Dear Collegiate Community,
It seems hard to believe, but school is back in session. This August we welcomed 23 new employees to WCS, who, along with our returning faculty and staff, spent the beginning of August preparing campus for the new school year.
Due to the unprecedented events of the past few years, this summer personally felt like the first “normal” summer I have enjoyed in Wichita. It is my sincere hope that all of you also had the chance to enjoy time to rejuvenate with family and friends.
This summer I spent a day-long retreat with our Leadership team. We discussed how thankful we all are to be working in a community like Collegiate, where we share mutual high expectations for how we conduct our work. An important step in setting those high expectations is ensuring that the community has a clear vision of the student experience at Collegiate. We plan on sharing with the community at the start of each school year our outline of that vision and how we are all proud to be Spartans. A link to an article on Who We Are: Our Pyramid of Excellence and our Key Principles can be found here. I encourage you all to become familiar with the information it contains.
One topic that became a focus for our work this summer was the safety and security of our students and staff at our school. The terrible tragedy at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has brought renewed focus on the issue of safety to everyone in education. We spent this summer assessing the practices we have in place already and looking for ways we can enhance security on our campus. We shared these updated policies and procedures with the Collegiate community earlier this month. We will continue to look at ways to ensure the safety of our Collegiate family.
We had an opening day enrollment of 940 students, which represents our highest overall enrollment in 5 years. Contributing to the growth we are experiencing is the fact that we have 170+ new students on our campus this August. That is the highest number of new students enrolled at Collegiate since 2015. We can handle this growth by keeping within our class size limits and utilizing our resources to the capacity they were meant for. Controlling that growth has led to the creation of a waiting pool in several of our grades as we enter the year.
We wish a warm welcome to all of the new members of our community. For our returning families, we thank you for entrusting the education of your students to our school.
GO SPARTANS!
Nathan Washer
Head of School