For years, school officials have been lamenting the state's underfunding of transportation.

Without adequate funding from the state, they say, districts must devote more and more of their local levy dollars to get kids to school.

One of their loudest charges: the state doesn't reimburse districts for transporting students whose homes or daycares lie outside a one-mile radius from school. And instead of calculating the actual route mileage, the distance is measured as a direct line from school to home or daycare. Or, in the colloquial, "as the crow flies."

Actually, says Allan Jones with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, the state does provide some money to bus kids within the one-mile radius. But not much.

Jones, director of pupil transportation, says the state gives districts some funding based on the total number of kids in kindergarten through through fifth grade within the one-mile radius.

The original intent was to help districts defray the cost of transporting youngsters who faced hazardous walking conditions, even though they lived close to school.

But it's a lower rate than what the state funds for students living outside the one-mile minimum. And the districts don't have to have hazardous walking conditions to get the money. They don't even have to use the money to transport kids within that radius.

Here's how Jones explains it, and the "crow flies" business in an e-mail to The News Tribune.

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Greeted by cheering and high-fives, Ed Barney finished Sunday running from Seattle to Portland.

The Federal Way School Board member crossed the finish line of the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic around 12:30 p.m.

Barney said he ran about 185 miles from Seattle to Portland, starting Wednesday afternoon.

With temperatures reaching the high-80s, Barney rode 10 miles Saturday night to cool down in a motor home with his wife, Barbara, who drove the route.

“I was dying of heat exhaustion,” Barney said.

Barney, 55, was back at work Monday morning teaching job skills at Deseret Industries in Federal Way.

“The only thing I’ve got is some sore sunburned calves,” Barney said. “Other than that I’m feeling pretty good.”

Barney laced up his jogging shoes to raise money for elementary school track programs in the Federal Way School District. He expects to raise at least $3,500 in donations.

Barney ran from Federal Way Thursday. From Spanaway Lake, he followed the STP route. An STP spokeswoman said she’d never heard of someone running the course.

Nearly 40 volunteers removed hundreds of pounds of garbage and belongings today from a vacant house in Federal Way.

Workers from Federal Way Police, South King Fire and Rescue and a dozen other groups cleaned up a blight in the Twin Lakes neighborhood.

The house was filled with old furniture, mattresses, paints, supplies and debris. Outside, it was surrounded with garbage.

The crews filled up two 30 cubic yard dumpsters. By 11:30 a.m., they finished cleaning up the outside and most of the inside.

In the morning, volunteer Carroll Fisher walked through the rooms with piles of debris.

“Junk galore,” Fisher said. “How could you make a mess so bad like this?”
The house at 2230 S.W. 330th Street is in foreclosure and couldn’t be sold because of all the garbage. It has been vacant for more than a year.

A woman, now in her 70s, purchased the home with her husband decades ago. After he died, she allowed her daughter and grandchildren to move in to help her. After the woman moved out into apartment, utilities were shut off due to nonpayment, police said. The house was left for over a year with hundreds of pounds of trash. The woman didn’t have the resources to clean up the house.

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Joe Colgan’s anti-war message was personal Thursday night as he flashed the peace sign with his hand while drivers honked at one of Federal Way’s busiest intersections.

On the sixth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Colgan protested in the memory of his son, Lt. Benjamin Colgan, 30, who was killed by a roadside explosive device in Baghdad in 2003.

“This is the main reason I’m protesting – to witness that violence is alive,” said Colgan, 67, an Army veteran who lives in Kent.

Colgan was among 20 protesters who stood and sat during rush hour Thursday at the corners of South 320tth Street and Pacific Highway South.

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I was chatting with several people last week about anger at the gas pump. Alas, a story won't be forthcoming, but I thought this is a cool story that I'd like to share:

I was in the convenience store portion of my local Chevron station one morning roughly two weeks ago to buy milk, and a young man was buying $6.00 worth of gas – he was using four $1 bills and a bunch of change to do so.

I could see the stress on his face and, for whatever reason, I just said to the clerk, “Put another $20 on his pump number.” The kid almost started to cry – he said he wasn’t sure the $6 was even going to get him to and from work that day, but the job was new and he desperately needed to get to it in order to keep it.

I really felt sorry for this soul and I wound up nearly filling his tank (this is very unlike me), giving the clerk $50 rather than the original $20, while he stood there in disbelief. Apparently after I left, and he was done pumping his gas, he went back into the store and asked them if they knew me. They told him that yes, I was an occasional customer, but they did not know my name.

I went into the store Tuesday morning of this week because, when trying to pump my own gas, my card would not process through the pump – the first time this has EVER happened to me. The owner was VERY happy to see me – he had an envelope for me with my $50 in cash and a note from the young man which reads: “Thank you to my guardian angel. I got my first paycheck on Friday and I need to pay you back for your kindness. You saved my job – and my life. I will try hard to pay this forward to somebody else in need. I will never forget you and I hope to see you again so that I can say this to your face.” And he signed it with his name and address.

