Students Head Back to school

More than six thousand Revere Public School students headed back to school this week to start an exciting 2019/2020 school year.

With the new school year underway, school leaders are hoping to implement several initiatives that will make the educational experience better and more fulfilling for both students and families this year.

Gui Machado and his daughter, Maysa Machado, are pictured outside the Hill Elementary School on the first day of school.

Last week Revere School Superintendent Dianne Kelly laid out additional goals to the school department’s five-year improvement plan. At last week’s School Committee meeting Kelly said she is hopeful these additional goals can be implemented and benchmarks hot by the end of the 2019/2020 school year.

 â€œWe developed district-wide improvement plan in 2015 and now this school year we will enter the fifth year of that plan,” said Kelly. “When we first started (in 2015) we had focus groups with students, parents and teachers to try and identify what the district goals should be over the next five years. We came up with the three strategic objectives of building community, teaching all students and assessing student learning  We then broke down those three categories into strategic initiatives that we have been working on the last four years.”

Kelly said the first big objective for this year is building community.

“We want to work with the larger Revere community on projects and city initiatives that impact students and their families,” said Kelly.

One such initiative is the ongoing planning for a new Revere High School (RHS).

“This year we want to engage parents, community members and students in the planning for the new Revere High School,” said Kelly. “A goal for this year is to have at least one parent and five community members named to the Revere High School Building Committee. We also want a 50 member Revere High School Visioning Team that represents all of Revere School’s diversity.”

Last school year Revere Public Schools cleared a major hurdle during a Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) board meeting. At that meeting the MSBA board voted to invite Revere and ten other school districts that filed Statements of Interest (SOI) to take part in the eligibility process that could ultimately lead to for grant money to build new high school here.

Then in the spring, Revere High School Principal Dr. John Perella and the RHS Design Team, which consists of Perella, students, parents and architects from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) held a design event to start envisioning what a new Revere High School might look like.

For the past three years Revere has been trying to get a plan off the ground to consolidate some old school buildings and build a new high school that will serve the city’s students and families for generations to come.

Aside from focusing on the potential for a new high school Kelly said Revere Schools want to increase equity and access by creating more opportunities for parents to engage with the school department and school officials.

“We also want to increase the number of relationships between the schools and local businesses, increase PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) participation by 25 percent, increase participation at school based activities and events by 10 percent as well as increase the number of Revere High and Seacoast students placed in internships by 20 percent.”

Also by the end of this years Kelly hopes that Revere School students will be able to report to the School Committee on how they had a voice in selecting school projects and avenues of learning based on their interests and passions as well as grading that is more fair and based on knowledge of subjects and not on work habits of how that knowledge was acquired.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.