School Counselors and Students: A Necessary Therapy Session

At first glance, school counselors have a very straightforward goal: to offer academic and emotional support to their students during high school. This includes handling course requests, writing the Secondary School Recommendation (SSR) for colleges, and checking up on their students’ mental states and home situations. School counselor Undine Guthrie summarizes this, saying, “The guidance office is a place where you can go to get tons of information to help you achieve whatever you need to accomplish.”

Yet the counseling department at Stuyvesant might not fully support all students. Only 41 percent of Stuyvesant students surveyed reported that their school counselor was helpful in terms of emotional support. This is despite the counseling department’s attempts at being more proactive and encouraging their students to come to them for guidance. For instance, counselors have mandatory meetings with their respective homerooms or meetings with small groups of students during freshman year. The problem is that these mandatory meetings with school counselors are usually not individualized, instead addressing a freshman homeroom or a group of students as a whole.

Besides these prearranged meetings, counselors also face the issue of not always being physically in their office. In order to remedy this, the counseling office implemented a “buddy system,” which allows students to visit a different school counselor and talk to them if their school counselor is unavailable at the time.

The “buddy system,” however, overlooks the connection and familiarity all students should ideally have with their school counselors. The system is problematic for some students because they may be uncomfortable to talk about their personal and academic matters with another adult, especially one that they do not have a personal connection with. Junior Maya Furusho notes, “ I feel like it’s not the same when you talk to a school counselor that’s not your own.” This becomes an issue when a student has a personal issue and needs counseling, but does not feel comfortable talking to a school counselor.

In light of some of these shortcomings with a program that has the potential to help so many students, it’s clear that the counseling department needs to implement more concrete and uniform measures in order to help students feel more comfortable around school counselors. All freshmen should have at least one mandatory one-on-one meeting scheduled with their school counselor. An individual meeting can ensure that school counselors have a chance to break the ice with freshmen and check on their transition from middle school to high school.

Past that first individual meeting, the counseling department should implement an online system, similar to the one currently used by the college office, for making appointments with school counselors. This would make it easier for students to find a time to visit their own school counselors because school counselors can easily post and notify students when they are available in their office during school hours every day of the week online. Students would be able to schedule appointments based on their school counselor’s availability and provide their reason for visiting.

This system would be convenient for both students and school counselors. Compared to the current e-mail based system, an online system would be able to clearly indicate when school counselors will not be busy during the week. This would give foresight to school counselors about why students want to visit and holds school counselors accountable for creating and keeping appointments.

Once students arrive for their scheduled meeting, counselors should also take the initiative of making their offices a welcoming place. When asked about factors that deterred her from getting closer with her school counselor, Junior Camilla Cheng commented, “Sometimes my school counselor has people [upperclassmen] hanging around his room and I get nervous [...] I don’t know how to approach him.” School counselors need to be able to adapt for shyer students and make themselves more approachable.

In order to make themselves more approachable, school counselors need to make sure that their offices are inviting by asking upperclassmen to hang out outside their offices in the counseling suite. This prevents upperclassmen from deterring students to visit their school counselors, which should be done in private.

But ultimately, when it comes to improving the effectiveness of Stuyvesant’s guidance program, a part of the responsibility falls on the students’ shoulders. About 28 percent of surveyed Stuyvesant students reported that they visited another school counselor because they claimed that they knew their school counselor was unhelpful or had previous bad experiences with their school counselor. School counselor Paul Goldsman notes in an interview, “A lot of the things we do are intangible and can’t be seen and a lot of people think that we’re just doing nothing and sitting in front of a computer when in fact I can say with 100 percent certainty that that is not the case.”

Students must realize that school counselors do a lot of “behind the scenes” work, such as organizing the freshman seminars implemented this year by the counseling department as a way to help freshmen with their transition into Stuy. It’s imperative that they are as open as they can be with their students about what they can do to make sure that their students can get all the information they need or want.

Underclassmen especially should take advantage of the new Big Sib program this year, which requires Big Sibs to meet with their Little Sibs’ counselor and offer helpful information on individual students to the school counselor and encourage students to visit their school counselor more often.

The guidance system is far from perfect. But as Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services Casey Pedrick noted in an interview, “We [school counselors] would really love it if the students could come in and introduce themselves to their school counselor. You can just come and say hi or come and talk to us and ask us and it can be positive, negative, a crisis, a high five, or a hug.”