Supt. Kelly Looks to Expand Successful Family Liaison Program at RHS

At a Revere School Committee subcommittee meeting Tuesday Superintendent Dr. Dianne Kelly proposed expanding Revere Public School’s Family Liaison program at Revere High School.

“One of the things that we have found to be a huge success from our days dealing with COVID is the use of family liaisons at each of our schools,” said Kelly. “They’ve really done a great job connecting families to the school and we have found them to be quite invaluable. Dr. Lourenco Garcia did a great job hiring a bunch of really great parents to act in those roles. One of the requirements in serving in that role is that the person be a parent of a RPS student and that (program) has been hugely successful.”

Kelly said one of the things administrators have seen from monitoring the new program is the need for more family liaisons at RHS.

“One of the things that we’ve seen from our experience is that it’s a bit of a stretch at the high school where there are over 2000 students and a lot more families to try to reach out to and connect with,” said Kelly. “So reflecting on the information we have from families and from principals on how effective these roles are we wanted to propose a new position of a second family liaison at RHS and we would hope to find a parents who serve in that capacity who either speaks Portuguese or Arabic to complement the current high school family liaison who speaks Spanish.”

Dr. Garcia said the Family Liaison program is one thing RPS put together in response to the pandemic that has really had an impact.

“This is really working successfully towards supporting our families,” said Garcia. “All our family liaisons have received training through UMass Amherst. They all have become certified translators. So they have the knowledge, the know-how, the language skills and are a great group of people and I think RHS really deserves an additional one, because of the structure and some of the complexities at the school.”

Committee member Carol Tye said she agreed with Dr Kelly’s proposal of adding a second family liaison and went as far to suggest there should be more at the high school.

“I wondered if we need more than one additional (family liaison),” said Tye. “When I think of how many kids are at the high school I think we could perhaps consider that maybe the Superintendent can do some sort of analysis and see whether it would make sense to have more than one additional (family liaison).”

Committee member Stacey Rizzo asked if the position would be filled this year or next. Kelly said it would be a short amount of money to fill the position for the remainder of the school year with reserved school budget funding and then try and make it permanent in the budget for the 2022/2023 school year.

“It’s primarily for next year, but if we can get someone to start sooner, it would be short money to get us from now until June,” said Kelly. “As you know, we always have differences from what we budgeted to where we are now and there could be some funding there that we could use. So we don’t have anybody in mind right now. We would need to do a search and post the position and see if we can find somebody. I would prefer it if we find somebody to bring them on immediately. But if we don’t, or if it’s June 2 by the time we get through this process, there’s no point in bringing them on then. These are school year positions. So it really would depend on how long the process took but we would love to do it sooner rather than later.”

Dr. Garcia added that he’d like to see a Portuguese-speaking liaison hired.

“The struggle that we’ve been having is finding someone that speaks Portuguese,” he said. “But I think that with the current salary we’ll be offering I think it’s a little bit more appealing.”