West River Eagle

Saluting out local school counselors



National School Counseling Week is a chance for the schools to honor their counselors whose roles are imperative to the smooth function of school systems.

The roles of counselors are extensive, from providing education about social skills, mediation between students, transitioning between grades and schools, college planning, crisis management, class scheduling to administrative collaboration, counselors extend their hearts and minds to every aspect of their job from school to community.

“The position involves SO many things that it is hard to even think of them all,” said Patty Peacock, who is a counselor for the Dupree School District.

To be a counselor at a school in most cases requires a master’s degree in psychology–school counseling.

“I do have a master level degree in counseling, but my specialty tracks are K-12 education and Student Affairs (college level). I had to complete 600 internship hours in each to earn those specialty endorsements,” said Jill Kessler, who is a counselor at C-EB High School.

There are different specialties counselors can focus on.

“At the beginning of my career, I was a National Certified Counselor (www.nbcc.org), but I let it lapse because the work I do in a school is more academic and transition based with referrals when a student is in need of deeper therapeutic needs. I am qualified to provide those types of services, but I have found that the school setting isn’t ideal for providing therapy sessions. Further, I am not qualified to administer medications, but my working knowledge on them has become vast because our students are being prescribed them for a variety of needs (most frequent: anxiety and depression),” said Kessler.

“Another area that many school counselors work with are special education through behavioral counseling or transition assistance as students transition from JH to HS or HS to life after high school. They are also a big part of TAT (teacher assistance teams) where staff meet to try and work together to figure out what works best for a student that is struggling in some classes but not others and often the counselor has valuable information to contribute,” said Peacock.

Administering state assessments and district-wide assessments is another job of the school counselor.

While there are some counselors who dislike the testing requirements, they are still expected to help staff and students administer and collect data from those assessments so that teachers can adjust their teaching to meet the needs of the students, or create intervention programs to fill education learning gaps.

According to Peacock, depending on the size of the school and interest of the programming, elementary counselors almost always do guidance classes on various social, behavioral, and educational topics and only some JH/HS school counselors try to make this work with schedules. 

“The amount of time given to JH/HS is often dictated by the size of the enrollment/need of students and the administration,” Peacock said.

The roles of counselors often extend beyond their job descriptions.

“Personally, in addition to district testing coordinator, I work with the JH/HS student council, National Honor Society, Destination Imagination, school play, yearbook, and outside of school I am a 4H leader,” Peacock said.

At C-EB, Lola Blue Earth and Kessler work in the high school, and “the other School Counselors for the school are JoEllen Berndt, Upper Elementary School; Gina Veo, Eagle Center High School Counselor; Jamie O’Neal, Junior High School Counselor; and Suzanne Eagle Staff, High School Social Worker,” said Blue Earth.

Amber Woitalla is in her second year at Dupree and works with the elementary students, and according to Peacock, Timber Lake added a second counseling position to their staff about the same time as Dupree, showing that while there are schools who have cut back on counselor positions because of funding issues, others are doing all they can to add counselors in an effort to help kids at their respective schools.

Students are constantly experiencing changes through school and their home lives, and counselors play a central role in those transitions. Remember to share your appreciation of the counselors who work so hard in so many different ways to assist students as they grow from youth to adult in our public and private educational systems.

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