Welcome to our board meeting! We appreciate you making the time to join us during the 2-week intersession.

Today, September 26 – October 1 is Adult Education & Family Literacy Week. Our Adult School program serves over 20,000 adult learners and offers adult basic and secondary education classes, Career Technical Education (CTE) classes, English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, and Parenting and Family classes. Some examples of classes our Adult School program offers is: a high school diploma or high school equivalency; CTE emphases such as accounting, building maintenance and repair, medical and nursing assistant, culinary arts, floral design, information and communication technologies, landscaping, real estate, welding, and workplace readiness; ESL citizenship and conversational speaking; and, parenting courses.

Some courses are free and some are fee-based. Did you know we have the second largest Adult School program in the state of California, only second to Los Angeles Unified. Our Adult School locations are in National City, Chula Vista, south San Diego, and San Ysidro. We are very proud of our Adult School staff and the programs they offer! Check them out!

We made it! I am so happy to announce we achieved our goal and have purchased “Sweetwater is Putting Students First” t-shirts for our 4300 staff members. This was a lesson in persistence since we began seeking donations in July 2015. T-shirts will be distributed to district staff this week and to site staff on Oct. 3, our first day back from break. Once everyone has their T-shirts, I am inviting each Sweetwater employee to wear it the second Wednesday of each month beginning October 12.

Can you imagine the message we are sending when over 4,000 Sweetwater employees in all of south county from National City to Chula Vista to South San Diego to Imperial Beach are wearing their shirt on the same day??? The message becomes quite clear – we are stronger together and we care about each student! Thank you Sweetwater employees for joining us and wearing our “Putting Students First” T-shirts on October 12! And sincere appreciation goes out to the over 70 Sweetwater retirees, former employees and other partners who contributed to this cause! It just goes to prove that we are stronger together!

As a gentle reminder: each one of us is very much needed and we all have our role to play adding to the success of the whole. Thinking about it like a symphony, we all have important parts to play. While some people are best suited to be conductors or soloists, our contributions would be diminished considerably without the individual musicians that lend their artistry to the fullness of the orchestra. But, any one member of an orchestra, doing less than our best at our particular part, can destroy the harmony of the whole piece; therefore, this is our importance.

So, although we may not receive the same amount or quality of attention as another, all of our contributions are valuable and integral to the success of the whole. This is another example of how we are stronger together when we are doing our best work!

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