BY OLIVIA VOLKERT

According to the Grady counseling department’s mission statement on the website, “Guidance and counseling are vital and integral components of the educational program of Henry W. Grady High School that support the personal, social and educational career development of all students.”

While I fully agree with this mission statement, I feel as though Grady is not doing everything it can to stick to it.

Although our counselors are always more than willing to help all students, they are not able to do so in a very personalized way when our student-to-counselor ratio is approximately 400 to 1.  I think a guidance counselor’s job should be to provide individualized academic guidance to students as well as emotional and social guidance with respect to their high school career.

It is this latter function where our current system is failing. Students rarely interact with their counselors. I know who my counselor is, but our relationship ends there. Only when I have a scheduling issue in the first few weeks of the school year do I ever actually talk to her. And when the Governor’s Honors Program application season rolls around, she is expected to handle each student’s application and endorse nearly 100 students in their various areas of nomination, many of whom she hardly knows at all. Even though there is a graduation coach for the senior class, many seniors hardly utilize her services.

But not all schools have such a disconnected process. For example, at Westminster, counselors interact with their charges not only through individual counseling, but also small group gatherings and larger group seminars. At Woodward Academy, every student meets with his or her guidance counselor periodically so the counselor can track the student’s growth until graduation. This allows the student and counselor to develop a good rapport, which means better recommendations for college, jobs and scholarships.

Of course, with a lot more funding from each family and a much higher counselor-to-student ratio, the aforementioned private schools are able to provide a great deal of one-on-one support for each student. Public schools, however, can and sometimes do provide more direct relationships between the counselors and counseled also. For example, at North Atlanta High School, students sit down with their counselors to plan out their schedule and set out certain goals for the year.

The role of counselors and the system in which they counsel students should be modified to be more personal and college-prep oriented. Perhaps the administration could provide more opportunities for the counselors to get to know their assigned students both in and after school. This could include regular or semi-regular private meetings with students, small-group meetings or a personal advisor system. If we could find a way for administrators to allow students to get to know their counselors a bit more, the guidance department could then realize its mission statement in full to the benefit of all Grady students.