In this episode, I’m sharing my top ten strategies for school counselors to start the school year successfully. Whether you’re returning to a familiar school or stepping into a new one, these tips will help you build strong relationships, organize your counseling program, and set up a solid foundation for the year.

Episode Highlights:

• Build Relationships: Start the year by connecting with both returning and new staff and students. Building strong relationships is the key to effective counseling and creating a supportive school environment.
• Review and Update Your Counseling Program: Take time to review your counseling program to ensure it meets current student needs and aligns with school goals. This includes setting measurable goals, such as improving attendance.
• Set Up Your Office: Make your office a welcoming and organized space where students feel comfortable. Clear out old materials, refresh your resources, and create an environment that’s inviting but not overwhelming.
• Create an Organized Counseling Schedule: Develop a flexible yet structured schedule for your counseling sessions, including classroom lessons, small groups, and individual sessions. Remember to leave some white space for unexpected issues that may arise.
• Communicate Your Role: It’s crucial to educate staff, students, and parents about your role as a school counselor. Use brochures and open house events to explain what services you offer and how to access them.
• Plan Your SEL Curriculum: Outline your SEL topics for each month, aligning them with school-wide events and goals, like bullying prevention week, to provide consistent and relevant support to students.
• Participate in Professional Development: Stay on top of the latest counseling techniques and practices by engaging in ongoing professional development. This helps you keep up with the evolving needs of your students.

Links Mentioned:

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Carol: You're listening to the counselor chat podcast, a show for school counselors looking for easy to implement strategies, how to tips, collaboration, and a little spark of joy. I'm Carol Miller, your host. I'm a full time school counselor and the face behind counseling essentials. I'm all about creating simplified systems, data driven practices, and using creative approaches to engage students. If you're looking for a little inspiration to help you make a big impact on student growth and success, you're in the right place because we're better together. Ready to chat? Let's dive in.

