Supt. Kelly Updates School Committee on 2020–2025 District Improvement Plan

At a recent Revere School Committee meeting, Revere Public School Superintendent Dianne Kelly updated committee members on the status of RPS 2020-2025 District Improvement Plan and highlighted some of the progress made as well as areas that still need improvement.

One of the goals of the plan was to increase partnerships between RPS and colleges and universities in the area.

“We now have two new formal partnerships with the Massachusetts Partnership for Diversity in Education and new partnerships with Salem State University to increase the number of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) employees that we have,”

Kelly said one of the major goals of the improvement plan is to increase the percentage of staff that reflects the racial linguistic diversity of RPS students.

RPS has also partnered with Wheelock Educational Policy Center, who has spent the last year doing deep study of RPS’s Department of Education data.

“They have been looking at what we’ve done in terms of BIPOC candidates and teachers,” said Kelly.

Kelly said according to the data, representation of BIPOC educators working in RPS has gone up since the school department has launched initiatives to hire people who look more like the student population.

“However our rate of proportion to the state is low on (BIPOC) teachers, but we are higher than the state average on paraprofessionals,” said Kelly.

Kelly said RPS still needs to work on getting more students of color enrolled in Advanced Placement Classes (AP). One of the trends, Kelly pointed to, is the number of RPS students who have received scholarships and how it correlates to students who are enrolled in AP classes. However, the data also shows that more effort and attention needs to be paid to getting more students of color enrolled in AP courses.

 â€œWhile only 31% of our students at Revere High School identify as white, they represented 42% of AP enrollment,” said Kelly. “However, even though 58% of our high school students identify as Hispanic, they represented only 40% of the students in those advanced classes. So it just demonstrates where we need to do some work in order to make sure that all students have access to a rigorous high quality education. So this is just more evidence of things I think that we already knew.”