HomeMy WebLinkAboutRHS street vacation support -26-0803 RHS street vacation follow up statement
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My name is Karina Ruiz with BRIC Architecture, and we've had the privilege of serving as architects
on the Renton High School Replacement project. I testified in your meeting last week in support of
the vacation of Tobin Street, and I want to follow up with more detail on why we believe this street
vacation is essential, not just to the athletic programs, but to the safety and security framework
this entire campus design is built around.
In November 2024, we convened a Safety and Belonging Summit with RHS students, staff, alumni,
and community members. As part of that process, a formal Crime Prevention Through
Environmental Design (CPTED) assessment was conducted on the existing campus. CPTED is a
nationally recognized, evidence-based methodology used by architects and security professionals.
It is not a design opinion, it's a diagnostic framework. The assessment organized its findings around
five core principles: access control, natural surveillance, territorial reinforcement, maintenance,
and social management.
Keeping Tobin Street running through the campus would be a textbook failure of territorial
reinforcement. That principle holds that a campus needs clear, legible boundaries so that people,
students and visitors alike, understand what space belongs to the school and is being watched and
cared for. Tobin Street would physically sever the athletic fields from the rest of campus, and the
consequences of this showed up directly in what we heard. Staff described their own parking lot
functioning as a public cut-through to Safeway. Students told us they didn't realize the fields
beside their own school were theirs at all, because dog walkers, pass-through traffic, and outside
groups used them as freely as anyone enrolled there. One participant described having to chain up
the tennis courts because community members were treating them as public space. Staff also
reported finding needles in doorways and described a campus that, in their words, didn't feel like it
belonged to the students who attend it.
This is why the street vacation matters beyond field dimensions. Yes, without it, the baseball field
falls below WIAA standard and Renton High loses the ability to host its own varsity games,
representing a major inequity from other high schools in the District. Yes, students would have to
cross an active public street multiple times a day to reach their own athletic facilities, a daily,
avoidable safety exposure. But the vacation also does something the CPTED assessment
specifically calls for: it closes a literal gap in the campus boundary, allowing us to design one
contiguous, legible, supervised campus instead of two fragments split by a through-road that
invites exactly the kind of uncontrolled access our safety assessment flagged as a risk.
The summit's other core finding reinforces this same point from a different angle: belonging is not
a soft outcome, it's a safety outcome. Students consistently told us that connection to school,
Follow up statement: RHS Street Vacation
August 3, 2026
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through a team, a program, a place that's unambiguously theirs, is often what keeps a student
engaged when things outside of school are hard. Right now, Renton High doesn't have a track,
doesn't have real dugouts or lights for baseball, and students know exactly what other schools
have that they don't.
Vacating Tobin Street isn't a convenience for the athletics program. It's the physical precondition
for the security and belonging outcomes this community told us, through a rigorous and
independently assessed process, that it needs. We're asking the Council to support a decision that
our own professional safety assessment, not just our design instincts, identifies as necessary.
Thank you for your consideration.