Alpine Valley School

What a week. 🌞

Our last photo post of the year — can you believe it? The final day of the 2025-26 school year is next Thursday, and we're soaking up every last bit of it.

This week we cracked open the brand new yearbooks and got completely lost in them, reliving a year's worth of memories together. Most of our energy went into prepping for tomorrow's graduation — cooking, decorating, and pulling together every detail for our Class of 2026. Speaking of which, please join us TOMORROW, Saturday, May 16th at 10:30 AM to celebrate our graduates! The reception is a tea party, and we made a trip to the tea shop this week to gather everything we need. ☕

Thursday was unofficially declared Moustache Day after a student brought in a bag of costume moustaches and, well, things escalated beautifully. Gastronomy Corporation whipped up fresh pasta, bread, and strawberry lemonade in their weekly cooking class. A spontaneous craving led to a group trip for snow cones. We welcomed visiting families on a tour. And School Meeting was buzzing — birthdays celebrated, a new rule about where slime is allowed in the building considered, and a thoughtful conversation about updating our Personal Device Policy.

It's been a wonderful year. Thank you for following along with our weekly updates — every single one of them. We're off to soak up summer, and we'll see you back here on August 19th. 💛

Curious what we're all about? - https://mailchi.mp/alpinevalleyschool/real-kids-real-freedom-real-community-10154796

What a week! 🎱

Last Friday, our alumni came together for Victory Pie — a pool tournament fundraiser that welcomed the brand new class of 2026 graduates into our alumni community. Players could pay for advantages (or disadvantages!) in the game, and we had an absolute blast raising over $2,000 for the school. Welcome to the family, graduates!

The rest of the week was just as full. A student set up a film projector in the theater and screened a series of silent movies. Volunteers transformed the art room into a star factory, assembling paper banner decorations for our upcoming graduation ceremony. Students painted each other's faces. And on Wednesday, a surprise Spring snowstorm gave us an unexpected snow day.

Behind the scenes, we welcomed a prospective family for a campus tour, got a head start on next year's field trips, and started dreaming up our 30th anniversary Gala Party — and trust us, it's going to be something 🌟AMAZING🌟.

We're heading into the last full week of the school year, with a clothing swap on Tuesday, May 19th and our end-of-year picnic on Thursday, May 21st still to come. And of course, graduation is next Saturday, May 16th — we'd love to see you there!

✨ A peek into our week at AVS ✨

The Flying Dutchman has officially docked! One of our students put the finishing touches on this paper boat masterpiece, which now holds court on the Main Room table.

Between rain showers, we got plenty of outside game time in. When the weather cooperated, students were out in the yard making the most of every dry minute.

Our Dungeons & Dragons groups kept rolling, with one student diving deep into world-building for his very own future campaigns. Watching someone craft an entire universe from scratch never gets old.

A giant cardboard television head costume came to life this week. Don't ask, just enjoy. 📺

Conversations about our video game ban have been thoughtful and ongoing. Students are weighing in on whether to keep it, extend it, or shift gears, and it's sparked some really meaningful reflection on what activities pull us together as a community and what pulls us away from each other.

Gastronomy Corporation cooked up butter chicken, garlic naan, Shirley Temples, and cookies in their weekly cooking class. The kitchen smelled incredible.

Hundreds of paper stars are now folded and ready to decorate our graduation ceremony on Saturday, May 16th. Two new graduates will be joining our alumni community, and tonight we're welcoming them in style at our first-ever Alumni Pool Tournament. There will be billiards, there will be victory pie, and there will be the kind of warm, full-circle moment that makes our alumni community so special.

Yearbook orders went out this week, and sign-ups are open for next week's swimming field trip.

Just another week of students following what lights them up, in a community they're actively shaping together. 🌟

Our Monthly Newsletter just for families! https://mailchi.mp/alpinevalleyschool/one-of-our-favorite-days-of-the-year-is-coming-up

Ever wonder what it actually looks like when kids have a real voice in how their school runs? Not the watered-down "student council" version, but the real thing — where an 11-year-old can take on a staff member in a formal trial and win on the merits. In this post, Larry Welshon shares the story of a recent case where he served as prosecutor, walked in confident, and got bested by a defendant who asked one well-placed question he hadn't accounted for. It's an honest look at how our students learn to think critically, weigh evidence, and hold the adults around them accountable to the same standards everyone else follows. Worth a read if you've ever wondered what "kids being treated with dignity and respect" ACTUALLY looks like in practice.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt — Alpine Valley School In our scaled down version of the larger society, our students inevitably bump into our equivalent of the court system that all of us are likely to encounter in adult life. Most of the time, the school’s Judicial Committee handles the run-of-the-mill allegations of rule violations by School Meetin...

What a week! 📸

The yearbook is officially done and headed to the printers — graduation photos, portraits, and all. Watching it come together has been such a joy.

In between, students played massive schoolwide rounds of Among Us in Real Life, our student photographer experimented with their digital camera and came away with some genuinely stunning shots, and our Gastronomy Corporation cooked up pesto pasta and boba tea. (Yes, both. Yes, it worked.)

Our D&D groups kept their adventures going, graduation celebration planning is in full swing — mark your calendars for Saturday, May 16th at 10:30 AM — and the community voted on a 5-day trial of blocking a particular video game to see how life feels without it. Students and staff voted together. That's just how we do things here.

We also wrapped up family check-in meetings for the year, announced next year's new hours (8:30–3:30!), sent out the school calendar for next school year, and started planning a clothing swap for the final week of school. More details on that soon.

It's that time of year where everything feels a little bittersweet and a whole lot of wonderful. We wouldn't trade it for the world.

April Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/alpinevalleyschool/real-kids-real-freedom-real-community