Spring 2017
snippets
Our goal is for this newsletter to be informative, relevant, and beneficial to your spiritual and professional growth. We value your input. Therefore, we’re inviting you to please help us achieve our goal by sharing with us your needs, thoughts, ideas, and testimonials at education2@nadadventist.org.
Leading the Journey - The Newsletter for Principals
If you’re a school principal, perhaps you’ve wished that there was a resource to provide you guidance with the many responsibilities you face… there IS! The NAD has a publication called The Principals’ Handbook
Have you wished for a way to regularly hear from other principals and educators about how they do things…there IS!
Every month of the school year, you will receive in your email inbox a newsletter called Leading the Journey (LTJ). Each issue will expand on one of the sections of The Principals’ Handbook with perspectives provided by principals and educators. Watch your email about the 15th of each month for the latest issue of LTJ!
Free Britannica resources
Available to all teachers/students affiliated with NAD accredited schools.
Britannica E-Books
Britannica ImageQuest
Britannica Original Sources
Britannica School
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If you have a Newsworthy item from your school that you'd like to showcase in future issues, please submit it along with a photo (at least 3MB in size), and a two to three sentence introduction.
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AN INTERVIEW WITH
Toakase Vunileva
MILE HIGH ACADEMY
It has been five years since Toakase Vunileva — who goes by Kase after you meet her — arrived in Denver to take on the role of Principal for Mile High Academy (MHA). The journey has been, if you were to ask her, God led.
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It has been five years since Toakase Vunileva — who goes by Kase after you meet her — arrived in Denver to take on the role of Principal for Mile High Academy (MHA). The journey has been, if you were to ask her, God led.
In 2012, MHA was on a downward trajectory. With enrollment at its lowest, test scores below state and national averages, and morale even lower, Kase saw challenge and opportunity. She came in with a goal, to make MHA the number one Christian school in the Denver area. She’s getting pretty close.
As we sit in her office, a tastefully decorated modern space, mid school year 2017, you can see how far MHA has come. “Every step of the way God was revealing the next step.” Which means, she says, “there are steps God still has planned for us.”
Kase will tell you that she owes it all to the partnerships built along the way. These include the Adventist hospitals in the Denver area, the Rocky Mountain Conference, Renaissance Network, the local churches, the skilled teachers and staff she’s made sure surround her every step of the way. If you ever call the school “her school” she’ll deny it and call it God’s school.
That’s truly how she sees it, a school built on 104 years of history and God’s leading. But if you’ve been around her for more than five minutes, you’ll know that it was her leadership that brought MHA from a struggling school of 136 back in 2012 to the thriving school of 245 that we have now. It took time and dedication. It took a big move two years ago to our new location in Highlands Ranch. It took the power of prayer and the support of relationship she’s been developing and building along the way.
The next step, with God’s leading, “I want MHA to be full of world changing students. I want to move the school in a direction that makes that sustainable well into the future.” The steps MHA has taken thus far have gotten us to a good place but if Adventist education is to be truly great, to fulfill its mission of showing Christ to the world, there is some work still to be done. And that takes a leader, and some really great partners, working together.
Toakase Vunileva
AN INTERVIEW WITH
