Who makes everything run smoothly, pinpoints every detail, and organizes all the events from Curriculum Night and Parent-Teacher Conferences to information night for newcomers? You wouldn’t know, would you? She does her job well. The woman everyone knows as  “the one who sets up school tours and shadowing” does so much more.

Greta Hardina not only sends out all the schoolwide emails, making her the first point of contact at CRLS, but she also started up the food pantry, collects winter clothing for students, sets up prom dresses in the spring, is working on giving students access to washing and drying machines, and created the most amazing new parent support group.

Eleven years ago, when Hardina started working at CRLS, everything was done on paper. There was very little communication between the school and families about events and deadlines. “So the first thing I did was start an electronic email using Constant Contact, on which parents had to self-register, and within a week a thousand parents registered,” Hardina told the Register Forum. Now we have the Did You Know newsletter, which goes out every Monday.

In addition to communications, Hardina works on family and student support, the most rewarding thing she does and her favorite part of the job. She used to run a home visiting program for mothers at the Public Health Department and has always been organizing community engagement and family support. Here at CRLS, she runs the food pantry, which opened four years ago. 

Principal Smith gave up his conference room for the space, while grants from Friends of CRLS and the Public Health Department bought all the inventory, shelving, food, and a deep freezer for the pantry. Without such giving and thoughtful people, the food pantry would not be possible. 

It is sustained by donations from community members and staff and receives fresh produce twice a week from Food For Free, which rescues food from supermarkets. Currently, about one hundred and fifty students come daily, weekly, or as needed to get food to take home to their families.

Along with accumulating a winter clothing closet in the back of her office, Hardina recently received a participatory budget for a washing machine and dryer initiative so students without access to these utilities can wash their clothing at the school. Hardina told us that it is also “an attendance initiative—a big reason for some students not coming to school is that they don’t have clean clothes.”

New this year are two amazing programs Hardina started up. The first one is called Tech Goes Home, which offers English Language Learning families fifteen hours of computer training and an option to buy a fifty dollar Chromebook. Families with no computer training get access to Chromebooks and affordable Internet, helping the families meet their needs and engage with the school. The second one is a Parent to Parent support group, designed to help parents who are struggling with raising their teens. It meets every first Thursday of the month and is “the most diverse and meaningful group of parents,” Hardina explained.

When asked about change and improvement in the CRLS community, Hardina stresses the importance of communication, saying, “There’s always, like, five hundred things happening at CRLS. If we don’t know about it then we can’t get it out to families … the only thing I wish about CRLS is that there was more collaboration, that people would work together.”

This piece also appears in our February 2020 print edition.