Editorials

An essential job

Mar 1, 2007 3:14 PM

Most kids in the school system are good kids with the normal problems of growing up. But there are also, unfortunately, a too many youngsters who suffer because of enormous strife in their personal lives. They need help and where can they get it? In some schools, if they are lucky, they find a guidance counselor like Laurie Bernstein, who is profiled on pages 24 and 25 of this issue. In all too many schools, there either is no guidance counselor or the counselor is so overburdened that there is precious little time to help troubled youngsters.

There are about 2,700 guidance counselors in the city’s school system. There are about 1.1 million students. That comes out to some 400 students per counselor, a ridiculous workload, and even that figure is misleading. Some counselors do only college admissions counseling, others are mandated Related Service Providers. That leaves even fewer counselors to work with kids who have serious problems.

Do you think there might be a connection between the city’s dropout rate and the number of troubled, at-risk students who have not received the counseling they need?

That kind of logic, however, is not the forte of many New York City school administrators. There was a time when every district had a supervisor of guidance who saw to it that the counselors got information, advice and support. These supervisors were eliminated five years ago when the first Klein reorganization went into effect.

Today, counselors get neither support nor professional development. And often they don’t get the respect of their principals, who try to pull them off to do other work. One guidance counselor recently heard of a principal who told parents that if his school becomes an empowerment school he will fire all the guidance counselors and let his APs do their work.

What is urgently needed is a complete rethinking on the part of Tweed about how essential guidance counselors are. There should be more of them and in every school. There should be a guidance program as part of the regular curriculum with classes on such issues as bullying, conflict resolution, anger management, peer mediation and immigrant assimilation. And the presence of guidance counselors and such a program should be mandated, not left to the discretion of principals.

As Laurie Bernstein noted: “Guidance counselors … functioning as mental health counselors, [run] in every direction to try to meet the needs of staff members, families and, of course, our students … A typical day can involve any number of crisis interventions from getting a child to a hospital that has been expressing suicidal thoughts to waiting until 5 or 6 at night for the city’s child welfare agency to come help a child we suspect is being abused.”

The role guidance counselors perform in our schools is absolutely essential. They should have Tweed’s and every principal’s full support.