The Valley School

Located in the Madison Valley neighborhood of Seattle, The Valley School’s mission focuses on imaginative thinking, the practice of kindness and intellectual exploration in elementary age children. The Valley School’s RainWise installation spans across three buildings, managing rainwater runoff from a total of nearly 6,300 square feet of roof area. The project

• creates an educational opportunity to help children learn about the water cycle and water conservation,
• provides detention and infiltration of the existing roof area,
• generates substantial water storage for summer landscape irrigation, and
• protects Lake Washington from combined sewer system overflows.

The project was completed in October 2017, with a total of $20,719.20 covered by the RainWise rebate program.

Building 1 Two 1,320-gallon Bushman cisterns with overflow to side sewer.

Building 2 Two 1,110-gallon Bushman cisterns with overflow to side sewer.

Building 3 Two 420-gallon Bushman cisterns with overflow to side sewer.

The Valley School campus is spread out over eight city lots and comprises of classrooms, a library, meeting space, and administrative buildings. Each building is unique and required different calculations for cistern size and placement. However, each RainWise installation captures the entire roof area, with Building 1 capturing 2,862 square feet, Building 2 capturing 2,183 square feet, and Building 3capturing 1,249 square feet. This comes to nearly 6,300 square feet of roof area that keeps almost 140,000 gallons of stormwater out of Lake Washington every year.

Valley School’s contractor, Rain Dog Designs completed the project from start to finish in about six months.

The Valley School used their cistern installation projects to engage children in building activities and learning about the problem of polluted water in the Puget Sound region. In addition to community awareness, RainWise cistern and raingarden projects serve as educational opportunities for students of all ages in academic institutions.

The project partners include school leadership, King County staff, RainWise outreach staff and the creative design talents of the RainWise contractor, Rain Dog Designs.