“Perceived Roles”

With only my limited exposure to guidance counselors, I probably have a very outdated perception of what their role is. As a high school student “once upon a time” myself, their role was mostly that of registering us for our next set of classes if we needed it. They were there to offer advice if we were not sure of what classes we needed in order to graduate on time. Most of the time, I knew what I needed and just registered for classes myself. A minor role that our counselor played (once upon a time) was to help those students that had personal problems that maybe made it into the school setting.  We never saw our counselor who was always behind closed doors or at meetings.  What they did exactly was a mystery. My most recent experience as a new teacher with guidance counselors and their role had not changed much. At the first school I taught at, I again never saw them and yes, assumed that they were busy registering students for classes and counseling behavior issues thrown their way on occasion.  I did not know their names and rarely saw them in their offices. I did learn that they were very busy with testing and graduation issues. But again, it was a mystery to me exactly what they did.  I heard many teachers complain that counselors were out of touch and just put the students that had no career goals in classes that had room for them regardless of whether the student wanted to be there or not. This was especially true of CTE classes.  I must add at this point that in my new school which is much smaller and has only one counselor that she has a multitude of responsibilities much like we do as teachers! I know her name and she is very approachable and helpful to me when I have issues I need help with regarding my students.  She deals with not only registration of classes but all the other things that come up that include emotional, behavioral and education issues to name a few!