Revere High School (RHS) introduced a new adviser for the school’s National Honor Society (NHS) during the school year in October.
NHS had to start the first few months of school without an adviser because their previous adviser decided to step down the year prior. Principal Doug Faris worked to find a replacement while also allowing the students to still have meetings and function like normal. NHS is mostly run by its students, so they found ways in order to still function.
“A lot of it was up to the NHS president [and] vice president. They did a lot of the work. And then I kept trying to find an adviser,” Faris said.
Faris sent out a Google Form to all the staff in the district, and he went through the people who expressed interest and had a phone interview with each of them and finally chose RHS alumna and 7th grade English teacher Elyssa Koutrodimos to take on the role as new advisor for NHS.
“I knew her as a student . . . . She was always very, very hardworking as a student, and she understood what NHS meant to high school kids. So it was a pretty easy choice,” Faris said.
Until they had an adviser, NHS President Ria Mahapatra had to take on the role and responsibility of being in charge of the entire program. They had their very first meeting without an adviser, and she had to make most of the decisions while they were finding someone to fill the role of adviser.
“I remember Mr. Faris told me, ‘You’re the adviser for now,’ so that was kind of stressful, just thinking that I had all this responsibility and working with an adviser from the middle school that wasn’t at the high school, so I [had] to take a lead on the high school side of things. For example, selling tickets—that’s all my responsibility,” Mahapatra said.
Koutrodimos was a member of the NHS when she was in high school. She started teaching at the Revere Middle School last year and was looking to be more involved with the school itself and when she saw that they were looking for advisors, she thought it would be a good thing she would want to do.
“I had received an email back in the fall from my principal, Dr. [Dan] Oberhauser. And he said that the high school was looking for somebody to be the new NHS adviser, and I’ve been looking for a way to kind of get involved within the club activity, either at the high school or the middle school. So I thought this was a good way to kind of get into it,” Koutrodimos said.
Koutrodimos’ main job is being a helping hand to the NHS student officers. Since they had their first meeting without an adviser, they grew to be more independent regarding tasks.
“I had met with Mr. [Paul] Fisher, who was a previous adviser prior to deciding if I wanted the role or not. . . . They’re super independent; they’re ready to run NHS by themselves for the year. So they’ve definitely been a really great resource to kind of see how NHS has been run,” Koutrodimos said.
Mahapatra, along with the other NHS officers and Koutrodimos were able to click with each other relatively quickly. Koutrodimos and the officers shared many experiences together.
“She’s relatively young. . . we just connected with her more because she was also in NHS in high school, so she’d like, knew how things worked and stuff,” Mahapatra said.
Koutrodimos has some ideas on how she wants to have NHS be more inviting to newcomers and be a resource to ask questions about when the application process is happening.
“[I think] setting up a time where I come in, maybe like two or three times before the applications are due. So if students want to check over what they have written, making sure their points are good, their GPA is fine. That would be something I’d like to implement,” Koutrodimos said.
The application process in the past usually was filled out by students with a packet. To get their volunteer hours confirmed they would have to find supervisors in-person and have them sign the packet. Now the application process is fully online making it easier to have supervisors confirm hours.
“I didn’t change it much from what Mr. Fisher had. It was the same points for GPA that students had to complete as well as 20 volunteer hours, which is what the application minimum was for last year. The only change was that students had to get those verified through Schoolinks,” Koutrodimos said.
The Winter Formal that NHS funds happened Saturday February 21 and the NHS Induction Ceremony March 2. NHS also has an upcoming Chipotle fundraiser the day after the Induction Ceremony as a meet and greet between veteran members and the newly inducted members.
