K-12 Guidance Counselor
She was planning to be an English teacher, but a college professor derailed that goal, so she shifted toward another career and eventually circled back to education as a school counselor.
SC was born in suburban Philadelphia, the 6th of 13 children. Her father was a military veteran of WW2 who was involved in Naval combat operations in the Pacific. Upon discharge, he worked for a meat packaging company and due to his daily hard work, was promoted to management positions as Foreman and eventually Superintendent.
PARENTS’ STRONG WORK ETHICS SET A POSITIVE EXAMPLE
Her father’s work ethic was confirmed in a telephone call when SC was an adult, employed full-time but home for a day with the flu. She telephoned her father, then retired, to see how his day was going. He was surprised to hear from her since he knew it was a workday and told her that if she was well enough to call him, she should immediately return to her employment.
Her mother’s work ethic was the same. Prohibited by SC’s grandfather from attending college “because I was a girl!” SC’s mother informed her daughters early on that they must graduate from college “in order to be able to live your dream” with no option to decline. Her brothers could choose to attend college or take up a trade and if so, be the best tradesman you can be!
When the youngest of SC’s siblings didn’t require her mother’s full-time attention, her mother enrolled in a community college toward earning her certification to teach in early child development programs, earning her college degree the same year as SC earned her college degree.
A LEADER AND SUPPORTIVE LISTENER EARLY ON
Looking back as early as elementary school days, SC had been a “listener” who came to be relied on by her friends for advice and emotional support.
During high school, SC served on Student Council and as a Class Officer. By then, SC realized that she wanted to be involved in education, specifically as an English teacher. These early, positive school experiences were invaluable later while chairing the ‘Guidance’ department (now titled ‘Counseling’ Dept) in a high school and subsequently serving as lead counselor within an elementary school.
THE FIRST CAREER ZIG-ZAG
SC chose a college which would provide an opportunity to pursue her teaching career path. She thought she was doing well within the English teaching curriculum until a professor told SC that she should pursue a different career. She disagreed while accepting his judgment and looked for another career opportunity – but in which direction to head?
Self-assessing her career interests, SC realized that in addition to being supportive of her friends and having served (during 7th and 8th grades) as a “helper” within the school nurse’s office to talk to fellow students while they were waiting for medical attention, studying psychology would be a perfect career fit, as trying to understand and assist others to resolve their problems had been SC’s core interest for many years.
THE SECOND CAREER ZIG-ZAG
While pursuing her degree in psychology, SC participated in an internship within a high school guidance counselor’s office. Instantly, she knew this was how she would adopt a career to help others. So, after completing her college courses majoring in psychology, SC returned to school to obtain her Masters in Counseling degree, which certified her for counseling at the high school level.
EXPANDING EXPERTISE TO BETTER SERVE YOUR CLIENTS
Thereafter, SC took every opportunity to expand her knowledge of how to counsel her students, based on their needs. Thus, she utilized two separate teaching sabbaticals to obtain her certification for counseling within elementary schools and for autism, by then a significantly increasing issue.
Additional training was pursued by SC to gain professional knowledge to better serve her students with drug and alcohol issues and to provide knowledgeable insight into other current issues and concerns.
SC’s counseling career path zig-zagged within itself from 15 years at the high school level, followed by 20 years at the elementary school level, while sometimes concurrently teaching Masters’ level courses at a nearby college to share her craft of school counseling.
COPING WITH DOUBT OF YOUR ABILITIY IS NORMAL
Considering the above career path, mostly zig-zagging straight ahead by listening to others to supportively help them resolve their issues, who would have guessed that SC had initial doubts about pursuing her counseling career? But she did. The job was everything she wanted to do but……… would she be good enough? Might she listen but offer the wrong advice?
As the hard-working daughter of hard-working parents, SC had always wanted to be self-supporting; as soon as she was able to earn money, she wanted to be able to cover some of her own expenses since there were so many other mouths to feed under her family’s roof. So, SC had long been a part-time waitress, earning more in two nights’ work than she could earn in a week as an entry level guidance counselor. Should she give up her secure and well compensated waitress employment for a job in which she had some doubts as to whether she could succeed and if successful, earn less money? What to do?
Hard working SC’s answer: do both, at least for a while, to maintain her financial security while pursuing her passion. So, SC determined work even harder, one step at a time and see what happens!
HARD WORK SECURES A LONG CAREER
What happened: SC so loved helping her students that she used some of her personal, off-duty, evening, and weekend time to take care of many of her “paper pushing” responsibilities (e.g., arranging class schedules, preparing recommendations, editing students’ college essays) so that she could devote more school daytime to personal interaction with her students.
The result: SC’s administrators recognized her common sense and dedication, which both secured her employment as a school counselor and earned her the freedom to work with less and less management supervision.
MEETING CHALLENGES
No job working with people can be fun and positive all the time. A counselor faces many significant challenging moments in the lives of the students with whom the counselor interacts; the counselor cannot ignore the challenges but instead, must face them and help the students through them.
The most serious challenge involves the death of a student (which affects the entire school) or death within a student’s family. Accordingly, SC took a course on death and grieving to assist her students through such a crisis.
Less serious but more continuous challenges involved working with administrators (the more they trust you the less they need to be involved) and with co-workers who might, from time to time, fail to provide timely information upon which the counselor relies to complete certain tasks. Thus, a counselor must learn to work with others in a diplomatic way to understand their goals while completing the counselor’s goals in an efficient and quality way.
LEARNING IS CONTINUOUS
Along SC’s career path, her continuous learning was often operating on three separate, concurrent levels: (1) investing her personal time to attend courses to provide additional information to meet the needs of her students; (2) learning from her students; and (3) teaching others – informally among her less experienced colleagues and formally within a Masters in Counseling program.
SC’s career satisfaction has also been continuous – to the benefit of her many counseled students over the years.
FORMAL REQUIREMENTS TO SERVE AS A SCHOOL COUNSELOR
Editor’s note – Decades before current times, a teacher could be informally designated “Guidance Counselor’ but in recent times, a Master’s degree in counseling is now required to serve as a ‘School Counselor’.
Three of the career stories within this collection demonstrate the potential for a counselor to provide ‘bad’ advice to a student (e.g. “You’re not college material” or “Don’t bother applying to colleges with rigorous admission standards” or “Your aptitude test best qualifies you to be a janitor”), based on that counselor’s lack of professional judgment and formal education in counseling, which was more likely until a Master’s degree in counseling became required. Those three stories, involving improper counselor’s advice, occurred between 1960 and 2000:
- DR. OF OBSTETRICS / GYNECOLOGY (see Healthcare & Medicine – OB / GYN)
- REAL ESTATE – BROKER (see Real Estate – Business Owner – Broker)
- VETERINARIAN (see Animal Care – Veterinarian) – here, the strong advice was offered by a college professor, untrained in counseling.
Fortunately for current students receiving advice from school counselors, there are now formal requirements to become certified / licensed as a School Counselor:
- Earn a Bachelor’s degree, usually with courses focusing on behavioral science, social science or education
- Earn a Master’s degree in school counseling
- Complete a graduate internship experience for certification / licensing requirements of the school district
- Pass required examinations for certification / licensing
- Continue your counseling education and stay up to date on counseling trends and changes
Of course, no education degree prevents a counselor offering uninformed, premature, and incorrect advice without some understanding of a student’s perceived strengths, abilities, and interests. Ultimately, the student and his or her parents will make final decisions based upon a counselor’s advice, which is now more likely to be accurate and helpful due to modern counselor education.
