Rancho Christian School Hires new STEM program director

Rancho Christian School of Temecula, CA is pleased to announce the hiring of their new Director of their growing STEM program, Mr. Werner Valvken.

Mr. Valvken comes from the award winning private school Valley Christian School (K-12) located in San Jose, California. During his 14 year tenure at Valley Christian, Mr. Valvken grew the STEM program into a national science and engineering powerhouse (arguably the best in the nation), and served as the Director of Students of Valley Christian’s prestigious Applied Math, Science and Engineering Institute (AMSE) until he was promoted to the Vice President of AMSE K-12 for the school in 2014. Former students of the AMSE Institute have matriculated to highly selective colleges and universities nationwide, including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Duke. Projects from his students have competed at the highest levels and won multiple national accolades, including the establishment of a program placing student experiments on the International Space Station.

Mr. Valvken graduated from California State Polytechnic University with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering with high honors and did his engineering graduate work at the University of Santa Clara. He also holds a Master of Arts Degree in Education (Instructional Technology) from San Jose State University.

Rancho Christian is a pre-school through 12th grade school with advanced programs at all levels in global languages, STEM, athletics and the arts. With a growing student body of over 1000 students enrolled, it just opened a brand new middle school and high school facility last spring with over 80,000 square feet of learning space including dedicated space for Robotics, Satellite Tracking and Computer Programming. Rancho Christian offers Robotics and Computer Science courses, the extracurricular program FIRST robotics, a Satellite Tracking program, the only one of it’s kind in Southern California, and like Valley Christian, offers a course in Science experimentation through which students have the opportunity to place experiments on the International Space Station. Mr. Valvken joins the Rancho faculty in the fall of 2017 and brings with him not only his incredible expertise and passion for STEM, but a deep devotion to helping students grow spiritually as well as intellectually.

Contact:
Betsy Kunau
Executive Director of Advancement
betsy.kunau@ranchochristian.org
Rancho Christian School
31300 Rancho Community Way
Temecula, CA 92592