North Mason schools approve counseling plan

Kirk Boxleitner | Oct 06, 20220

During the North Mason School Board’s Sept. 15 meeting, high school counselor Rebecca Roberts spoke about the work being done for the Comprehensive School Counseling Plan before Board Director Laura Boad moved to approve the plan as presented.

According to Roberts, the American School Counseling Association has a model they’ve published for more than a decade outlining the best practices in counseling.

“School counseling has shifted, in the last decade or two, from being very individualized (to) taking a schoolwide, data-driven approach to influencing and affecting the whole school system,” Roberts said. “We still meet with students one-on-one, but we also examine schoolwide data, which informs our practice, (as well as programs and) groups we implement, so we can affect a larger number of students in a smaller amount of time.”

Senate Bill 5030 requires that school districts outline a comprehensive school counseling program by the beginning of this school year.

“That’s what we worked on all last year as a district team,” Roberts said, crediting counselors with putting “all the information we gathered into this document you’re looking at.”

Superintendent Dana Rosenbach said the draft plan and the assessment that the group developed includes “where we are in North Mason, and where the holes are,” as far as “places we need to address.”

Rosenbach cautioned “it’s not a complete, final product” because “some areas are much more filled out.

“We’ve been able to be really deliberate in addressing what was in the assessment,” while counselors and principals have been able to consider, in Rosenbach’s words, “This is what we know we can do this year.”

School counselors “intuitively knew so many things they’d like to see” done differently, and “going through this assessment really helped us pinpoint changes that needed to happen, to best serve kids in the world we live in today, with the social, emotional (and) learning needs our students have,” according to Rosenbach.

By applying data in different ways, Rosenbach said she believes counselors have found more effective methods of tracking “how they’re using their time supporting kids,” to focus more on what data they have and what resources they need to meet student needs.

Roberts confirmed that secondary counselors “now have a tool that tracks, very comprehensively, how we’re spending our time,” and while “it does take time to input things, the more we do it, the more efficient it will be.”

By keeping track of how many conversations counselors are able to have with students, Roberts hopes to discover what works and what doesn’t.

Rosenbach said she also hopes to identify how to distribute resources better, and which collateral duties counselors are performing.

District 5 Director Arla Shephard Bull asked whether any suicide prevention work was being done locally to coincide with Suicide Prevention Month.

“That looks different at every building,” Roberts said, explaining how the elementary and middle school grades had a “pretty well-working system” of counselors providing lessons and outlines to teachers, who in turn presented those materials, with counselors standing by to support teachers if they needed help.

“We don’t have something like that at the high school yet,” Roberts said. “It has been on my priority list for the last two years.”

Roberts recently adopted a template provided by Mason County that she hopes to implement shortly, pending administrative approval, by further developing the district’s existing partnership with Peninsula Community Health Services “because for just the two high school counselors to do this in homerooms, it would take months to get to all of them.”

Roberts said Peninsula Community Health Services is coping with staffing shortfalls, but it’s had conversations with the district about how to “hit every building” with basics such as “what is suicide prevention, what to do, how to report it, how to notice it if your friend is struggling, or what to do with that information.”