President's Update: July 23, 2020

To the Shasta College Community:

I trust you are doing as well as can be expected during this time. I find it difficult, at times, to stay motivated over such a long period of being in an emergency, and I bet many of you find yourselves feeling this way from time to time as well. I find when I make the effort to connect with people via telephone or zoom outside of my work life that it helps me to continue to strive for excellence in service to our community and our students in my work life. I encourage each of you to do the same - and to continue to encourage one another in our work as we interact together. We are lucky, I think, to work at an institution with such a great purpose - helping improve our community through providing a path for our students to improve their lives through education.

I just have a couple of updates for you. First, our enrollment patterns are not following any model of prior years. We are tracking behind the last two falls significantly - around 20%. We are not alone in this pattern - the majority of the people I am talking to at other districts are in a similar situation, tracking behind compared to prior years. I cannot help but think that this has to do with the uncertainty of people's lives, the uncertainty surrounding their having to deal with child care and schooling this fall, and with some people not wanting to take distance learning courses. I am still hoping that we may have more enrollment over the coming 30 days that will make up some of this gap.

Second, our construction projects continue to be moving along. It is good to see the improvements being made so that we will have better facilities in the future when we get back to a regular life! You can check the Measure H website for monthly updates.

Finally, it is exciting to see that the new website will be coming out soon. You have gotten some separate communication on this, but I wanted to recognize all the work involved in making this happen. It sure will be nice as we get more and more information on the new site and to have a site that works better on smartphones.

Thanks to all of you once more for being creative in adapting our services and offerings to our students. We have a ways to go yet, but I am confident we will continue to solve the issues that arise and serve our communities well.

Joe Wyse
Superintendent/President
Shasta-Tehama-Trinity Joint Community College District
11555 Old Oregon Trail
Redding, CA 96049
530-242-7510