We are excited to announce the recent digitization of materials from the Miami Valley School Collection, including over 400 photographs and several additional documents. The Miami Valley School digital collection can be accessed through CORE Scholar, Wright State University’s Campus Online Repository.
The Miami Valley School is an independent, non-sectarian, college-preparatory day school for grades Pre-K through 12 in Dayton, Ohio. MVS is accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Central States. The Miami Valley School received its permanent accreditation from ISACS in 1973, and it received its college preparatory charter in 1976 from the state of Ohio.
In the 1956 Dr. and Mrs. Fritz Marti came to Dayton, Ohio, and founded the Marti School. It was founded with the idea of providing experiential learning and a classical, liberal arts curriculum to prepare students for higher education. Eight years after the founding, the Marti School evolved into what is now the Miami Valley School.
The Miami Valley School Collection was donated to WSU Special Collections & Archives in May 2006 by headmaster Tom Brereton. The collection includes administrative materials, such as meeting minutes, Board of Trustees files, faculty and parents’ association information; development office materials, related to fundraising and special events; academics materials, such as course of study, student handbooks, academic programs, and commencement exercises; publications, such as the school newspapers, yearbooks, and other writings about the school; scrapbooks, mainly consisting of news articles; and photographs.
To help commemorate the school’s 50th anniversary, WSU and MVS collaborated on a special project to digitize select materials from the collection and create an online gallery on the school’s history. Materials currently available in the online gallery include documents, letters, and publications from the school’s early days; The Miami Valley School, 1956-2003: A Retrospective by Barbara A. Cleary, Ph.D.; and over 400 photographs, most of which date to the 1980s. Additional materials will be added over time.
The photograph gallery includes the ability for visitors to leave comments. While all of the photographs include a basic description, in many cases the date, event, or people depicted are unidentified. We would welcome any assistance from alumni or the public in gathering those details, so that it may be preserved.
In order to preserve the privacy of students depicted in the photos, please note that comment information identifying students or children in the photos will not be posted publicly. This information will be redacted from the published comment but will be retained confidentially by Special Collections & Archives.
Miami Valley School comment widget, using IntenseDebate
The comments feature of the Miami Valley School photograph gallery is powered by the IntenseDebate comment system. All that is required to leave a comment is a name and email address, though users may also comment by logging into their IntenseDebate or WordPress.com account, if desired. Once submitted, comments are moderated by a library staff member before being posted publicly. At that time, any information identifying students will be noted for archiving purposes but redacted from the comment itself before it appears online.
Below are a handful of the 400+ photographs from the gallery; click on a photo to view it in CORE Scholar and leave a comment if desired:
Boys’ basketball game (MS358_53_02_009)
Bulletin boards with cutouts of staff (MS358_53_02_103)
Students at graduation (MS358_53_01_099)
Students in a play (MS358_53_01_041)
Students dressed in white (MS358_53_01_261)
The materials published in CORE Scholar represent just a fraction of the original materials that can be found in the Miami Valley School Collection here at Special Collections & Archives. To learn more about the collection’s full contents, view the Miami Valley School Collection online finding aid.
This digital project was a collaborative effort between the Miami Valley School, the University Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives, and the University Libraries’ Digital Services Department, which provided the digitization, metadata encoding, and uploading of this digital collection to CORE Scholar.
Please visit the Special Collections & Archives’ CORE Scholar page to browse additional digital collections.