Joan Wallace couldn’t sleep.

When the Bellevue businesswoman looked into her own grandchildren’s eyes, she couldn’t forget about the conversation she had with her sister-in-law, Janet Wheaton, over Thanksgiving turkey.

Wheaton, then an administrator in the Yakima Valley School District of Granger, Washington, spoke about the impoverished students whose families struggled every day just to meet their basic human needs.

Wallace and Wheaton committed to helping the students, and for the past 10 years, have helped to provide food and other essentials through their nonprofit, Friends of Granger. They also worked with Alma Sanchez to address the district’s poor attendance rates by making attendance part of the district’s culture through student encouragement and incentives. Their mantra became: “Every child, every seat, every day.”

Last year, the Granger School District achieved the best attendance record in the state of Washington. The district’s chronic absenteeism fell dramatically from 13 to 3.6 percent — less than half of the truancy rates in Bellevue, Mercer Island and the Lake Washington school districts and far below the state average of 16 percent.

The inaugural Innovations in Education Award was presented to these three women for their role in the Granger School District’s attendance success story on May 19. Sound Publishing is pleased to be a legacy media sponsor of this new award, which is aimed at highlighting creative innovations that can contribute to the transformation of our K-12 education system in Washington state. During the award ceremony, Wheaton held up a rope. She unraveled the cord and discovered it was made up of 45 individual strings.

“And any one of these (strands) I could probably break pretty easily, but [woven] together there’s no way I can break this rope. I can’t begin to tell you what a collaboration this was,” Wheaton said through tears, noting this success story wasn’t about herself, the women who collaborated with her, nor the district’s teachers and administrators. “This wasn’t about the Granger School District — it was about all of us.”

These women saw a need and worked inside and outside the confines of the K-12 public education system to overcome that attendance issue. And there are individuals right here in Issaquah and Sammamish who are also creatively thinking outside the box and collaborating to transform education.

While each school district has its own unique challenges, every district has roadblocks to student learning that require creativity and collaboration to overcome. Our goal is to highlight these creative trailblazers in the K-12 system, to encourage innovation and to inspire others.

Sound Publishing will continue to seek potential innovators in education around the state: education-focused individuals, groups or institutions who have implement innovative ideas that have transformed K-12 education on a local, regional or statewide level. A future selection committee of business leaders and education experts will select an Innovations in Education Award winner next year, and thereafter.

We hope to hear more about the creative ways people in the Issaquah/Sammamish community are contributing to the transformation — and betterment — of our K-12 education system one child, one classroom and one school at a time.

William Shaw is a regional publisher and Carrie Rodriguez is a regional editor with Sound Publishing.