Information on high School Counselors

Essay by SwilliamsonUniversity, Bachelor's October 2006

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There is a position within the school systems that is titled school counselor. When many people hear the title school counselor, they automatically think of when they were in high school (or possibly middle school) and their counselor assisted them with their class schedules and possibly even helped with their college application process. But if society only knew what a school counselor really does. There are so many "behind the scenes" tasks that a counselor must do and school counselors are not only at the high school and middle school level; elementary schools have counselors as well. All of this was made very clear with classroom visitors Clara Cho-Hayshigwa, a elementary school counselor; Nancy Regas, a high school counselor at Patrick Henry High; Greg Child, a former middle school and elementary school counselor currently working with Poway Unified as Crisis Response and Intervention; and lastly Ileen Akers, the head counselor at Marshall Middle School.

There are many duties a counselor partakes in on a daily basis. Some of the task very from elementary to secondary level, but for the most part, the days is full of busy work and situations that have to be resolved. Clara Cho-Hayshigwa mentioned that her number one priority while at work is to work with the students. After the students comes consultations with the teachers, following the teachers is working with the parents to get collaboration for the student's success. Greg Child found his work to be broken into a percentage. He said that coordinating, which includes creating the master schedule, standardize testing meetings and conducting of the tests, having a lot of responsibility and no authority to make decisions within the school and for the students, takes up eighty percent of his time. Greg feels that consulting takes up about fifteen percent...