Stop Counselor Overload

by Kevin

Guidance counselors are essential to students. They play a major role in deciding a student's future. Guidance counselors are supposed to be there to counsel students. They are also supposed to be there to help students get their credits straight so that they may be able to attend college. However, this does not always happen.

In certain cases, students do not get the support they need at all. Last year at Anacostia SHS we had a shortage of guidance counselors. We had one guidance counselor to support about 900 students. Half of the time he was too busy to help some of the students who really needed his assistance. This made people feel that their problems were not as important to him as others. Our counselor was responsible for everything in our school.

 

In addition to counseling, he did hall monitor duty and he sometimes did cafeteria duty. This was confusing when I had to have my schedule changed because I needed him to change it. This situation not only affected the students, it also affected some of the teachers. One of the teachers was asked to do administrative duty in addition to his regular duties. As you can imagine this was very stressful to us all, especially when we found out that a teacher would have to change our schedules.

 

At the Youth Education Alliance, we currently have a campaign to get more guidance counselors for our schools. Counselors can have a lasting impact on how our life turns out. We need them to succeed. To go through school without them is to rob us of our learning experience.