Kids

Read more about the article Riding on Buses with Kids
The author's son enjoying the view.

Riding on Buses with Kids

My family is a lower Wallingford family. A few weeks ago, we packed ourselves into the car to go to Green Lake Library, a favorite of ours. Driving there was awful. It was a sunny day and everyone else decided to go to Green Lake too. We saw a bicyclist who'd clearly just been hit. He was okay but shaken. We decided Green Lake probably wouldn't be a great place to go via bicycle with our kids. Driving around looking for parking…

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Read more about the article This Weekend: Good Plants, Bad Plants, Phamarcants

This Weekend: Good Plants, Bad Plants, Phamarcants

If you like to eat, tend or learn about plants, this weekend's Wallingford activities should be right up your alley! Invasive Plants Class 10 to 11:30 Saturday: The community gardeners at the Freeway Estates Community Orchard (FECO) invite you to participate in their invasive plants class on Saturday from 10:00- 11:30 am at the Freeway Estates Community Orchard: 6th Ave NE, just north of NE 60th St (on the west side of I-5, next to the sound wall).  This class will be taught by a representative…

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Read more about the article Hamilton Wants to be Pesticide Free

Hamilton Wants to be Pesticide Free

A few weeks back, when I posted about pesticide use at Wallingford Park, I heard from several families at Hamilton International Middle School. As noted before on this blog, Seattle Public Schools routinely utilizes pesticides at public schools, because it is more cost-effective than hand-weeding. There are so many concerns about the use of pesticides around children and pregnant women that I don't even know where to begin my rant about this short-sighted behavior, so I will point you to the fact…

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Read more about the article Bootyland Moving to Wallingford Center

Bootyland Moving to Wallingford Center

I stopped by Bootyland, the hip children’s clothing and toy boutique which moved from Capitol Hill into the former slot of Paron’s Closet in Wallingford Center. Jordan writes: Hopefully, they'll do better than Paron's Closet (http://www.wallyhood.org/2013/07/parons-closet-closing-notes/) and Izilla Toys (http://www.wallyhood.org/2011/10/izilla-toys-closing/), the latter of which made a similar move from Capitol Hill to Wallingford Center, where it discovered the hard way that Wallingford Center's organic foot traffic is fairly sparse. Although their opening was March 4th, they weren't quite ready for show…

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Read more about the article Elementary Open Enrollment at Seattle Public Schools

Elementary Open Enrollment at Seattle Public Schools

Wallingford is fortunate to have some excellent public elementary schools, although they are unfortunately fractured in their attendance areas. Just last year the decision was made to make both John Stanford and McDonald school "option schools", meaning nobody in Wallingford is guaranteed entrance. There's a complicated lottery system that assigns a certain number of slots to students in the walk zone and then to other buckets as well, so nobody is guaranteed a slot. The primary reason Sherry Carr (our school board…

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Read more about the article Click to Earn Recycling Challenge $$ for Non-Profits

Click to Earn Recycling Challenge $$ for Non-Profits

In December the competition heated up in the Waste Management Think Green Recycling Challenge.  Our Friday North* volunteers organized a record 11 outreach activities last month, but the Tuesday South route, represented by West Seattle JuNo, matched us with 11 of their own. The Recycling Challenge is a contest sponsored by Waste Management for the 10 Seattle neighborhoods it services with residential waste pickup. Of those 10, the neighborhood route that reduces its garbage per household the most from October 2013…

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Seattle Schools Releases Draft of New Boundaries

On Tuesday afternoon, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) released a draft of the proposed new boundaries. You can read the draft in its entirety here. Here are the proposed changes for Wallingford: 1) John Stanford International School and McDonald International Elementary School would become Option Schools beginning in 2014, with small geozone boundaries for folks living nearby (those boundaries have not been drawn yet). 2) All kids living east of Stone Way and not within the JSIS/McDonald geozones would attend Green Lake…

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