"Guidance" Counselor

The first few days of school have been a whirlwind, but I wouldn't trade a minute of it! I love my job and am grateful that I have the opportunity to work with high school students. My mentor has been amazing; sending emails to check in on me and including me in on the important stuff (504s, At Risk students, etc).

Something I'm struggling with at my school is the term "guidance counselor". Granted, this may be partially my fault as I have not addressed my staff head on. I am constantly introduced as the new guidance counselor, and my office door still says "guidance". I did however have a chance to talk with the counseling secretary and have her change the transcript request form to "school counselor", and she seems to be on board with the change. Baby steps, right? I have a feeling that if I address my staff, they will be really open to the change. I've been told multiple times that they don't envy the amount of work that goes into being the counselor, and think I am doing a fantastic job.

The g-word is the least of my worries though. It seems like a lot of counseling duties are happening outside of the counseling office. I won't go into any details, but right now my plan is to slowly "take back" some of these duties. Again, the counseling secretary is amazing and is all about helping me take the steps to do this.

Things are finally slowing down enough with scheduling that I am hoping to have more time to focus on more counseling related things. I am currently working on a bulletin board for the seniors. It is tradition for the seniors to hang their senior pictures up in the counseling office, so I decided to make a list of every senior and hang it up on the bulletin board. My plan is to write what college/job/military/etc each student is attending after they've been accepted and then hopefully by the end of the year I will have a good idea of where everyone is going! I will post a picture once it's finished.

I feel very fortunate to have the support I do, and I know this journey is only going to get better.

Updates to the office

As it turns out, high school students are kind of nosey. I found out the hard way that they like to snoop, which is why I decided to rearranged my office. Originally I didn't want my desk to be a barrier between the students and I. However, I could be simultaneously working on multiple transcripts at a time and all it could take is a student or parent seeing some classified information. 

I also like this set up better because before there really wasn't a good place for my chairs where the student could see my computer if I needed them too. This works a lot better. 

I'd love to update more (and I will!) but I just wanted to do a quick update on my office :)