When students returned to the classroom after the COVID-19 school closures, many brought with them the effects of trauma, the experience of isolation, and the impact of missed social and academic development. Like in so many schools across the nation, the staff at Revere High School in Massachusetts was stretched to the brink as they tried to support students facing new and unique challenges. Absenteeism soared and bullying and fights became more common challenges.
“We didn’t have a perfect system prior to the pandemic, but it was working,” said Chris Bowen, Principal of Revere High School. “Returning to school after the pandemic was a major stress test on all the systems, and it felt like everything broke.”
Bowen knew something had to change.
“We had lots of good people doing good work to support students, but we realized we didn’t have a strong set of processes and systems for student support,” Bowen said.
At the time, Revere High School—which serves more than 2,000 students—had an assistant principal for each grade and school counselors and social workers whose caseloads were split alphabetically across grades.
“Every student had a school counselor, a social worker, and an assistant principal but it was never the case that there was one group of adults that shared the same students. Every counselor was working with five assistant principals and multiple social workers, every assistant principal was working with eight counselors and five social workers. Everyone was working hard, but there was not necessarily a process,” Bowen explained.
Bowen wanted to create Student Support Teams that could collaborate to better support each student. To do that, the school needed to be restructured into multi-grade houses, each with a designated assistant principal, two school counselors, and one social worker. Bowen and his team also created two new positions—a Student Engagement Coordinator and a Student Support Specialist—and there would be one of each on every Student Support Team.
But getting this new structure up and running would be a challenge, and Bowen knew he couldn’t do it alone. That’s when he reached out to Boston College’s Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children.
Having earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Boston College, Bowen was familiar with the City Connects model. And while he felt his school wasn’t ready to adopt City Connects, he knew the team at the Center for Thriving Children could help him rethink the school’s Student Support Teams.
“In a big school like this, it’s hard to ensure that every student is known. Chris came to us with this idea to make sure kids weren’t falling through the cracks. We knew we could use the Center’s knowledge and expertise to help,” said Cynthia Scheller, Director of Student Support Programs and Practice at the Center for Thriving Children.
Scheller and her team dove into the work by doing a landscape analysis based on interviews with dozens of staff members. Once they understood the needs of the school, they created a handbook—based on best practices— that laid out details for how students can be referred to a Student Support Team, who should be part of each Student Support Team meeting, and what role each member of the team would play. They provided professional development for staff and sat in on Student Support Team meetings to provide feedback. They also worked with teams around identifying the root cause of challenges facing each student and helped develop systems to foster students’ strengths.
“These are the students with the biggest needs, but they also have their own strengths and interests. There are so many resources within the school and within the community. If there is a student who needs mentorship, for example, maybe there is a club at the school that could meet that need and an interest,” said Scheller. “We wanted to capture all those resources in one place, so we created a database that staff can refer to during Student Support Team meetings.”
After working with the Center for Thriving Children for two years, Revere High School now has a robust system of student support, with teams meeting weekly to develop support plans for students in their cohort. Teachers, school staff, and community members know when and how to refer a student to the Student Support Teams. And attendance rates are increasing.
“The systems we created with our colleagues at Boston College have become internalized,” said Bowen. “Three years ago, we were focusing on fights, bullying, kids missing a significant amount of school or not going to class, and other more complicated challenges. Now we can shift our focus to more proactively supporting students, instead of reactively.”
Bowen says working with the Center for Thriving Children helped the school through a difficult post-pandemic era while setting up systems to support students well into the future.
“Being able to lean on them as very competent colleagues with expertise to offer was such a blessing,” said Bowen.
“Working with an engaging and visionary leader like Chris, who you know is going to see this project through, makes the work exciting and meaningful,” said Scheller.
