target the parents of incoming students. The counselor for this class
would make a presentation on how parents could help students deal
with the transition from middle to high school.- Finally, counselors would post their schedules on their office doors so
all staff could see they were working the full day, except for a lunch
period when they could relax and read a newspaper.
Counselors and the teachers began to work together. Students had
greater access to support services. As teachers became more adept at
spotting potential student problems, counselors could work with students
to prevent problems from reaching the crisis stage. School ambience im-
proved. Over time, Principal Thelen added a fifth counselor, whose full-
time job was college counseling, beginning with classroom sessions in the
sophomore year. As budgets improved, class sizes were reduced, leading
to an overall reduction in enrollment (as more classes were reduced to
twenty-five from thirty-four, the number of students the school could ac-
commodate decreased). He soon had a 325:1 student-to-counselor ratio.
Along with all the preceding came the training of new counselors. Mr.
Thelen had no counseling background so most of this was left to the assis-
tant principal of pupil personnel services and the experienced counselors.
However, new counselors were expected to attend the new teacher work-
shops he conducted. Prior to the mid-1980s, almost all guidance counsel-
ors began as classroom teachers. As the requirements for counseling cer-
tification become more stringent, fewer classroom teachers chose this as
the next step in their careers. More and more, counselors were graduates
of guidance certification programs and had never worked as classroom
teachers. Counselors are, by definition, advocates for children; however,
counselors who have never been in a classroom do not understand the
pressures of dealing with five classes and over 125 students a day.
New counselors needed to hear what new teachers faced so they could
empathize with teachers as well as students. They also could help train
new staff by providing insights into adolescent psychology that went be-
yond the one or two undergraduate courses most teachers were required
to take.
Mr. Thelen also made it a practice to observe counselors, just as he
observed teachers. Many school leaders with no guidance background
are reluctant to do this, particularly as one-on-one counseling sessions
148 Chapter 11