The first nine weeks of this school year have been extremely eventful. We have settled into our daily routines, established relationships, made new friends and are steadily working towards meeting our own personal goals.

October is recognized as Principal Appreciation Month. Each October, principals are recognized for the essential role they play in making our schools great. Principals are among the hardest working, yet often least recognized individuals in education. They set the academic tone for their schools, and it is their vision, dedication, and determination that provide the mobilizing force for achieving student success. We are so thankful for the leadership of our 32 campus principals and for the positive examples they set each and every day for our 24,000 students.

We also recognized Cybersecurity Awareness this month. As technology continues to take precedence in our daily lives, we have to be hypervigilant in protecting ourselves from those that may want to do us harm. This is why cybersecurity is so important. Our district operates on the highest level to keep its students, staff and families safe through a myriad of ways. ClassLink celebrated the exceptional achievements of both individuals and teams during the closing session of their annual ClassLink Learning Analytics Summit, CLAS 2022, on October 7th. Goose Creek CISD’s IT Team, under the leadership of Gary Lackey, was recognized as the winner of the Data Security Champions Award during the event. The Data Security Champions Award recognizes an organization using analytics/security insights to inform their data security strategy implementation. We congratulate Gary and his IT team on their win and salute them for a job well done.

As a district, we wore pink in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, where we recognized and celebrated those that are currently fighting the disease as well as those that have come out on the other side. According to Breast Cancer Facts and Figures 2022-2024, “Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed among U.S. women and is the second leading cause of death from cancer among women after lung cancer.” We all know someone that has been affected by breast cancer. It is important for all of our employees to not only remain healthy, but to have the resources they need should they encounter a health crisis.

October is declared as National Bullying Prevention Month. Our Social-Emotional Learning and Student Wellness department, led by Dr. Precious Reimonenq, now leads the district in efforts to prevent bullying, by providing training and resources to our staff in order to mitigate the number of occurrences on our campuses. Our district also has an Anti-Bullying committee, where members of our district, parents and business partners meet monthly to discuss best practices in order to keep all of our students safe. There is still more work to be done to prevent bullying, but we will continue to invest our time and resources to ensure every student that walks through our doors knows that they are loved, protected and cared for.

Our mission as a district to develop the whole child, stems from our desire to ensure that every student, upon graduation, is college or career ready. We believe this can be accomplished by exposing and providing opportunities for students at a very young age. This week, we saw the grand opening of two facilities that, in time, will prove to be a success for our students and our community. The Culinary Arts program at Stuart Career Technical High School formally opened the Titan Table. A restaurant will provide high-quality meals prepared by our students in the program, at reasonable prices, now open to the public every Thursday. Guests that attended the ribbon cutting were blown away at how professional the students were and thoroughly enjoyed the meals. We encourage our community to support this student-led facility and order a meal from the Titan Table today. Tickets can be purchased on our Athletics page.

The STEM field is critically important to the sustainability of our local communities and the world we live in. Without a steady flow of highly-qualified employees, our infrastructure will suffer. We recognize that we have the opportunity to provide the employees that our economy needs by introducing them to the STEM field as early as our pre-K programs. The district held a ribbon cutting for the new Robotics Facility on October 20th. This building will provide our students with STEM skills, as well as, the integration of robotics into the science curriculum, which will ensure our students will be hired into the high-demand, high-wage industry career positions within our region. The district’s award-winning robotics team, Blarglefish, will be housed in that building, but we will also be able to host small-scale competitions there as well. Being innovative and on the cutting edge of technology is what makes our district distinctly great, and I have no doubt that our Robotics Center will serve as that beacon of technological progress for many years to come.

We thank our students, staff, families, community and business partners for their continuous support of our district’s initiatives. Everything we do is centered around providing the highest quality education, through a multitude of options for our students to connect to and engage with during their pathway of human development. Our decision making is done with the student in mind, and we recognize that our success is contingent upon the buy-in and support of our parents and our community. Thank you!

As always, please visit our website and follow us on socials to get a true vibe of what GIANT life is all about.

My Very Best, 

Dr. Randal O'Brien

Superintendent of Schools