Seattle Press on Line - Garfield Students Hold Bake Sale to Fund Fire Sprinklers

Garfield Students Hold Bake Sale to Fund Fire Sprinklers

Garfield High students Ben Roseth (left) and Jody Hansen sold cookies to help pay for a fire sprinkler system in their school.

May 17, 2001 -- Most school bake sales are held to finance class trips and other special activities. But last week a group of Garfield High School students held a bake sale to help pay for a fire sprinkler system in the school bathrooms.

Vandals have been setting fires in the trash cans, especially in the ground floor girls' bathroom which is close to an exit door, explained Ben Roseth, a 10th grader at the school.

There have been three bathroom fires in the last four months, according to principal Cheryl Chow. She said one student was expelled and two suspended for starting the fires and there have been no fires since.

But Roseth was worried that the 1920s wood building could quickly become a raging inferno. He talked to other students. He talked to teachers. He talked to Principal Chow. He talked to people at the School District and at the Seattle Fire Department.

Some school officials didn't think putting in sprinklers was a good idea.

"We're in compliance with the law," explained Lynn Steinberg, spokesperson for the Seattle School District. "There are smoke detectors and pull alarms throughout the building. We concentrate on alerting people and getting them out of the building."

But Roseth says there are only two smoke detectors in the whole building, and a fire could get out of control in one part of the building before the smoke detectors got a whiff of it.

Principal Chow told Roseth she would okay a pilot sprinkler project to be built in one of the bathrooms, if the money could be found to do it. That's when Roseth and his committee started baking cookies and muffins. Estimated cost to sprinkler one bathroom is $800, according to figures Roseth got from school district maintenance workers.

The committee sent out press releases, but their hoped-for media firestorm was thwarted in part by Principal Chow, who refused to let TV cameras in to cover the bake sale. "It wasn't an approved event," she explained. "I found out about it when the TV stations called."

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danielle kuhlmann	Oct 04, 2002	seattle	student
oh my god! ben is a total hottie! can i get his number????