Director’s Corner: 4 Things We Are Celebrating at the Start of the 2025-26 School Year
Director’s Corner: 2025-26 School Year Off to a Great Start!
Our 2025-26 school year began on Aug. 27th with a record enrollment of 197 students! We are excited for our first year as a fully accredited school, having received our official accreditation confirmation in July of this year. I am excited to announce the theme for the year developed by our Student Service Council. The them is “Rooted in Christ” and focuses on how only in Jesus can we build a firm foundation for our lives and on the practices that can help us be rooted in him. We are looking forward to a great year together at VVA as we seek to develop obedient disciples of Jesus who transform Rwanda and the world through academic excellence, growth in the character of Christ, and service to others!
Blessings in Christ,
Dr. Matt
Directors Corner– Back Together!!!
VVA’s New Administration and Middle School Building
On Oct. 15, 2020, the day we had been waiting for since March 13th finally came! After inspections by Musanze District and Ministry of Education officials, VVA received permission to open our doors to students once again! This permission came after several 
months of preparations to be sure that VVA was compliant and exceeding COVID-19 prevention guidelines including installing handwashing stations throughout the campus, ensuring social distancing in classrooms, equipping a medical isolation room for suspected cases, and even 
combining two rooms into one so that our art room could have enough space to ensure social distancing.
According to our inquiries, VVA was the first international school to reopen in Rwanda and for two days we were the only K-12 school in operation in 
the country! Since then most schools in Rwanda have also opened their doors. Our students have done an amazing job adjusting to new policies to ensure that everyone stays safe including regular handwashing, mandatory masks, and limits to the number of students who can be together for activities. We are also so thankful for our parents who endured through the difficult remote learning period and were willing to pay school fees and continue with us into this uncertain year. Our school year is off to a great start, and it is so good to have our students back on campus!
Love and Joy at VVA
We hope you enjoy our teacher video made for the 2020 VVA Talent Show! This video highlights our 2019-20 theme of Love and Joy!
Director’s Corner-Overcoming Disrupted Learning
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unparalleled time of challenge for global education. The first case of Coronavirus was registered in Rwanda on March 13. Within a week, the Rwandan government made the prudent decision to close all churches and schools, a precursor to a broad lockdown that is credited with limiting the spread of the virus to under 300 cases with no fatalities so far. With that announcement that schools would be closing, our teaching and admin staff immediately began planning for how we could best continue to support our students’ learning from home. While many schools around the world have opted for on-line classes, we felt this solution would not be an equitable fit for our school community.
Ms. Andrea at her home teaching table
Sending graded work back to students using WhatsApp
What has emerged is an approached based on the delivery of hard-copy materials that have, depending on the guidelines of the government, been delivered or picked up by families every two weeks, followed by support via WhatsApp videos and pictures, phone calls and home visits as the lockdown has eased. I am amazed at the hard work and persistence of our teaching staff and the way that our parents have stepped up to help their students at home. While nothing can replace the face to face interaction of the classroom, I am very happy with the progress that our students have been able to make during this challenging time. It is an honor to be leading such an amazing community of learning, and we are eagerly anticipating the time when our school can gather again with the start of the 2020-21 school year in September!
Director’s Corner
A Growing School
We have now been in our new school facility for more than two months, and we can see growth happening all around us! With the opening of the new school, we were able to add more than 10 students at the semester break, bringing our student body to almost 100. We are so thankful for this facility that has increased our capacity to be a blessing to our community!
More importantly, we see daily signs of growth in our students academically, socially, and spiritually. It is such a joy to see students sharing their creativity, insight, and faith with each other. We want VVA to be a place where students are challenged to grow holistically in an atmosphere of love and support. We believe this unique atmosphere will produce servant leaders who will impact the future of Rwanda and the world. We hope you enjoy our 2018-19 school picture taken in front of the VVA Library!
Matt Miller
Director’s Corner
A Story of God’s Faithfulness
As we prepare to move next month into VVA’s permanent home, I want to remind our school community how much God has done in the past two years to bring us to this place. In October of 2016, we had the opportunity to purchase a one hectare plot of land, the plot that our new school is being built upon. The only challenge was that we only had 1,000,000 RWF in our land development fund! Despite this, we made a down payment, telling the owner of the land that we had faith that God would provide what we need to complete the purchase. We even asked the land owner to lead a prayer asking for God’s provision! Three months later, we had all that we needed to complete the purchase! In the same way, God has worked through the generosity of countless individuals and churches to provide all we need to finish phase 1 of our building project.
We are on track to move into our new school buildings on December 15, and plan to begin our new term in January 2019 in our new home. Let’s all stop for a moment and say thank you to our powerful, generous Father who has made this possible, and pray that he would help make VVA a place that fulfills our vision: Developing obedient disciples of Jesus who transform Rwanda and the world through academic excellence, growth in character, and service.
-Matt Miller
Fourth Grade Fiction
The fourth grade watching the film adaptation of Because of Winn-Dixie.
Over the past eight weeks or so, the fourth grade readers and writers have been studying the realistic fiction literary genre. The realistic fiction novel we have been reading is called Because of Winn-Dixie, a story about a lonely girl who moves to a new town, adopts a stray dog whom she names after a grocery store, and befriends a series of unlikely characters who all end up a little less lonely thanks to the dog that brings them together. During this study, we have participated in regular collaborative discussions and literature responses, using text evidence to support our answers in discussion and writing. We have also been walking through the writing process to create our own realistic fiction narratives, which we will be publishing and sharing with one another soon!
Ms. Jessica
Second Grade Story Writing
Hello from 2nd Grade!
I love seeing students grow in the processes of writing. The first writing we did this year was a personal narrative. We are presently in the middle of our second piece of writing, story writing. The students are learning that writing is a longer process than they think. We learned a short chant that helps us memorize the steps of the writing process. It includes: brainstorming, writing a rough draft, editing our work, publishing, and adding a picture. We use bubble maps for our character development and story maps to help us plot out the beginning, middle, and end of our story as well as helping us to make sure there is a problem to be solved.
I love seeing the creativity and watching them add details to their stories to make it interesting for the reader.
The skill of being able to write well is so important for them to learn from a young age. Great writers come from great thinkers. Great thinkers make great communicators. I hope that they can grow their writing skills this year and as they get older!
Blessings from Mrs. Andrea and the 2nd grade!
We Have Been Very Creative in Art!
High School are working on a group project. Team Rwanda very kindly donated two bicycle wheels to VVA for their project and the High School have split into two groups and are working together to design their own wheel. Both wheels are very different but very colourful and look great.
Grade 1, 2 and 4 are working on cartoons. Each year group have been copying cartoon characters and are now working on designing their own character.
Grade 1 have also made some amazing African Masks which are bright and colourful and look great. They wanted their designs to represent how they felt about God and so they included crosses and bright happy colours.
~ Alison
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