Browse >
Home / Archive: 31. July 2009
Mike Rutledge has another state championship on his resume, although he managed this one all by himself.
Just three months after helping the Mount Si boys golf team snare the Class 3A state title, the Fall City teenager captured the WJGA boys state championship at Glendale Country Club July 31. The title capped a furious three-day run on three different courses for Rutledge.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said. “It’s been a good year for me.”
Playing in the 16-17 age division, Rutledge topped everyone else in the tournament with his 72-70-73 – 215. He was even par for the three days, as well as the final round.
Rutledge’s closest competitors – Kent Hagen from Covington and Zach Wanderscheid from Goldendale – were each two shots back.
Mike Rutledge tees off on No. 14 at the Washington Junior Golf Association state tournament in Bellevue.
Read more
The Festival at Mount Si promises to be extra special this year, because the annual event has been combined with North Bend’s 100th birthday celebration.
The city plans to dedicate its centennial project, a climbing tower in Torguson Park, at 8 p.m. Aug. 8. If the weather is good, a group of paragliders will take off from Mount Si and land at Torguson Park. Afterwards, at 9:45 p.m., there will be a fireworks display.
Other centennial-centric festival events include a community quilt cake that will serve 2,200, and a tent on the Si View Park festival grounds with displays from the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum showcasing 100 years of North Bend history.
A pair of unicyclists perform in the parade at the Festival at Mount Si last summer.
Read more
By Laura Geggel
Safer schools, decreased drug use and better mental health services were just three elements Snoqualmie Valley hoped to improve with a federal grant called the Safe Schools – Healthy Students Initiative.
The federal grant would have given Snoqualmie Valley $1.5 million per year for four years, totaling $6 million. But, on July 10, the federal government announced its grant recipients, and the Valley was not included on the list.
“It would have made a huge difference,” Snoqualmie Valley Community Network Executive Director Kristy Sullivan said.
The network worked with the Snoqualmie Valley School District to apply for the grant and included other stakeholders, including the Riverview School District, Friends of Youth, Encompass, law enforcement agencies and more.
Snoqualmie Valley School District employees had high hopes for the programs they could have implemented with the grant money.
“It was huge,” school district Student Services Director Nancy Meeks said. “It would have been so great.”
“It was a fairly substantial grant,” Snoqualmie Valley Superintendent Joel Aune said. “With the budget challenges we’re facing and resources being so scarce, there are some needs out there we simply can’t address.”
Aune said the grant could have started programs instrumental to the district, such as staff development and training and writing protocols that could be used in the long-term.
Even though the network did not receive the grant, Sullivan said there was a silver lining.
“What this grant helped us do was to start a dialogue with different partners,” Sullivan said. “That community dialogue has helped us move in a better direction.”
Aune agreed.
“It’s helped us to do some thinking, maybe a little deeper thinking, about student needs, staff needs, community needs and how we might go about better addressing those needs,” he said.
Safe Schools – Healthy Students
For the past 10 years, the federal Education, Justice and Health and Human Services departments have offered the Safe Schools – Healthy Students grant, awarding more than $2.1 billion to educational, mental health, law enforcement and juvenile justice partnerships.
Last year, about 60 communities across the country received the grant, a number the government halved this year because of budget cuts.
Snoqualmie Valley Community Network Grant and Program Evaluator Jan-Olov Johansson, Ph.D. said that it is hard to receive such a grant on the first try, especially since the government received 422 applications and only accepted 29 of them. Communities with high rates of violence and diversity tend to have better chances receiving the grant, Johansson said.
If the grant is offered again next year, Johansson said the network would likely work with the Snoqualmie Valley School District to reapply.
The grant would have helped Snoqualmie Valley youth in five major ways. The grant requires recipients use the funds to increase school safety, decrease alcohol, tobacco and substance use, offer behavioral, social and emotional support to students, make available mental health services and collaborate with early childhood development agencies.
Johansson helped Skagit County receive a $7.8 million Safe Schools – Healthy Students four-year grant in 2005.
The grant helped Skagit develop its emergency response to multiple types of emergencies within its 35 schools, from gang violence to natural disasters.
“Each school had a team that could assess any threat,” Johansson said, adding that each team had school administrators, counselors, teachers, law enforcement and emergency responders.
In a four-year period, the grant money provided anti-bullying training for more than 2,000 students. At the upper level, Skagit County used to have only 4.5 prevention intervention specialists who helped students deal with substance problems. The grant money increased that number to about 15 specialists, so now every middle and high school had one.
“What that means in numbers is in 2004, there were 275 youth that received prevention intervention services,” Johansson said. “In 2009, we had close to 1,200.”
Similar programs would have been implemented in Snoqualmie Valley. For instance, the grant could have increased Snoqualmie Valley schools prevention intervention specialists from two part-time specialists to 4.5.
The money would have also helped early-education students at places like Encompass learn anti-bullying and harassment lessons, which would have given the young students the necessary vocabulary to address these issues as they matured.
The grant would have helped the Valley better integrate services to help children who are falling between the cracks because they have emotional, truancy, substance abuse or other problems. Interventions at specific grade levels are not enough — the entire school district and community need to be engaged, Johansson said.
“If we do one-shot deals and continue to press the burden on one of the sectors, like the schools or the law enforcement, the likelihood we will be successful in addressing this is going to be minimal,” Johansson said.
Despite the Snoqualmie Valley School District’s losing bid for the grant, Aune thanked the network for helping it apply for the grant. Larger school districts have grant writers on staff, but Snoqualmie Valley cannot yet afford to fund such a position.
“For us, to be able to form a partnership with the network in terms of pursuing these grant opportunities, that’s a real benefit for the school district,” Aune said.
Reach reporter Laura Geggel at 392-6434 .221 or lgeggel@snovalleystar.com. To comment on this story, visit www.snovalleystar.com.
Safer schools, decreased drug use and better mental health services were just three elements Snoqualmie Valley hoped to improve with a federal grant called the Safe Schools – Healthy Students Initiative.
The federal grant would have given Snoqualmie Valley $1.5 million per year for four years, totaling $6 million. But, on July 10, the federal government announced its grant recipients, and the Valley was not included on the list.
“It would have made a huge difference,” Snoqualmie Valley Community Network Executive Director Kristy Sullivan said.
Read more
