40 Years of Bethel Pride!

Celebrating our district’s flagship publication

Since the 1970s our district has communicated with parents by mailing a publication home. From the late 70s to 1981, the modest newspaper was named “On Track” to signify the year-round track calendar the district was forced to use due to overcrowding.

After a bond was passed and new schools were built, the district was able to return to a normal school calendar. In the Back to School issue of On Track there was an advertisement to the community asking for help renaming the paper.

Renamed “Bethel’s Pride” in 1981, the paper continued to inform the community on what was going on in and around the district.

The paper kept that new name until the 2002/03 school year, when a slight revision was made, changing the name from “Bethel’s Pride” to “Bethel Pride,” which it has been for nearly 20 years.

In January 2017, the Bethel Pride was reformatted into a bimonthly magazine. The new format offered a significant cost savings over the old newsprint edition, which had become more expensive to print as there was less demand for newspapers.

Since then, the Bethel Pride magazine has been recognized twice by the Washington School Public Relations Association as the best in the state, first in 2018, and again in 2020.

Bethel serves over 200 square miles of unincorporated Pierce County. The only city within our area is the small city of Roy. The rest of our community, which includes our more than 20,000 students and their families, live in unincorporated areas like Graham, Spanaway, and Frederickson.

With a population so spread out, diverse, and busy with their own lives, the Bethel Pride is one way the district can communicate to everyone, especially the community members who don’t have a direct tie to our schools.

In 1967 the student population of our district was 3,995. Today we are proud to serve more than 20,000 students and their families.

You can visit the Bethel Pride digital archive archive by clicking here.