Instead of students switching their guidance counselor after two years, students will now have the same counselor for all four years at the high school due to the restructuring of the guidance department.
With guidance counselor Dan Barber retiring last year, the guidance department shrunk from eight counselors to seven.
“For the last couple years, we’ve been talking about restructuring guidance,” guidance counselor Dan Glatts said, “so [with Barber not being replaced] we said, this is the time to do that.”
Originally, the eight counselors were divided into two teams: ninth-tenth-grade guidance counselors and eleventh-twelfth-grade guidance counselors.
This meant that after their first two years at the high school, students would switch their counselors and go into their junior year with a new counselor.
“Now [six of us counselors] are ninth through twelfth grade,” guidance counselor Nickole Trout said, “so we get students in ninth grade and we keep them on our caseload all the way through [high school].”
According to guidance counselor Bryan McKeever, the new structure will help students avoid “ambiguity” about who their counselors.
McKeever also said that change allows counselors to “build better connections” with their students.
“Meeting with all grades, for us as a department, and then [students] knowing that we’ll keep them for the length of time that they’re in this school, I think, is the biggest benefit,” McKeever said.
Similarly, Glatts found that when researching and talking to other schools, this structure best fit with their main goal to “build relationships with kids” to allow the counselors “to be more helpful and supportive.”
“We felt that the best way to establish a relationship, and keep the relationship with the kid, is to have them for four years instead of two and two,” Glatts said.
Trout believes that this new structure will be beneficial for students and parents in the long run.
“I think we’ll see the benefit in a few years when the current freshmen become juniors and seniors,” Trout said. “[As guidance counselors, we] are going to know them so well and they’re going to know us, and I think we will definitely be a better support for them and their families.”
Along with this, guidance counselor Tom Overberger is now located in the college center, which is to the left of the new student center, as a guidance counselor for all GIEP students and a college counselor for students looking into post-secondary education.
“Students will be able to utilize me as they start planning post-secondary stuff,” Overberger said. “So whether it’s college, trade school, military, whatever they choose to do, they can ask [me] questions.”
In his new position, Overberger hosts college prep sessions as well as personal meetings to best benefit the students.
The other guidance counselors have found Overberger’s new role to be helpful in allowing them to meet with more students than they have been able to in the past.
“I think having Mr. Overberger in that role allows him to specialize and take a lot of things off our plate, [which] allows us to see more students,” McKeever said.
