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A history lesson on Mount Si High
School
March 5, 2008
By Laura Geggel - Sno Valley Star Reporter
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n 1944, Washington state passed a law allowing high schools in
Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City to consolidate and level the
education playing field among students. Initially, the students
flocked to the Snoqualmie branch – now school district headquarters
– and dubbed it Mount Si High School.
Valley students matriculated from Mount Si High School for nine
years before the real Mount Si, the one where today’s school is
located, opened in 1953. And it opened in a floodplain.
“Everything was built in a flood plain because the early pioneers
were farmers,” said Christy Lake, assistant director of the
Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum.
The Snoqualmie tribe had already cleared the valley floor of
trees and the river’s flooding renewed silt, attracting farmers and
early construction.
Mount Si has grown since it’s grand opening in the mid-twentieth
century. Additional space was added in 1955, 1968, 1977 and it was
remodeled in 1991, adding 60,169 square feet to Mount Si High
School’s berth.
The most recent additions, a sports complex totaling 13,300
square feet and an all weather track and football field, were
completed in 2005.
Small readjustments have taken place ever since, although they
don’t make headlines.
The wave of new students has caused the high school to hire 20
new teachers in the past five years. A shortage of classroom space
has converted a former special education room into a math class.
Room 108, nicknamed the Harry Potter room because of its location
under the stairs, houses math students throughout the day.
Lake remembers hearing about high school rivalries when
Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City all had their own schools.
Kathryn Lerner, a school board member representing District 3 on Snoqualmie Ridge who also served on the Facilities Task Force for the school bond during the 2005-06 school year, agreed that contemplating a new high school is difficult. “When you’ve got one high school, you think of yourself as a one schoolhouse town and that’s part of your identity,” Lerner said. “But when you talk with the students – they do sports and band – they identity so many other ways with the community.” |
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New athletic heights for Mount Si
By Michael
Ko Seattle Times staff reporter - 2005 |
| SNOQUALMIE, WA — Mount Si High School has always had its share of weather-related issues. Annually, about 61 inches of rain drenches Snoqualmie, compared to about 36 inches in Seattle. The campus is a couple hundred yards from the often-bloated Snoqualmie River. In 1990, during the worst flood the area has seen, water gushed through the river near the school at a rate of about 78,000 cubic feet per second — enough, as one flood engineer calculated, "to fill a Kingdome-sized bucket in about 10 minutes." The school's athletic fields and parking lot were submerged for days. All of which raised an interesting design question in 2003, when the citizens of Snoqualmie approved a $53.5 million school bond, about 20 percent earmarked for improvements to Mount Si's athletic facilities: How do you build a modern high-school sports complex in the middle of one of the state's wettest floodways? This September, in time for the beginning of the new school year, the Snoqualmie Valley community is scheduled to unveil its very precise $14 million solution. Four new fields. A track with the same state-of-the-art rubber surface used in last summer's Olympics in Athens. A covered 1,800-seat grandstand, and 600 additional seats for visitors. All surrounding a commons area called Wildcat Square, named after the school's mascot. "What I see is the most unique athletic complex in K-12 in the state," said Clint Marsh, a program manager for KJM & Associates, the company hired by the Snoqualmie Valley School District to manage the project. "This is more of a community-college or a junior-college level complex," Marsh said, "and we would have never been able to do that except the floodway presented such design challenges." The centerpiece of the project — the football/soccer field — is taking shape with the recent completion of a concrete platform 240 feet wide by 440 feet long, raised six feet off the ground on dozens of rectangular pillars. Hundreds of tiny holes have been drilled into the sloped platform — six inches higher at the center compared to the edges — to aid drainage. A Styrofoam-like pad will be laid on top of the platform, and then FieldTurf, an artificial-grass substance, will be placed above that by the end of next month. An elevated tunnel will lead out of the school, through the grandstand and onto the raised football field. A natural rubber track made by the Mondo company in Italy will be installed next to the football field, but at ground level. The official track surface of the summer Olympics is unique because it's able to be vacuumed after rains and floods. The track, which was not raised above ground in large part because of financial costs, will have a grass infield. The Mondo substance, despite being more expensive than other surfaces, was chosen because of its proven durability. The company even gave the school district a 10-year warranty against flood damages, and the school district hopes to save money in the long-run by avoiding costly maintenance. "It was an expensive investment for a school with public money," Marsh said, "and so we didn't want to put down anything that we couldn't get a warranty on." The old red cinder track held up so poorly against the elements and was such a maintenance nightmare, said Chris Jackson, Mount Si boys track and field coach, that the school hasn't hosted a track meet in almost five years. Other project features include: New baseball and softball diamonds with built-in swales at the edges. When it's wet, they act as bowls that direct the water off the fields; An auxiliary gym with 19,000 square feet, also built on a raised foundation. "In a small community like the Valley, you don't have that many resources," said Jackson, who is also an assistant football coach. "Our kids deserve better than what they've had, and it will be nice for people to see their tax dollars at work in a real tangible way." |
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Construction Starts on the Finest High
School
Sports Complex in the World
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