📢 Cascadia Voices 08/15/26

As students squeeze in a last few moments of summer vacation and parents check purchases of school supplies and clothes against back-to-school lists, Bellingham Public Schools has yet to determine the fate of two of its elementary schools — Carl Cozier and Columbia — threatened with closure as part of an effort to address a budget shortfall.

Among those more than interested in the decision is Lauren Dudley, who teaches science education at Western Washington University and places students as pre-service teachers in Bellingham classrooms. In a CDN guest commentary this week, Dudley questions the district’s use of a state model — drawing on a “prototypical school” used to set state funding — that Dudley says has been used to determine class sizes. It’s also a model that even state lawmakers are questioning because it may underfund small and rural districts.

“In other words, the state’s own policy apparatus is actively rethinking the 400-student assumption for elementary schools that Bellingham is actively pursuing and treating as a settled matter,” she writes.

Dudley also writes that the district may be underestimating the effects of school closures, not just on the two schools that would be closed, but for students throughout the district: “Research demonstrates that when schools close, those schools receiving students absorb real disruption: increased mobility, strained school climate, decreased test scores, falling attendance rates and spillover effects on students who were never displaced at all.”

Dudley’s commentary can be considered assigned reading for parents and officials in all school districts.

Even as Whatcom County Council moves forward on plans for a new county jail, community members and others are pressing the county on a pledge given to taxpayers who approved a sales tax increase for criminal justice and behavioral health needs. Some, including a national advocacy organization that has pushed for justice reforms in Olympia and elsewhere, are raising concerns that funding for behavioral health and re-entry and diversion programs is losing out to construction costs.

Lauren Johnson, the Austin, Texas-based justice director for Dream.org, sees a squeeze happening in the county’s decisions in a CDN guest commentary this week: “What we are seeing instead is a familiar and costly pattern: when budgets tighten or political pressure rises, investments in people are the first to shrink, while investments in incarceration expand,” she writes. “This approach does not just fail morally. It fails fiscally.”

Bellingham and Washington state, she continues, have an opportunity to serve as a model for effective policy that delivers safer communities by investing in the conditions that provide safety, including mental healthcare, stable housing and diversion programs.

“The people of Whatcom County understood that when they voted,” she writes.

This isn’t innovation. It’s inertia dressed up as an “upgrade.” While other cities invest in modern, cleaner wastewater solutions that reduce emissions and protect waterways, Bellingham is poised to lock our community into another generation of toxic air and water pollution. That’s not a plan for the future; it’s a $40.9 million bet against it.

More than 1,400 residents have raised their voices in opposition. That’s not a fringe complaint; that’s a community demanding better. Yet the city has pushed forward anyway, seemingly more committed to bureaucratic momentum than to genuine problem-solving.

Our kids will inherit whatever infrastructure we build now. Do we want to hand them antiquated machinery bleeding pollutants into our air and water, or do we want to hand them a Bellingham that chose courage over convenience?

City council, reject this contract. Choose innovation. Choose our future.

Genevieve Sanchez
Bellingham

Read more letters to the editor here.

Submit a letter to the editor (250 words max) or guest commentary (500–800 words) online at cascadiadaily.com/submissions.

The Trump administration on Wednesday repeated its request to the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision on a Trump executive order that would restrict states’ use of ballots mailed to all registered voters, then returned by mail or to drop boxes. Washington state and 22 others have challenged the order. A federal district court judge blocked the order Tuesday.

Last week’s poll: Should kratom and 7-OH be regulated, and by whom?

Sample comment: “I'm a nurse who sees the results of drug addiction every day. The millions and millions of dollars that could be saved in healthcare if addiction were addressed; whatever benefit these drugs offer is not worth the cost to our healthcare system, let alone personal lives. We have plenty of pain relievers and stimulants, we don't need more.”

While moderate Democrats and Democratic Socialists duke it out over the party’s direction in the runup to midterms, conservatives have thrown down over “the $20 burrito,” as Forbes Senior Contributor Andy Meek writes. A grumble on X about the cost of a delivery burrito became a larger brawl among conservative commentators that fell along class and generational lines but missed Americans’ general concerns for affordability. “Strip away all the personalities and competing visions for the MAGA movement, meanwhile, and it’s clear that the $20 burrito debate has exposed a more immediate fault line for conservative media: Whether the right is listening to voters who say they can’t afford everyday life anymore,” writes Meek. My question: Does that $20 at least include chips and salsa?

Give a read and a listen, including a couple of musical cuts, to The New York Times interview by David Marchese of “psychedelic bluegrass” guitarist Billy Strings. Strings, 33, learned by ear, picking out Americana chord progressions as he sat at his stepfather’s side. Strings manages to honor the traditions of bluegrass while building on them with electric Grateful Dead-like jams during concerts. In his interview he also expands on his family’s — and his own — struggles and losses because of substance abuse, which provides more than one take on the title of his upcoming album, “So Much for Goodbyes.” The title is a reflection on the overdose death of his mother last year but also her continued presence in his thoughts. “I like the idea that it can be taken both ways: So much for goodbyes, like I didn’t get to say goodbye, but also so much for goodbyes because it’s not really goodbye.”

As to this being “The Summer of Jimothy,” I offer as Exhibit No. 1 a quilt in competition last weekend at the Skagit County Fair that featured Seattle’s long-limbed, short-spined raccoon. Blue ribbon-winner, to boot. Exhibit No. 2 is an essay by The Atlantic’s Annie Lowery that asks if raccoons are evolving into pets in an accelerated manner. Having adapted and taken advantage of their anthropogenic environment — as have pigeons, rats and crows — raccoons have used “runaway” natural selection to favor affability over more aggressive traits. “Yet,” she writes, “scientists cautioned me against thinking about domestication as a sequential, deterministic, and unidirectional process — get on at wolf; get off at Yorkie. Some species start domesticating and then stop, such as gazelles. Some domesticate and later rewild, such as dingoes.” Something to think about before buying a collar for Mr. Bitey.