There’s a new headmaster at Verde Valley School.

Head of School Catherine Massar, 38, said her goals for the Village of Oak Creek boarding school are to increase student enrollment, bring long-term financial stability, build out the campus’s property to monetize the land and complete major infrastructure projects.

However, prior to all that, one of the moments that she has stood out since she started the job on July 1 was giving the new student orientation and talking about tarantulas.

“The tarantulas are mild,” Massar said. “They’re not going to do us any harm. But if you’re not from this area, it can be quite shocking. The first time I saw one crawling across my porch was a fun experience for me and my kids and the scorpions too.”

Massar said she has not yet seen a Gila monster since she and her husband, Christopher Massar, and their three children, all under age 7, relocated to Arizona from her position job as associate dean of Student Experience and lead dorm parent at Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia.

“Our first date was at a Japanese steakhouse and we just kind of saw each other every day after our first meeting,” she said about meeting Christopher in 2018 on a dating website. They married in 2019. “He’d just gotten his first smartphone the month before. He still had a flip phone and so he got that, got on online dating and we met and the rest is history.”

Massar also offered some words of wisdom to NEWS photographer David Jolkovski, who is expecting his third child with his wife in November.

“Just give yourself some grace,” Massar said. “You add that third one in, suddenly you’ve run out of hands to hold children.

“It’s a lot, but it’s fun, and I think having them close in age, they play with each other. There’s big fights, but then there’s also a big sibling love that I don’t think you get when they’re further spread out. So that’s something to look forward to.”

The VVS Board of Trustees unanimously selected Massar after a year-long national search. She succeeded Ben Lee, who led the school from July 2023 to June 2025 and Kevin Warren, son of VVS founders, who served as interim.

Massar graduated in 2010 from the University of Central Florida with a bachelor’s degree in hospitality and a minor in anthropology. She earned a master’s degree in international education from Vanderbilt University in 2012 and a certificate in school leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Board Chairman Abani Heller wrote that from their first meeting, Massar has taken the time to understand the school, including its International Baccalaureate program, the school’s history and finances and its “IB+ Dirt” model, which pairs the IB curriculum with outdoor learning.

“Given the geopolitical context currently, I’m not targeting as strong international growth,” Massar said. “Right now we’re 30% international students and we’d like to maintain that level right now, and so my goal is to diversify our domestic boarding students… international students will be more possible, because we can admit them, but they might not get their visa.”

Currently VVS has 105 students. Massar said one of her goals is to get back up to 125. VVS is evenly split between boarding and day students.

“A long-term goal is to get us back up to a 70% to 75% boarding population to support the budget that we need to keep going,” Massar said.

Capital Projects

“This is our 78th year and our 80th year is going to be a big capital campaign to fix up campus buildings,” Massar said. “We need a new roof on the dining hall and just some building improvements all the way around and faculty housing needs some improvements too. So that’ll all kind of go into our 80-year capital campaign.”

Among the projects is adding air conditioning in the dorm rooms to support summer programming at VVS.

The school plans to use the vacant Camp Soaring Eagle buildings after Yavapai County Board of Supervisors a conditional use permit in April 2023.

The board is exploring using Sedona Seedlands, aka The Sedona Academy, for potential partnerships for VVS and the broader community, Heller wrote.

Massar said that her goal is finalizing plans for former Camp Soaring Eagle buildings by the summer 2027.

“I’d really like to get some summer programs started on our campus, both day programs for local kids and then boarding programs for seventh- and eighth-graders as a pipeline for admissions,” Massar said. “Because when I moved here with my little kids, there really aren’t a lot of camp options over the summer.”