Ready to Go Back to School?

Our first day of school is August 15, and our staff is busily preparing campuses, greeting and collaborating with returning staff, and onboarding new employees. It is an exciting time for all of us.

New to our district this year are about 240 transitional kindergarteners, a half-dozen new site administrators, and more than 40 new teachers. We welcome them all to our Alameda Unified community and look forward to getting to know them over the coming year.

As many of you know, we have commenced a major redesign and reconstruction of Wood Middle School . Our contractors are putting the finishing touches on the temporary campus, located on the former Lum campus. The brand-new portable classrooms are beautiful, and the contractors were remarkably fast and efficient in getting them up in just two short months.

Our construction projects at Alameda High School ( a new pool and upgrades to Kofman Auditorium) and Encinal High School (a new athletic field) are proceeding apace. We apologize for the noise, dust, and other inconveniences, but we can hardly wait to unveil the new projects to our community.

We can’t talk about our excitement about the new school year without also acknowledging the tragedy that occurred this summer —the shooting deaths of six-year-old William Killian, his 14-month-old brother Wesley, their mother Brenda Natali Morales, and Brenda’s mother and father, Marta Morales Diaz and Miguel Angel Carcamo Ramirez.

This shooting continues to deeply affect the community of Love Elementary School , where William was a kindergartener last year and was going to be a first grader this year, and the Alameda Adult School, where Brenda, who was from El Salvador, had taken English classes. We are grateful to Alameda Family Services for partnering with us to provide counseling services to students and staff both before and during the start of school next week. We also want all of our Alameda community to know that we have an extensive list of Tools for Family Conversations on our AUSD website, which provides resources to help with talking to children about death, grief, gun violence, and other difficult topics.

We also want to take a moment to thank our partners at the Alameda Police Department and Alameda Fire Department for their response to this incident and their commitment to investigating it. We cannot imagine what the first responders saw and felt upon entering the family’s home on the night of July 10, and we know they did their very best, under incomprehensible duress, during this incident. We send our emergency responders our gratitude and support for all they experienced that evening.

We also thank them for the six-hour emergency drill they conducted with us on August 1 so that all three agencies could jointly practice protocols for emergency incidents at our school sites. These types of collaborations help us develop and maintain safe, resilient communities, and we are grateful to APD and AFD for their willingness to partner with us.

Susan Davis is the Senior Manager of Community Affairs for the Alameda Unified School District. Reach her at sdavis@alamedaunified.org .

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