By LAURA QUEZADA News Review Staff Writer–
It appears that the 2024-2025 school year will be exciting with a lot of change in the air. With the enthusiasm of Dr. April Moore, Superintendent of Sierra Sands Unified School District (SSUSD) at the helm we can expect her vision to become reality. Her excitement is palpable and contagious and makes you want to be a kid again to go back to school.
Moore shared highlights of some of the District’s plans. “One of the things that I’m excited about is August 5,” she says. We have our All Hands Meeting, with all district staff invited. It’s a room full in Kerr McGee.
“We’re doing two very important things this year. August 5, we are formally launching our ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ that our community helped us to develop last spring. We’ve refined it, run it through a few committees, and had a review, and then our Board adopted it at the end of that last school year.”
The Portrait of a Graduate defines “what we want for our students after they go through our whole system from Transitional Kindergarten through their senior year in high school. Who will they be? It’s not only academic, but it’s beyond that.” The elements include “communicator, collaborator, creative and critical thinker, ethical and global citizen, and goal-directed and resilient individual.” She adds, “The language specifically came from our community. It’s what we believe in our students. And now we get to make that the reality.”
The staff will be addressed by keynote speaker Mr. Mark C. Perna, an expert in intergenerational and career-focused learning.
Throughout this school year, the District will be working towards closing Monroe, which had unusable staff bathrooms and sewer system at the end of last school year. This prompted planning for reorganization and updating the facilities master plan. They are calling the project “Rebound, Reimagine, Rebuild.” The District involves the staff, families, and the community in the planning process, with the goal of reorganizing elementary schools. “TK through sixth grade will have a reimagined junior high on the campus of Murray with seventh and eighth grade, and we will have Vieweg Campus, which will be a STEM Academy from TK through eighth-grade magnet school. We will have Pierce as a Visual and Performing Arts Academy. TK through sixth grade will have a new independent study school and middle college program with high school students taking college classes on campus at Cerro Coso. It is a really ambitious plan that we’ve put together with strong community support.”
Moore emphasizes the importance of involvement: “This collaborative approach is critical to how we’re operating and how we’re doing business. Because whatever we end up with needs to represent our whole community. SSUSD serves all the schools and communities from Ridgecrest and Inyokern to Johannesburg and Randsburg and all the areas in between. We want everyone’s voice involved in the process so that our final product represents what we want for our community.”
When classes begin on August 6, staff will continue their “Capturing Kids’ Hearts” program with Moore and her team welcoming students and their families. Moore explains the program, “It’s a protocol of building relationships between the adults and the students, the students-to-students and the adults-to-adults on campus. It’s really helped us build a system district wide of how we do business. So not only do we greet students at the doors when they come in, but we have a social contract with the students. What is it that we expect in a classroom? We have a social contract with our staff; what do we expect at a staff meeting? We’re actually taking that to the district level. We are so invested in this.”
