District Counselors Share New Plans to Help Students Academically, Socially

Today’s students are dealing with more challenges than in the past, guidance counselor Jaci Owens told the Brecksville-Broadview Heights Board of Education on Monday.

The counselors see students who are abusing substances or dealing with cyber bullying. They help students with their classwork, finding ways to fill in the gaps for those who might be struggling.

And they’re doing all that with fewer resources, Owens said—each counselor might be working with 350 to 700 students.

To address all of that, the director of curriculum and instruction and the district’s counselors came together to create a revised course of study for K-12 school counseling.

One of the new components of the plan is a district-wide program that will focus on bullying, Owens said.

“There is a big issue within our district with bullying,” she added.

The program will teach students and staff how to recognize bullying and what to do if they see it happening. At the high school level, Owens said this bullying is less physical and more emotional. It can take the form of cyber bullying or “relational aggression,” where students might act like a friend one day but not the next.

Board member Alan Scheufler commented on how much counseling has changed since he and the other board members were in school. Today’s counselors aren’t waiting in their offices down the hall, he said; they’re in the classroom. They’re “proactive” in spotting and solving problems.

“The job of counseling truly has changed dramatically,” said Superintendent Scot Prebles. The counselors presented an overview of the curriculum to the board members during at the district’s , and Prebles said he hopes the board will vote on the curriculum at its meeting in December.

The proposed curriculum includes consistent language and messages from kindergarten up through 12th grade. Prebles said that he liked knowing the counselors at all levels worked together to create the new document and talked about what was happening at each level.

The program is comprehensive—standards are divided into academic, career and social/personal “domains,” with clearly defined skills associated with each standard. For example, in the 6th to 8th grade range, one of the personal/social standards for students would be to set goals and take steps to reach them. A skill associated with that standard would be whether a student could identify alternative routes to achieving his or her goal.

And there are also suggested age-appropriate activities, much like an academic curriculum.