Superintendent’s Corner
Dr. Katherine Bertolini
11.23.2024

Maple Valley Schools needs your input!

Maple Valley Schools is developing a Strategic Plan in cooperation with the greater community, parent & guardians, staff, students and our Board of Education to structure and focus our priorities for the next five years. This allows the board to determine funding priorities, curricular priorities and both immediate and short term needs of our community school system. The plan we developed in 2020 is coming to a close in the spring of 2025 and we are getting busy gathering information that will commence our work together for the next plan. This is how our loyal community of Maple Valley can do us a great service.

Starting on Monday, November 25, 2024 we will release a community/parent survey that seeks to gain people’s thoughts, values, hopes and expectations for our children. The survey will be posted on our Facebook pages, our website, and sent via robocalls to our parents and guardians. We will leave the survey open until December 9th. The week of December 2nd, we will ask our staff and 7th - 12th grade students, who voluntarily choose to participate with parental support, to also complete surveys which will gather their perspectives on the same topics.

We are fortunate to have supportive businesses in our community. The following civic minded businesses have partnered with us to provide $100 gift baskets or gift cards to be awarded to folks who complete the full survey. A huge thank you to Carl’s Supermarket ($100 gift card), MOO-ville (25 pounds of ground beef), Maple Valley Pharmacy (gift basket valued at $100), Court-Side (gift basket valued at $100), and Hometown Lumber (gift basket valued at $100). Once people complete their survey, they will be able to select the gift they most prefer and we will hold a drawing of the respondents to all 3 surveys on December 10th. Given that the survey should only take around 10 minutes to complete, this is an excellent way to potentially win some marvelous prizes for the good work of investing energy in the plans for Maple Valley Schools from 2025 - 2030.

Our strategic plan is going to focus upon what our community values for our graduates at every level of our district. Please take some time to reflect upon the skills, values, and knowledge you would want to see in our 2nd grade graduates, our 6th grade graduates, and our 12th grade graduates. This is our time to come together as a full community to envision what we hope and dream for our children as our school district works to fully prepare them for the world.

Also, please consider if you would be willing to volunteer to spend a day processing the results of these surveys and helping to formulate the goals of what we will do to achieve our plan. There will be an opportunity within the survey to state your willingness to volunteer. Our goal is to seek as many perspectives as possible in this work.  It is said that raising a child takes a village. I believe this is true and now is the time for the village to determine what our children will become with all of our support and commitment to make their futures bright. Thank you for joining with us in this effort.  Maple Valley is an incredible community and we value your input.

Dr. B