New Veterans’ Services Director Jay Weaver enjoys history and embraces the opportunity to be of service to the community’s veteran population.

By Harry Kane

Jay Weaver became the Director at Veterans’ Services on April 2.  As a Harvard man he studied American History. Weaver has always been fascinated with The American Revolution and World War II.

“This job has been fantastic,” said Weaver, “because I get to meet these guys that actually were in World War II. This morning I was talking to a guy that parachuted into D-Day.  It’s a good opportunity to learn something about history in the process of doing work.”

Weaver was in the military, but joined very late in life. “I’d always regretted not having served in the military because I was always so impressed by veterans when I met them and it was with a little bit of embarrassment that I had to admit that I had never served myself. So, at the age of 47, I convinced the army to give me a 12 year age waiver.”

Weaver was allowed to serve as an “army reserve guy.” He went to Germany and served with the First Armored Division and later went to Afghanistan for one year. Weaver had a bunch of different jobs over his military career.

One of his big jobs was serving in the JAG Corps. “One of the big responsibilities I had over there was taking care of soldiers.” If one of the soldiers was injured, and had to be sent back home, Weaver had to make sure the soldiers’ affairs were wrapped up. “In the course of that year of helping our soldiers in a combat environment I learned that I really enjoyed that kind of thing. It was really very fulfilling to help those kinds of people who were defending our country.”

When Weaver returned he fell into a similar line of work at Somerville’s Veterans’ Services. Weaver recalls that the previous Veterans’ Services Director, Frank Senesi, who had been the Director for 8 years, had retired in January opening up the post for Weaver. For Weaver it was perfect timing.

Veterans’ Services serves several functions. Primarily they administer state benefits. Indigent vets can turn to Veterans’ Services for assistance in getting their state benefits. If they meet certain income guidelines, veterans are entitled to a monthly paycheck from the state.

Veterans’ Services does a bunch of ancillary things. They run the parade every year. They also are in charge of maintaining all the city’s monuments and memorials and all the veterans graves.

Sometimes Weaver will be responsible for handling street dedications. Family can request that a square be named in honor of one of their military relatives. There’s a square dedication committee that handles that procedure.

In the future Weaver would like to see some positive improvements at Veterans’ Services. “In the past veterans were much more involved in things like veterans organizations,” said Weaver, “joining the VFW posts and the American Legion posts and so forth.”

After meeting with the Allied Council, which is a joint meeting of all the various veterans’ posts here in Somerville, Weaver learned that very few of the veterans who are coming back now from places like Iraq and Afghanistan are joining these organizations. “For the most part unless they are really banged-up. They’re just coming back and going back to their lives and going back to work.”

Veterans are entitled to a lot of different benefits like the GI bill, which allows them to go to college on federal money.

“My fear is that a lot of these guys will come back and they won’t even know the full range of benefits that they’re entitled to get, and that they deserve, unless they come to talk to us about it,” said Weaver.

Weaver hopes to do more outreach. The IT team will be updating the city’s website “to improve that and make it a more local site.” Soon he hopes to create a Facebook page, and more “things for the modern era” veteran.