Superintendent's Message for January 2024

Happy New Year!   We are almost half-way through the 2023-2024 school year.  We have already reached many goals this year and we are excited about our great start!  All of our schools are meeting the requirements in the Iowa Performance Profile and two of our buildings are at the high-performing level.  The Corning school board approved all of the bids for the Corning elementary and Southwest Valley baseball and softball complex project.  The project should be underway in March or early April, with the drilling of the geothermal wells.  The bulk of the project will begin around June 1, 2024, and the projected time frame is approximately 12-14 months.  The plan will be to move into the new building for the start of the 2025-2026 school year.  The athletic fields project will begin after the last pitch of this season and will be ready for the 2025 season.  In Villisca, we finally installed all of the windows at Enarson Elementary and the blinds will be installed soon.  The Southwest Valley Activity Center project is complete with two new energy-efficient boilers which includes air conditioning in the gym area as well.   

As we move into the new year, we will continue recruiting new staff members and retaining the excellent staff we already have on board.  We want to be fully staffed for the 2024-2025 school year and it will take a significant effort to accomplish this.  If you want to try something new for the new year, why not try teaching or driving a bus?  We had a community member step up last year and is teaching in the high school this year.  They are doing a great job and we encourage anyone who wants to try something new to give us a call and let us visit with you about our current openings. 

January also brings many activities that will be happening this month and early next month.  Check out our school’s website, Facebook, or the Bound App to catch up on all our activities.  We have our regular board meetings this month on January 11 at 7:00 p.m. in Villisca and on January 15th at 5:00 p.m. in Corning.  The Corning board changed the time of their meeting to 5:00 p.m. to allow our board members to participate in the Iowa Caucus.  

Have a great January and New Year!