Dear Editor,

There are certain things you can almost expect from the combination of high school students and fast food restaurants. One of those is trash in the street. I live a block from Ballard High and overall the students are great for the neighborhood. They are respectful of the people who live here and not one of them has personally given me any trouble to speak of. However, I do have a problem with what very likely only a few of them leave behind, and that is trash from fast food restaurants. I'm talking about soda cups and food wrappers.

An egregious example of this trash problem is in the enclosed photo of a pile of Taco Bell cups on a patch of grass on 15th Avenue NW, just two blocks from the high school. That pile of garbage, most likely left over time by students straggling back from lunch, has in the past week been cleaned up after more than a month lying there, perhaps because of letters I recently sent to Ballard High principal Phil Brockman and Taco Bell owner Ray Richardson. Still, the cleanup of one mess does not solve the underlying trash problem.

One day coming home from work I was driving up 14th Ave. NW and a student was getting into his car. Before he got in, though, he emptied out handfuls of trash onto the ground, most of it fast food cups and packaging. I could not believe it. How is it that a person gets to driving age thinking it's perfectly all right to dump trash into the street? In my letter to both Brockman and Richardson, I wrote that students need to be told it's not okay to trash the neighborhood. It's the duty of individuals contributing to the problem as well as those complicit in it to take action to prevent it.

As I said before, I have no problem with Ballard High students. Their presence every day adds a lot of life to the neighborhood. I'm sure that even a minimal effort like awareness campaigns in the high school paper and an urge for student associations to have bi-monthly neighborhood cleanups would solve much of the problem. Maybe signs in nearby fast food restaurants (Taco Bell is definitely not the only restaurant whose trash lines the sidewalks on the way back to school) reminding students not to litter would make a difference. Perhaps a few trash cans along 15th and 14th on the way to school would make it easier for students to not litter.

These are a few of my ideas, but I ask anybody else in the neighborhood who is tired of the trash to also write letters to Phil Brockman at Ballard High and local fast food restaurants owners and ask them to walk the nearby streets to see the trash for themselves if they haven't already. I'm sure it won't take much effort to get these anchors in our community to help fix a simple problem like student trash lining the paths back to school.

Alex Russell