Fall City, snapping photos of the Snoqualmie River where it had burst its banks and overflowed Highway 202 and neighboring properties.

By Monday afternoon, Jan. 17, the river was dropping when Snoqualmie Falls head pro Jeff Groshell parked next to sightseers, stepped under a rope barrier and walked to the end of dry pavement. His family-owned course was beyond, inaccessible under about four feet of water.

As Groshell’s son Trevor splashed a boot into the current, Jeff warned him to stay out of the swirling water, which hid road, pasture, fence posts, greens and all from view.

‘Minor’ flood soaks Valley

Seth Truscott/Staff Photo

Jeff Groshell and his son Trevor inspect the flooded entrance to their family’s golf course at Fall City. Groshell was sur-prised by how high flood levels rose in the Lower Valley dur-ing the Martin Luther King Jr., holiday weekend compared with river flows in the December 2010 event.

www.valleyrecord.com2 • January 19, 2011 • Snoqualmie Valley Record

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Clearly, there’s room to grow at the middle-school level, and if the bond is approved, there will be a lot more room. Snoqualmie Middle School today is about 65,000 square feet, with a capacity of 600 students. The new, or replace-

ment, Snoqualmie Middle School will be 87,600 square feet with a capacity that varies.

“It’s designed for 600 stu-dents,” explained project manager Clint Marsh of Hill International, the construc-tion management firm for the project. That’s at a student-teacher ratio of no more than 26:1—the goal of specification

documents guiding the con-struction of the school. Marsh assumes the average will be between 600 and 800.

“You could go up to 900 students without actually feel-ing crowded,” he said.

The new Snoqualmie Middle School is intended to meet the district’s student needs for the next 20 years, according to the district’s web-site (www.svsd410.org). It is also being designed to meet various community needs, Marsh said, with more than 100 parking spaces and several options for overflow parking.

Marsh delivered the posters and model of the new school to the district office last week, using them to give a brief tour of the site. The property is 40 acres that the district owns, flanked by Carmichael Street

and residential properties off Elderberry Avenue. The site includes an artificial-turf foot-ball field and track, and a nat-ural-turf soccer field and base-ball diamond, dotted between three wetland areas. Science teachers will be able to tie in the nearby wetlands with their lessons.

“The green space here is going to be phenomenal,” Marsh said.

Design lessonsThe school building will fol-

low the basic design of Twin Falls Middle School, which opened in 2008.

“That’s not only saving us money, but saving us time, too,” said Superintendent Joel Aune.

Re-using the TFMS design will save the district an esti-

mated $400,000 in design costs, but there will be some changes. The proposed school site changes elevation by 82 feet from one end to the other, so the TFMS design had to be reversed to address the slope.

Teachers and staff at TFMS and SMS were consulted on what they’d like to see in the new building as part of the planning process.

“Everybody that’s got a disci-pline inside the building gives their input,” Marsh explained. The input helps “fine-tune” the design.

Teachers at SMS added their own requests, such as a loading dock from the music room and maybe even a performance space to rival the Mount Si High School Auditorium.

“The commons is too small,

when we have 500 people at a performance,” said music teacher Dean Snavely. “We’ve done all our concerts in the gym.”

Most of the teachers, though, are just hoping that the bond passes, and that they will have a new building.

Passing the bondSome important aspects of

SMS would remain unchanged in the new building. Principal Vernie Newell is determined to bring the SMS culture with him to the new school, for the benefit of the students and the district as a whole.

“The plan involves moving Snoqualmie Middle School’s identity, traditions, school staff, etc. to a new building location. This approach has some clear advantages in terms of pre-serving successful programs and reducing start-up costs and time, compared to start-ing from scratch to open a new school,” he told the Record by e-mail.

All of these plans assume that a supermajority of voters will approve the bond in the Feb. 8 election. If the mea-sure fails, only a few things are definite: SMS will become part of Mount Si High School as a freshman campus; and the students and staff who would have gone to SMS will transi-tion to either Twin Falls or Chief Kanim Middle Schools.

Newell feels that the crowded schools—about 700 students in each facility—will hinder staff’s ability to teach the students, as well as leading to more dis-cipline problems. “From my experience, the more manage-able size of the student body, when divided among three middle schools, helps to mini-mize potential barriers to learn-ing and distractions that can influence students aged 11-14,” he wrote.

Regardless of the vote out-come, the district will under-go another review of school boundary lines next year. Superintendent Aune said this will be necessary, whether for reassigning students to a new building or to one of two old buildings, but his focus is on the positive.

“Let’s talk about when the bond passes,” he says.

Many staff members share this approach, too.

“The discussion of what to do if the bond does not pass has not taken place,” said Snavely, who is the union representative for SMS teachers. “Our energy is in passing this bond, in what’s right for the kids.”

The district’s Proposition 1 on the Feb. 8 ballot would raise $56.2 million with a property tax increase of 47 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, effec-tive in 2012 and lasting for 20 years. The cost for a $360,000 home would be $169.20 annu-ally, or $14.10 monthly.

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