Next Step: Supt. Abeyta Issues Entry Report as She Takes on the Job Solo

The new year has brought on a lot of changes, and one of the key changes in the city is Supt. Almi Abeyta fully taking charge of the Chelsea Public Schools as the district leader – having spent the last several months getting up to speed under former Supt. Mary Bourque.

This week – after working with the School Committee last weekend on their annual retreat – Supt. Abeyta has issued a report identifying strengths and opportunities in the district. It’s a report she hopes will guide the district to the next step of budgeting and strategic planning.

“There’s such a healthy culture in Chelsea,” she said. “There are so many wonderful things happening and great things to build on. We have opportunities and the leadership team has been studying the findings we have and are trying to already address the things we have heard…With the findings from the entry report, we can use that to strategically plan and budget. We’ll use the findings to guide our planning for the 2020-21 budget. There are areas that have popped up – specifically to improve our middle schools and shore them up academically and programmatically. We really want to work on our middle grades.”

Her four categories of findings include:

•Rigorous Teaching and Learning

•Expand Access, Opportunity and Equity

•Family and Community Engagement

•Operations to Support Teaching and Learning

One of the first steps, though, will be music to everyone’s ears.

One of the first, most obvious, changes Abeyta will make is to have student performances before each School Committee meeting. She said she hopes it can raise the level of awareness for the great arts and music programs Chelsea puts forward. The first performance will be at the Feb. 6 School Committee meeting.

“One thing Chelsea has prided itself on is in the middle of many budget shortfalls year after year, the leadership team preserved the music and arts and performing arts and continued to make them an important investment,” she said. “We’ll have a performance after the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s meant to highlight the great work our teachers and students are doing.”

Another visible and quick change will be to improve the Chelsea Public Schools website, which has been in need of an update for quite some time.

“Our community partners and families go to our website looking for information and it’s not there or it’s not updated or easy to find,” she said. “One way to improve communication to families and the community is to improve the website.”

One of the four big categories, Expanding Access, Opportunity and Equity could be defined in many different ways. It is inclusive of a lot, she said, but one specific thing she got from her listening tour last fall was that high school students wanted to be competitive when they graduated and left for college.

A practical way that was suggested was to procure laptops that students could take home to do their homework.

“I got that from listening to the kids at Chelsea High,” she said. “They were asking for laptops that could go home with them. Other school districts allow it, and they said it would make it much easier to do their homework.”

A second piece of that was to provide more College and Career Counseling – including offering more help with college applications and financial aid forms.

“We want to help students understand ways they can afford to go to college,” she said. “Many of our students get into four-year colleges, but they can’t afford it. So, they end up at community college. That isn’t a bag thing at all, but we want to make sure we help with understand all their options in making that financial decision.”

One finding for the middle schools is to expand the Caminos dual-language program to the Browne Middle School. Currently that program only exists at the Kelly Elementary, but Abeyta felt it would be a good move to help strengthen the middle grades.

The long-term hope for that is that students continue their bi-lingual abilities – as most kids in Chelsea come to the schools able to speak both languages. Once at the high school, they hope that the dual-language abilities would be able to feed into a new interpreter pathway program. Students would potentially be able to secure an interpreter certificate before graduation, and then use those skills to support themselves during college, Abeyta said.

Other opportunities for improvement in the report include:

•Improving operations.

•Doing a better job retaining teachers.

•Focusing more on STEM.

•Engaging more families.

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