DSST campuses are where the majority of our staff work; however, there is a small but mighty group that work out of the Home Office. The Home Office is equivalent to our districts’ network level support. You have already interacted with several of the Home Office staff and as you go into your first year at DSST, you will continue to interact with even more.
To help build your understanding of what is happening at the Home Office, the teams are listed below with a description of the focuses for those individuals. This table does not include all the different initiatives that happen but is a nice summary that you can look at should you have any questions.
C-Team
Bill Kurtz is the CEO of DSST Public Schools. As CEO, Bill oversees the entire organization ensuring that we are upholding our mission and working towards are long term goals. Prior to becoming the CEO, in 2004 Bill was the Founding Head of School of the Denver School of Science and Technology, the flagship school of DSST Public Schools.
Christine Nelson is the Chief of Staff of DSST Public Schools. Christine joined the DSST in 2010. As Chief of Staff, Christine works with the Human Capital Team to recruit, hire and find talented individuals to work in our schools and continually create a positive impact on our students, schools and communities.
Scott Walker is the Chief Operating Officer of DSST Public Schools. Scott joined the DSST team full-time in 2015 after serving as a consultant to the network in the fall of 2014 helping implement a new financial system. As COO, Scott oversees five departments at the home office: Information Technology, Education Technology, Finance & Accounting, Operations, and Development.
Academics - Our team focuses on: Creating systems, assessments, curriculum and tools that help all academic focused staff to more effectively help our students reach their goals.
Advocacy - Our team focuses on: Bringing our families and community to the forefront of our work to eliminate educational inequity in Denver and Colorado. We build community support for DSST and organize our families, community and staff to advocate for school choice and increased access to high-quality schools for all students.
College and STEM Initiatives - Our team focuses on: Our team builds and connects college and STEM industry partners with opportunities to support the DSST community, in addition to, supporting college culture and support initiatives at DSST and college campuses.
Communications - Our team focuses on: Ensuring our network communications are clear, concise, aligned, consistent with brand and are listened to. We also build systems, strategies, structures and collateral to support others in our organization to communicate more effectively and encourage student recruitment.
Development - Our team focuses on: Fundraising at the network level to ensure DSST has the necessary resources for growth, capacity building, and strategic initiatives to support our mission and vision. We concentrate our work in the following areas to best enable us to build a sustainable, highly successful fundraising effort: Individuals, Foundations, and Corporations.
Educational Technology - Our team focuses on: Building, acquiring, implementing, and supporting software solutions that support student learning. Our team is made up of software developers and instructional technology specialists who focus on providing solutions to schools, either through the development of new software, acquisition of market ed tech tools, or working with schools to think through the school and classroom structures to maximize the use of this technology.
Finance - Our team focuses on: Providing the tools, processes, guidance and policies to ensure DSST’s finances are optimally and sustainably utilized to achieve our mission.
Human Capital - Our team focuses on: Serving as partners to leaders throughout the organization to attract, develop, support, reward, and retain high performing teams who will most effectively attain results for kids and community.
Operations - Our team focuses on: Creating the operational preconditions that fuel exceptional instruction and school culture as we scale.
Schools - Our team focuses on: Ensuring all schools have highly effective leadership, utilizing intensive coaching and mentorship to support and develop school directors and admin teams. This work includes weekly coaching, school leadership development programming, and alignment of home office support for schools.
Technology - Our team focuses on: Ensuring our network has consistently functioning tech tools to allow everyone in our network to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.