Wenrich: Following your passion leads to purpose

As many know this year has been a crazy year full of new surprises to which everyone has had to adapt. One new strategy is interviewing some teachers by email. Kassandra Wenrich was the easiest teacher I could have asked for to do that. She responded to my emails quickly and was always very nice and when I asked her questions she would give comprehensive answers.

Wenrich was born in Oceanside, California; she didn’t stay there long as her dad was a United States Marine so she traveled all over the country from coast to coast. The two places she calls home are New Orleans, La where her family decided to retire and, of course Florence, SC, where she has met amazing people through education and outside of education.

Growing up, Wenrich said that she would never be a teacher, but never say never because that's just what she ended up doing. Her whole family was involved in education but she initially majored in Political Science because of her love of history and politics. She changed her major to Child and Family Studies after working at New Orleans, YMCA where she fell in love with kids and decided that she wanted to help them.

Wenrich has been working for F1S for three years now; she started at Alfred E. Rush Academy but because of Covid, they moved her to West Florence. Wenrich has three goals in her teaching; the first one is to meet students’ needs every day; one of her favorite parts of classes is something she started is called self-work/bell work. She prompts her students every day with a question about their past, present, or future. This allows her a constructive way to incorporate social emotional learning into the classroom, which then allows her to know her students well.

The second goal is to incorporate cross curricular lessons as much as possible, the biggest one being English. Her last goal is to ground all her lessons into critical thinking to challenge her students. Weinrich attended LSU, home of the Tigers! She received a BS in Child and Family Studies. The main obstacle she faced was not having a main degree of education or certification to become a teacher. She overcame this by applying and being interviewed with a program called Teach For America, and she was accepted into the program. She taught summer school in Mississippi in the Delta with Regional Corp Members. Her first job was at Alfred E. Rush Academy; she knew an Alternative school was going to be challenging but it would prepare her for anything and she wanted to give those kids a second chance.

Outside of school Wenrich loves to hang out with her friends who help her; when she feels like she can go on no more they bring her strength. She loves to read any book and to watch tv on her firestick because "who needs cable anyway."

Weinrich’s favorite unit to teach is US history and the civil rights movement. The people that have helped her the most transition into West is everyone; she was overwhelmed with how everyone help her but the main were her girls Ms.Ashe, Mrs.Cummings, and Ms.Hanna. Her favorite things about West would be the administration and her ¨kiddos¨; she said that she was nervous at first not knowing if she would connect with her students as easy at first coming from an alternative school but quickly did. One thing Weinrich wants people to know is she is currently in a program called Second Tour Fellowship, and at the end of it, she will be a National Board Certified Teacher.

¨It shows that you can be completely lost in life, and just follow your passion by placing all of your energy into it and your life can transform into a place of purpose,¨ she said.