SET High -- California Distinguished School Nomination!!!

[Neil McCurdy]

Dear Parents, Guardians and Students,

I am really excited to report that we have been recognized as a potential California Distinguished School because of our performance over the past two years.  This is a huge honor!  Only 16 other schools in all of San Diego County are in the running to be recognized and only 190 in the entire state.  You can see the entire list of schools nominated here: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/sr/cs/yr19distschools.asp  I keep thinking of other really good schools in San Diego and my jaw drops when I realize that they are not on the list.  To help put this in perspective, there are 175 schools in San Diego County that are not on this list!

Our application for the final step in this process was submitted yesterday after some fantastic work by Ms. Loughrin, Ms. Jokanovic and Mr. Heid over the weekend.  You can find the public portion of our application on our website under Student Experience|Model Programs:  http://sethigh.org/modelprograms  Thanks also to Lisa Catlin who did a final read-through and cleaned it up for web publishing.

We will be adding a section on our home page to brag about this nomination within the next couple of days, and we will add it to our marketing material.  Let everyone know that your child goes to a California Distinguished School!

Other Exciting News (keep reading!)

• Check out our new website:  http://sethigh.org
• SET is hosting Shark Tank Pitch Training in partnership with Hands-On Mobile and BioCom
  
• SET is applying for the K12 Strong Workforce Grant
• SET Robotics team won the Connect award and advanced to San Diego Regionals

Check out our new website:  http://sethigh.org

We have a team of parents who have been putting in a tremendous amount of time and energy into getting our website to be an accurate reflection of our school.  It is still a work in progress, but now that it is live and obviously different, I want to make sure that I acknowledge those parents.  The bulk of the work has been performed by Val Canino and Lisa Catlin, but Kathleen Kubota also deserves recognition for working on copy and getting the ball rolling.  Some of the photos still need some work and getting the headings properly lined up regardless of window size is something that we will gradually get right.  Students, please try to avoid being critics just to be critics, but we are happy to listen to solution oriented constructive feeback.  The starting template that we had is challenging to work with, but we're starting to get the hang of it.

SET is hosting Shark Tank Pitch Training in partnership with Hands-On Mobile and BioCom

We have a really exciting opportunity to showcase our best entrepreneurial talent next month.  SET will be sharing a booth with Hands-On Mobile at the BioCom Science Festival on March 2nd, and then during the evening of Friday, March 8th, our students will be doing model Shark Tank presentations and teaching young students from around San Diego how to make effective Shark Tank pitches.  On April 12th these same students will be invited back to SET to perform their final pitches in front of a panel of high-profile investors.  Exciting stuff!

Students, we definitely need your help with the booth on March 2nd and if you are interested in helping with the training on March 8th, let me know.  Both events will get you Community Service hours.

SET is applying for the K12 Strong Workforce Grant

We have just completed the first phase of a grant proposal that will hopefully bring in some much needed money for next year.  We are looking to expand some of our key classes and programs (SysAdmin, Robotics, Art, Entrepreneurship), so fingers-crossed that we receive this grant!

SET Robotics team won the Connect award and advanced to San Diego Regionals

The SET family did another fantastic job of hosting a robotics tournament over the weekend.  We had 14 teams competing in a fierce competition for a limited number of spaces at San Diego Regionals.  I am really proud of our team for showing well and winning the Connect award that allowed them to advance to the next round.

Thank you to our partners at Northrop Grumman for sponsoring the competition and for volunteering so much time at our school.  Thank you also to Elinor Weed who has taken the lead on hosting these events for 4 straight years.  That is 8 major events that we have put on.  Wow!  As the parent of a graduating senior, I am sure that she is ready to retire so we will be looking for someone to take the lead next year.

Thanks everyone!  Let's all work to parlay the great news about our Distinguished School nomination into a full and well funded school!

Dr. McCurdy

--

____________________________

Neil McCurdy, Ph.D.

Principal

http://sethigh.org