Superintendent’s Corner
Dr. Katherine Bertolini
10.19.2024
Fall has arrived in all of her glory and it has been a gorgeous time to be in the Valley! As our seasons change and school has settled into a normal routine, I wanted to give some updates on how things are progressing for our students and staff of Maple Valley Schools. October 20th-26th is safe schools week and I wanted to share some of our safety efforts as well as letting you know about the progress on our Athletic Strategic Plan and future planning for the 2025-2030 Strategic Plan for the entire district.
Last spring, we benefitted from some state funds to bring in an outside consulting agency to do a safety assessment of Maple Valley. It was a comprehensive process that yielded a report to our board and community. You can view the report on our website if you are interested. From that report, we worked to improve as many items as we could over the summer. Since that time, we have met with our first responders in both Nashville and Vermontville to be sure we are all on the same page for our safety response programs. We continue to do drills and practices to keep everyone informed. The next stage is to convene an advisory group to work with me. We will share what we are doing to be proactive for safety as well as hearing from various stakeholders to know their questions and concerns regarding student and staff safety. That meeting will be held in the first week of November. If you want to join me, please call my office at 517.852.9699 to get in the group.
Back in the spring, we brought together a group of people to develop a strategic plan for Athletics. From that work, we developed a mission, vision and values as well as a series of goals we hoped to achieve as a voluntary group of community members, coaches, and staff. From that effort, we created 4 subcommittees which worked to focus on our athletics strategic plan. The committees focused on four areas of improvement: Student engagement, Coaching, Curriculum across youth through varsity athletics and Culture. From those efforts, we have created multiple tools. The committees are presenting a standards rubric for coaches to implement with their teams, a handbook draft for our coaches, some proposed curriculum in all areas of athletics and plans for a meeting to bring together youth coordinators, JV and Varsity coaches and our Athletic Director. All of these efforts are supporting a goal to see how we can all work together and create the most rewarding extracurricular experience for our student athletes. This work will be presented to our School and Community and Activities Committees of our Board on Monday evening, October 21st at 6 pm. If you are interested in receiving an in person update on this important aspect of our district and community partnerships, please stop by the Central Office.
Finally, we are beginning the process of gathering information for our Strategic Plan which will guide our work for the next five years. The first step is to gather information from our community, our staff and our students to assess our values, goals and concerns. These surveys will be going out the first week of November. If you have 5-10 minutes to give us your feedback, we would be so appreciative. The more input we have, the better we can anticipate the needs of our local community in crafting our roadmap for the next five years. We are going to paint a picture of what we want our Graduates to look like by examining our values, interests and needs at a local level. This is what makes local control so important. Please help us when the surveys are deployed. Keep an eye on our Facebook page and our website mvs.k12.mi.us for further information.
It is a great day to be in the Valley, Dr. B
