News Bytes

The members of the SCDS Chess Club, ranging from Kindergarten through 6th grade, competed in the large Lakeridge Chess Tournament on February 27. The students had a great time, and in addition to winning several individual awards, SCDS took home a first-place team trophy from among approximately 300 players representing 51 schools. This was especially remarkable because our contingent was small compared to lots of other schools, which had as many as 65 players present; so everyone had to do well to attain this team achievement.  Congratulations to our young players!

Sandi Wollum, Director of Seabury School in Tacoma, was recently elected to the SCDS Board of Trustees. Sandi has worked in both public and private school education in the region for more than 25 years. She taught in the Sumner School District for many years, and in 1988 was selected to teach in Sumner’s elementary gifted program. In 1997 Sandi became the district’s gifted program coordinator and has continued to work in the field of gifted education since that time.  

In 2002, Sandi left public school to join the faculty at Seabury School, an independent school in Tacoma.  She served as a teacher and Assistant Head of School before being named Head of School in 2005.  In 2007, she led Seabury through the development of an innovative, new middle school program to be located in downtown Tacoma.

Congratulations to Grade 5 Humanities teacher Jane Hesslein, who was elected to the National Board of SENG - Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted. She recently returned from her first board meeting, held in Dallas. Jane has been involved with SENG since 1989 and is a trained facilitator. SCDS has now held two 10-week SENG groups on campus, and they have been enthusiastically received by our parent community. Jane and many others are looking forward to the National SENG conference, to be held in Seattle next year.

SCDS was proudly represented the Medina Chess Tournament on January 30th. The members of the Chess Club, ranging from Kindergarten through 6th grade, participated in the large tournament. Along with several individual trophies for outstanding play, SCDS brought home a 2nd place team trophy, from among 325 competitors representing 36 schools. 

by Rebecca Teagarden
(Seattle Times May 10, 2009)

How to build a strawbale bedroom: Take lots of polar fleece, and rain, and mud, and straw (of course), and coffee, and a solar panel and can-do friends and neighbors. Mix well. Nourish with a "feastival" at the end of Day 1.

For "Team Stucco": Add more polar fleece and tea and rain and volunteers galore and windows and soup and bloody fingers and mud (the stucco kind) and hugs for friends new and old. Trowel-on liberally.

Brenda Ajbour's house in Bryant is a work in progress.

And a work of love.

This has been a real save-and-build deal for a single mom on a teacher's salary. She took on a downstairs renter to even afford the place. That left one bedroom. Ajbour gave it to Etri, her 18-year-old son (teenagers are best stored in bedrooms).

Ajbour? "I've been sleeping in the kitchen for three years!"

Not anymore. With the last coat of exterior stucco dry, Ajbour finally has a real room to call her own: Seattle's first permitted strawbale project at 256 square feet. Her architect, Sage Saskill, calls it "Brenda's strawbale oasis."

It is, too. Butter-yellow walls as thick as, well, a bale of straw; fat, stucco window sills, concrete floors. A little truth window exposing the room's straw guts.

But something else was revealed, too.

Ajbour knew she would get a womb of a room; she wasn't, however, prepared for the people. They came and worked, and kept coming and kept working. Through snow and rain and bitter wet cold. Strangers, some of them. A guy from Brussels. Etri's friends from Roosevelt. Volunteers and donations (the contractor threw in the tubing and labor for the solar-heated floor). The whole project took on that old-timey-Seattle-outdoors-hippie-alt-culture-inventiveness feeling some of us thought fell out of fashion with Birkenstocks and tie-dye.

"People worked nine and 10 hours for a bowl of soup! I was not prepared for the outpouring," Ajbour says, still amazed, changed. "We had regulars, and friends of friends; people who saw it on the Web site. That blew me away. One day I went out back and my new boss was there. Just showed up."

They came to help build a bedroom and left as family.

Photo by Benjamin Benschneider

This fall, SCDS hosted 350 guests who came to celebrate the completion of our facilities improvement project and to tour the new Middle School building and Library. Past and present parents, students, alums, faculty, staff, and board members had a great time sharing stories and reconnecting with friends and teachers in our beautiful new building which includes large classrooms, fabulous science labs, big windows, real lockers instead of cubbies, and sweeping views toward the Seattle skyline and Olympic Mountains. The project was funded in part by the generosity of the SCDS community who raised $4,000,000 in the  A Place to Grow capital campaign.

K-3 Art Specialist Winnie Young, and Quinn Thomsen 4-5 Math, recently completed their master’s degrees. Winnie earned a Master of Education in Integrated Teaching through the Arts from Lesley University, and Quinn completed his Master of Education from the University of Washington, with a focus on both gifted kids and math education. Grade 3 teacher Duffy Lord heads to India this summer, where she’ll be teaching in the Ladakh—“the land of high passes”—bordered by the Himalayas.  Quinn, Winnie, and Duffy all received support in reaching their goals from the SCDS Professional Development Fund.

The Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) of Western Washington recently honored the SCDS construction project with an Excellence in Construction Award. The ABC award was one of only nine given in various categories for the entire Western Washington region.

 Veteran 3rd-grade teacher, JoAnn Sims, PhD, recently announced her retirement from SCDS as she completes her 30th year at SCDS. Dr. Sims was instrumental in firmly establishing the school during its formative years. She has been a long-standing advocate for gifted education and serves on the board of the Washington Association of Educators of the Talented and Gifted (WAETAG). As an adjunct professor at Seattle University, she has taught gifted education to graduate students for many years. Says Dr. Sims, “When I reflect on my career with SCDS and its contributions to my own children, those contributions are endless. I have been proud to be a part of this community…and appreciate my talented and professional colleagues.”