PHILIPSBURG, Sint Maarten – Managers of La Vista Resort and MPC alumni Mario and Andrea Bartlett are the third to contribute to the ‘Keep a cool head’ project – a joint effort from SVOBE, Milton Peters College and Baker Tilly to provide air-conditioning at MPC. Andrea Bartlett unhesitatingly responded to the sponsor e-
mail and committed USD 5,000. With this amount La Vista secured their own classroom on MPC: the La Vista classroom. Their input means that a third MPC classroom will be air-conditioned.
The La Vista Hotel group, managed and owned by Mario and Andrea Bartlett, both former MPC students, did not need to think long about sponsoring. Bartlett replied by e-mail on the sponsor request: “That is so cool! Yes, I would like to sponsor a class…I am actually an alumna. I was in the HAVO class. My class was the first HAVO 4 and 5!”
La Vista is the third company, after Port St. Maarten and Divico, to adopt a classroom. The Bartletts however are the first MPC couple to sponsor a classroom. Andrea Bartlett is still proud of being part of the first HAVO 4/5 class: “We are the example that an MPC diploma can take you a long way; we have been successful entrepreneurs for 32 years and counting.”
La Vista is also a proud sponsor of the Nature Foundation and believes in Corporate Social Responsibility. “By giving back to the community, and especially to the youth, we secure our future work force. Only by doing so, we can be in this business that is run on human capital as much as on real estate. You can have a really nice hotel but if you don’t have the people to service our visiting tourists, you might just as well close shop”, Mario Bartlett says.
Only seven classrooms left to adopt
The ‘Keep a cool head’ project team has received two more adopt-a-class room requests from the private sector (neither of them former MPC students), which brings the total number of commitments to 15.
Project manager Van Engelen from Baker Tilly explains: “Five of these fifteen commitments have been signed, the other ten sponsor letters are expected to be signed before the end of the month. This means we only have seven more classrooms that are up for adoption.”
