By DON CARTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Several years ago, Pam Ash was coaching her Little League baseball team when a short woman wearing a skirt and tennis shoes walked across the field to introduce herself, and by the way to ask for Ash's vote.

It was Patty Murray, a Shoreline resident who became the first woman in Washington elected to the U.S. Senate.

Because of Shoreline's history of civic activism, Ash says she wasn't particularly surprised by Murray's triumph. "We have a lot of people who are on the front line here," she says. "They don't just talk, they do things."

Ash, who on a recent sunny day was found at one of her favorite spots, Saltwater Park, says she moved to Shoreline from Oregon 19 years ago.

"The original reason for moving here was schools, schools, schools. My husband had heard the schools here were the best," she says.

"Then we came to this park and I couldn't believe it," Ash says, nodding toward the broad beach, Puget Sound and Olympics beyond. "This was a great open space for my three sons. They built forts here. It was an essential part of our life."

Like Ash, many Shoreline residents will tell you they moved there because they wanted quality education for their kids. "There's kind of a standing joke that you move in for the school district and you never move out," says Connie King, who became the city's first mayor after it was incorporated in 1995.

King moved to Shoreline in 1960 when her children were young, attracted by both the schools and the ability to afford a larger house than her family had in Seattle.

Education and politics go hand in hand in Shoreline. Murray, for example, was a preschool teacher and then a school board member before she moved on to state and national politics. She won her Senate seat by campaigning that as a "mom in tennis shoes" she could represent working-class people with school-age kids.

Herb Bryce is one of the few who moved to Shoreline after his kids were grown. Bryce, dean of science and mathematics at Seattle Community College, says he wanted to live in a district "that really supported education."

Voters routinely approve school tax measures and have provided a financial stability so there is little teacher turnover, says Bryce, who is a member of the School Board. The teachers "are doing a good job," he says. "All of the test scores show that we're doing better than OK."

Bryce and others say they can remember only one time when Shoreline voters turned down a school tax measure. That was in 1972, when massive Boeing layoffs thrust the region into a depression and tax measures were voted down almost everywhere.

Interest in education goes beyond financial support, Bryce says. "I'm surprised at the number of people who get involved. I've been in districts where nobody went to School Board meetings, and here we'll have 20, 30 or 40 people come out just because they're interested, and not because they have an ax to grind."

In recent years, Shoreline has tended to elect education-minded Democratic women to the state Legislature. But that doesn't mean the area is really completely Democrat, says Nancy Rust, a Democrat and former legislator.

"I think people vote for the individual rather than the party here, and that a moderate pro-choice Republican could win in Shoreline," Rust says.

The problem with recent Republican candidates, Rust says, is that they have ignored Shoreline voters' strong feelings that women should be allowed to choose whether or not to have an abortion.

Rust and her husband moved to Shoreline in 1954 from Seattle's Yesler Terrace. They'd lived in the low-income housing project while her husband was finishing his medical residency.

"We had babies then, and Seattle and Edmonds weren't funding kindergarten," Rust says. "I went to kindergarten in the depths of the Depression, and I couldn't imagine a district not funding kindergarten."

Shoreline's emergence as a new city is directly tied to the education issue.

Shoreline residents trace the push toward incorporation to 1988, when former Seattle City Councilwoman Jeanette Williams proposed a study to consider whether Seattle might annex the unincorporated area. "People just went ballistic," says one Shoreline resident who attended a standing-room-only community meeting to discuss the proposal.

"It was the most un-Shoreline-like meeting I've ever seen," King says. "And it was held in a church, too."

When the Seattle officials said the area could be annexed without harming the Shoreline School District, "I told them they were liars," says Mickie Gau, 88. Like many other longtime Shoreline residents, Gau remembers the last time Seattle came knocking. In the early 1950s, Seattle pushed its northern border north from 85th Street to 145th Street, and all of the Shoreline schools in that area were taken over by the Seattle School District.

"We have a very good school district, and we want to keep it," Gau says.

Continued:

• Young city has many faces