There are many staff members at the Harvard Elementary School who go above and beyond the call of their contractual duties. Their personal agenda is to provide students with the best educational experience possible. One staff member in particular who exemplifies this standard and never boasts about her accomplishments is Principal Mary Beth Banios.
Mary Beth has brought many positive influences to our school. Technology in the classrooms is now closer to 21st-century standards. She found funding for a portable laptop cart with 12 computers that can be shared with all classrooms, and is solely responsible for introducing the Harvard public schools to Smart Boards, which are valuable to visual learners, students with processing issues, and all students of this technology-driven generation.
Mary Beth works hard to find updated, suitable assessment materials to identify students at academic risk and to create levels of intervention to accommodate their needs, such as small group instruction and software programs.
She meets regularly with teachers at all grade levels as a team, visits classrooms often, meets weekly with curriculum coordinators, and has an open-door policy making time for staff members and students. This is amazing when you consider that the population of our school is almost double that of many other Massachusetts elementary schools.
Mary Beth has brought to the elementary school and to the Harvard community a level of professionalism and leadership that is extraordinary. Her expertise in education and her knowledge of the requirements mandated by the Department of Education are remarkable. She often has to make tough decisions, yet she has the fortitude to make those decisions and the conviction to stand by them. She goes out of her way to back all staff members and is as supportive as any one person can be with an 85-member staff and a 536-member student body.
As you can see from her accomplishments, she is much too busy to sing her own praises. So, we feel that it is our obligation to reveal the undertakings of our “unsung hero.”
Karen Shuttle and Claudia McKenna
HES secretarial staff