Turns out he is a neighbor of sorts (several blocks away) and I feel sure that I will, indeed, see him again someday.

There is some strange cosmic reason that my card could not be read that day causing me to walk into the store – and there is some strange cosmic reason that my uncharacteristic ‘good deed’ got such a strong and positive payback.

I just know that I will follow my ‘gut’ a whole lot more in the future. Hopefully, my story will encourage others to ‘pay forward’ their own good fortune from time to time to someone in need in these uncertain economic times.

Question: Where do you get your news from?

Discussion: There was lots of diversity on this answer. Most get at least some of their news from the Internet, but many still use other traditional sources like the newspaper, television and radio

Quotable: “Mine’s off the Internet. I go tot AOL, and it has all the things that’s going on in the United States. It’s faster, you find out everything else and it’s easy.” – Brianna Bennett, Federal Way High School

The family of Jane Britt of Federal Way expressed “denial, anger and sorrow” at her killing last week, in a statement released through her church, and her pastor remembered her Saturday as an “elegant, gentle, caring woman.”

“She was an exceptional person,” said the Rev. Vic Hippe of Community of Christ-St. Luke’s. “She’s going to be missed by all.”

She had gone Tuesday night to visit her husband, Frank, at Garden Terrace, a Federal Way nursing home, and police later found her dead inside her car in the parking lot. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office said Britt died of asphyxia due to strangulation and suffered from force injuries to the head and neck.

Federal Way police had no new information on the homicide investigation Saturday night.

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Earlier today I attended the memorial service of Brian and Beverly Mauck, the Graham couple who were shot dead last week. Memorial services, wakes and funerals for those who have been killed are almost always more sad than services for those who, say, died of a heart attack or from a car wreck.

Still, this is a memorial service I'd like to have when I bite the dust. People reminisced about the good times instead of harping on the tragedy that ended the Maucks' lives. And while there were tears, there were tons of laughing. A good example: Brian Mauck's boss talked about his difficult it is to learn to ride an air chair while water skiing. It took him weeks to learn. His wife still can't master it.

Mauck apparently mastered it with his first try.

"And that really pissed me off," his boss said as the crowd roared.

An early edition of my story is after the jump:

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Word on the Street special correspondent Liz Shaw shot this video of the line outside Best Buy in Federal Way at 1:20 a.m. – still about 3½ hours before the electronics store opened its doors. The video was shot from the passenger seat of my car (hence the point of view from a parking lot and the picture shaking when I hit speed bumps), but it’s a good idea of the crowd the store already had.

Waiting in line for hours upon hours presents some problems. It’s cold. It can get boring. And, perhaps most importantly, there’s nowhere to use the bathroom.

A 24-hour grocery store must have seemed a savior to those waiting in line at the Federal Way Best Buy. Top Food & Drug was across Pacific Highway, and that seemed to be the destination of choice.

With that minor inconvenience out of the way, the most frequent griping was about the cold.

“I’m kind of freezing,” Federal Way’s Mercedes McCaw said. “I wish Thanksgiving was in July.”

Geremy Carlisle came prepared this year. Really prepared.

Carlisle lined up outside Best Buy in Federal Way at noon Thursday to take advantage of the electronics’ store deals on computers. While many people braved the cold with camping chairs and blankets, Carlisle crammed a heat fan, a space heater, a television, a PlayStation2, a coffee maker, camping chairs, DVDs and a case of bottled water under a tent. He ran a generator to power all the gear.

“The older I get, the more stuff I accumulate,” he said, “the more stuff I can haul out each year.”

But Carlisle was the 10th person in line. The top spot went to Matthew Vollger. The lure of a cheap laptop drew the Edgewood man to the store at 6:45 a.m. By the time Best Buy opens its doors, he will have been waiting for more than 22 hours.

It’s the fifth year he’s lined up early to score some cheap hardware. He spent the time watching a portable DVD player run by a car battery.

“A lot of people think they an buy the ticket off you,” he said, “but you have to pay the price for it.”

Special Word on the Street correspondent Liz Shaw and I are sitting in a car outside the SuperMall in Auburn. It’s advertised that several of the shops – Gap, Liz Claiborne and Tommy Hilfiger – are opening at midnight. That might be true, but it appears the mall itself isn’t opening.

That hasn’t stopped a dozen or so people from waiting. Before that, there was probably the most ridiculous parking job in the history of Washington state. Here’s the setup: Liz and I are the first ones to park. A gray sedan parks two spots away. Along comes a red Toyota minivan. Now, remember there’s an entire, enormous parking lot completely open. But the van decides to back in between my car and the gray sedan. And, if that’s not absurd enough, the driver wasn’t particularly good at it; she had to shift between reverse and drive five or six times before finally, successfully parking the car.