Welcome to our first board meeting of the 2016-2017 school year!

We truly appreciate you attending, listening, and providing input as part of the Sweetwater community.

As we begin the new school year, I want to ask everyone to please remember we have a plan! It’s called the Local Control Accountability Plan, our LCAP. We developed our LCAP in collaboration with all stakeholders and we believe and think the goals, along with the actions and services, will help us maintain a focus on each student.

Here’s what I mean:

• Goal 1 – Ensure excellence in teaching and learning so each student is prepared to succeed in college and career. This year we will concentrate on quality first instruction by paying attention to collaborative planning with the end result more students learning to mastery on initial instruction.

• Goal 2 – Create a safe and healthy learning environment for each student by building a culture of equity and a positive climate that promotes excellence throughout the district. When we narrow the focus of Goal 2, we will be approaching ALL we do with and through an equity lens. This means using an equity lens academically, socially, emotionally, and physically.

• Goal 3 – Foster and honor parent/guardian and community engagement to support excellence in each student’s success. We want to ensure parents and community members are able to access information in a variety of ways and we are going to use our district and site websites to expand that communication. Please stay tuned for more information.

• Goal 4 – Develop coherent and transparent systems for operational excellence to support each student’s success. For the 2016-17 school year every district department will be completing internal and external process reviews to identify and implement best practices. Some of our departments (Maintenance, Planning & Construction) already received reports and recommendations that we are implementing immediately. All other departments will follow and conduct their own reviews. We know working on creating coherent systems across the district will help us accomplish Goals 1, 2, & 3 more effectively.

We know school systems that struggle are often riddled with incoherence – mismatched strategies, competing cultures, and illogical initiatives. This year using the LCAP as our roadmap, we are going to focus our direction to build a collective purpose; we are going to cultivate a collaborative culture while clarifying individual and team roles; we are going to deepen our learning to accelerate improvement; and, we are going to secure individual and collective accountability from the inside out!

We are going to continue to work hard on district/schools partnership and trust.

We are going to pay attention to lateral relationships between and among schools and our feeder districts.

All four LCAP goals must be pursued coherently! And, that’s exactly our plan this year.

Finally, I want to invite all staff and community to join us for 2016 Welcome Back Rally. Half the district will join us at San Ysidro HS on July 18 and the other half will join us at Olympian HS on July 19. Both days begin at 7:30am with a continental breakfast and an opportunity to greet your colleagues. The program begins promptly at 8:29am. Hope to see you all there!

It’s going to be a great year; especially if we remember:

Thank you for the opportunity to serve and support each of you!

Sincerely,
Karen Janney, Ed.D.