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Dear WCCUSD Community:

Welcome to the 2022-23 school year! I am excited to welcome our students and families who are returning and those who are new to our district this year. 

We are getting close to the first day of school: Tuesday, August 16, 2022. 

The first few weeks of school can feel overwhelming, and we want to help you start off the year right. We have created a Back to School Guide on the District’s website to provide resources and information to support your family during the 2022-23 school year, including:

• Annual Back to school and lunch forms 
• COVID-19 information
• Facility upgrades 
• School safety information
• Staffing, and more.

We are looking forward to starting the school year with you and encourage you to check the school guide often for updates. Click here for WCCUSD’s 2022-23 Back to School Guide!

If you would like to see more resources, please email your recommendations to our team. 

Before we return, I want to share what my leadership team and I have been doing to prepare for the upcoming school year. 

District leadership and staff have worked hard over the summer to ensure your family has the best school experience possible. We are committed to moving the District toward a higher-performing organization and a culture of accountability. This process not only includes the work that you have done to help us form the District’s Strategic Plan, but we are also assessing our leadership goals and evaluating our internal strategies that can support the District’s new vision, mission and graduate profile. 

We are working together to reform our team’s values and are committed to challenging ourselves as leaders to delve into deeper discussions of how we can work together to support students and families. We have been meeting frequently to assess our strengths and opportunities to improve the district’s processes. I am excited to share our three priority focus areas of improvement for the upcoming year: 

1. Rebuild Trust 
2. Create Effective Systems of Accountability
3. Encourage Healthy and Efficient Conflict Resolution 

I will be sharing more about these areas of focus in the coming months. I have challenged my team to take what we have learned, and apply it to our internal processes. And I look forward to leading our district in building and maintaining these areas of focus, which I believe will support the foundation of our new strategic plan.

There is still time for you to give input to support the new vision, mission and graduate profile. Your voice is important to us, and we want to hear from you. I encourage you to take the strategic planning survey here. We have extended the survey until August 28 to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to share their thoughts on the future of our district. 

The WCCUSD team has been working throughout the summer holding four in-person job fairs and one virtual job fair to reduce the number from more than two-hundred vacancies to 153 vacancies across the district. We have a planning team that consists of all of the executive team (Superintendent, Human Resources, Maintenance & Operations, IT, Communications, Business Services, SPED, and Safety). Here's what we are doing as well.

• We are running a list of credentials of UTR, and central office personnel to determine which individuals we can move into the school sites
• We are reviewing our substitute numbers on hand and how many are ready to go for the first day of school
• We will be going to the board to ask for approval to continue signing bonuses and incentives as we did last year for teachers, classified and also with substitutes
• We will offer another job fair August 13th to recruit teachers, classified and substitutes
• We will continue job fairs throughout the year
• We are developing a long range plan that would partner WCCUSD with local university teacher preparation programs and look at opportunities to grow our own teachers

The above is what we are currently planning and we solicit additional ideas to bring in more teachers. If you have any additional ideas please forward them directly to me. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work together to place qualified teachers into our classrooms. 

This weekend, Saturday, July 30, we are hosting our final summer job fair! We will be reviewing resumes, conducting interviews, and extending conditional offers to qualified candidates. For more information, including what to bring, visit this website: https://www.wccusd.net/workwithwccusd.

Thank you for supporting student achievement and academic excellence in WCCUSD. 

Sincerely, 

Dr. Kenneth Chris Hurst

Superintendent