Job losses during the pandemic, internet access challenges with virtual learning, and social distancing requirements brough to public attention something schools have long known: meeting basic needs and promoting social and emotional learning are essential to student success and learning. 

Based on TBP’s ongoing efforts to provide additional supports to help our student succeed, in summer 2021 TBP created the position of Counseling & Family Engagement Coordinator. Over the summer, former Pafford campus counselor Holly Vasquez was selected to take on this new role and the laundry list of goals associated with the position.

Holly Vasquez 
Counseling & Family Engagement Coordinator

“One of our goals with family engagement is to offer opportunities for families of all kinds of student populations to be involved and informed,” Vasquez said. “I’ll be looking into resources for families across DFW that would benefit our families. We also want to streamline counseling procedures across TBP and create more unity in those processes.”

Before coming to TBP, Vasquez’s passion for families began during her five years as a band director at a traditional school district. 

“At that time, I had a student in band who told me that he had not had electricity for 3 days,” Vasquez recalls. “That made me realize that there were kids that were struggling, and we weren’t doing enough. I felt like our counselors at that school had given up on these kinds of needs and instead focused only on being a testing coordinator.” 

Despite already having a master’s degree in Music, those experiences as a band director prompted Vasquez to earn a second master’s degree in counseling in order to become campus counselor. Her career in counseling ultimately brought her to TBP, where she spent three years as a counselor at Pafford. 

“At Pafford, I advocated for my kids and their needs,” Vasquez said. “I worked on creating the protocol for our student 8th grade students to transition to high school. We now use those protocols for all of our TBP campuses.”

Beyond resources and procedures, Vasquez envisions growth in the areas of social and emotional learning, promoting active parent participation in their child’s learning to improve educational outcomes, and parent resources and empowerment to meet their child’s needs after TBP. 

“When you are a student at TBP, we are going much deeper than coming to school and clocking attendance,” Vasquez said. “We are passionate about and committed to developing students as adults and provide them with transferable skills. This is not ‘surface-level’ school.”

New Faces and New Places:

 
The following are a list of staff either new to TBP or in new roles with TBP:

Jefferson:

Dreux Jordan
Counselor

Pafford:

Rhonda Anderson
Counselor

Tenth Street:

Deana Deloatche
Counselor