Carol: Hi, everyone, it's Carol. Welcome back to another episode of Counselor chat. So glad that you're here with us today. And if you have been listening over the last several weeks, I shared my tips for really having the best school year that you can have. And the last four episodes were really a little series of just some helpful advice. Today, I thought we would still continue with get ready for back to school season. And I know that a lot of you have already started, but you have to remember, I'm in New York and we when this episode airs, we will just be starting our very first, probably our first day of school when this episode airs. And with that said, it's still very early in the school year, no matter, I think, when you have started this summer or this fall season, because I know that some of you, when you're starting back in August, it's almost like fall and August, even though the weather might be still pretty hot. But as we head back to school, I think there's some things that we really need to think about of what we should do right at the beginning of our school year. And I don't mean like the first day or two days or even the first week, but within that really that first semester of our school year. Because starting the school year really on the right foot is really crucial for us to really set the tone for a really successful year. And my wish for you this year is for you to all have the most successful year ever. So I'd really tried to come up with a kind of like a top ten of things that a school counselor should do to really start off their school year. The first, I think you could probably all guess it, is to really start building those relationships with your staff and your students. And whether you're a returnee like me or this is your very first position as a school counselor, it's really important to introduce yourself, reconnect with returning staff, introduce yourself to those that are new and really make a point to meet students now, my school, we don't really get a ton of kids that transfer in, but we do get kids that transfer in to us as a new school. And being that I'm in an elementary school, of course, every kindergartner is brand spanking new. So it's also important not only to introduce yourself to the staff, but to also meet with those new little pumpkins as well. Our connections, our relationships that we build are super important. And with a really solid relationship, we are going to really move mountains. We are going to make an impact. And it's building that team, because we shouldn't be working in isolation. We need to work as part of a team. Building those relationships right from the very start are. Is probably the most important thing that you can do. Number two is to really review and update your counseling program. We have been meeting as an. In my district, as an elementary school counseling department, there are a six, I want to say six element. I should know this by heart, but we have six elementary schools, and there are eleven of us elementary counselors throughout the buildings. And it's really important as we come together that we really talk about the things that our program really what we want to accomplish. We're looking at curriculum, how we want to really program our year. And even though we have different buildings and we're in different buildings and we have different groups of students in front of us, it's really important, or we feel like it's really important as a team to kind of have the same program. And when I'm talking about program, I'm really talking right now about curriculum and what we're going to be doing now, we at least want to have the same common topics as to what we're doing. So maybe in September, we're all going to be doing our introductions, but we've decided maybe we want to talk about values, because our values really determine who we are as a person. But when other people know our values and what's important to us, they can start to begin to empathize. When maybe we're having a bad day or they get to know us. Now, recently, I was part of a four day training for tier two circles. And if you're not familiar with circles, they are wonderful. I have several episodes on counselor chat about circles, but for tier two, you're really diving deeper into your community and trying to hash out any problems that are occurring. But with the circle training, the one thing that the trainer kept saying is, and I thought she was spot on, was when we don't know people or we don't know their story, we tend to make it up, and that's so true. So we really want to learn about a person's values, who they are, what they stand for, what's important to them, who they are as a person. Because when we can do that, we start to build empathy. And when we have empathy, we can solve a lot of problems. And it's really important not to make up other people's stories, but to hear firsthand from their mouth what their story is. Because sometimes when we make up our own stories about a person, we go right to the negative. But our perceptions can totally change if we know exactly what's going on in their lives. So as we're reviewing and updating our counseling program, we also want to make sure that we are looking at our school's goals and the new needs of our students. It's also really important to really set your goal for the year, your counseling goal. We have one major goal for our school building this year, and that is to really improve attendance, and that's our building goal. Of course, as a counseling goal, we want to help support that. We want to do some proactive things with students. And although it's attendance, and I'm not a big fan of having attendance as a counseling goal at the elementary level, because so much of attendance is out of our kids hands, it's all parent based. And when I'm providing interventions for a goal, I really want it to be direct student involvement. But sometimes that's not the case and we have to work with parents. So as we are talking about our counseling goal, we really went round and round. Did we use attendance as our counseling goal? Do we choose something different? And we decided that, yeah, we're going to use attendance as our counseling goal because we're coming. We have attendance letters that will be going out at certain intervals, and we've never really been consistent with that in the past. So this year, our building has really come up with some pretty good protocols as to what we're going to do when kids hit certain thresholds in attendance. So after three days, the teacher's going to call home. After another few days of attendance's absences, the counselor will call home, or one of our designated people, like maybe the nurse or our principal will call and we'll talk to parents. But we also decided as a counseling team to go in and do some classroom lessons focused around attendance and to have a parent contract about attendance. And we started thinking of all these things, as well as building community and how we're going to work with kids that maybe aren't coming to school because they're feeling victimized in some way, shape or form, or maybe there's some other parental problem that's kind of preventing them. And then we also talked about things like equity issues that are related to the counseling program. Like my point in the meeting was, well, we have a lot of kids that don't come on half days. And what are the reasons for that? Some of it is because our parents don't want to send their kid in for just a half day. But most of the ones that don't come to school are really our low economic background students. So I said, what if we had some sort of after school program so that it's still a full day and we make it kind of enticing for kids to come to school. So they come to school for half day, and then the second half of the day it's fun, and we have some fun activities and we pay people to do things with their kids that don't have a ride home or that something's a problem. And then we'll see if the district can maybe provide some busing. Now, I don't know if this is all going to happen, but these were some of the ideas that we talked about for our counseling goal and to kind of alleviate the problems that we're seeing with attendance. But it's really important, I think, to do that with your own program. What are the school's goals? What are the needs of the students to update materials or resources that you will need to talk about the things that you want to put together? Ask the questions of what can we do to make our school equitable for all students? And you need to once again review that and update it as a team. This should be with your administration and maybe the other stakeholders. Maybe you have a school building team that talks about these types of things and goals and things like that. Maybe ask to be a part of that team. So you definitely need to do that in the start of the school year. The third thing that you need to work on is really setting up your office. You really want to make sure that your office is as welcoming to all students as it possibly can be. Ensure that it's organized. Go through your resources, look through your files, get rid of stuff that's like ancient history. And I also like to really go through all of my books because I'll tell you, I got a lot of books, and sometimes I forget what they are. And so just flipping through them, I might think, oh, wow, I haven't used this in a while. Maybe I'm going to like tag that because this might be really great for a lesson later on. So go through what you have. Make sure that it's organized. Once again, I'm a big person about this. Look around at your pictures and your decor and the things that you have and make sure that it's not faded and worn out and not so pretty anymore. But don't overstimulate your office either, because too much can be too much for kids. So set up your office. You also want to really work on creating your counseling schedule. And this would be the fourth little thing to do. So you want to really make sure that you have your schedule for your classroom guidance lessons, your small groups, your individual counseling sessions. You want to be flexible, but you want to have that structure in place. I like to create a schedule basically a month at a time. I like to go in know when my teachers want me to come in for their, their lessons. And I do go in once a week, well, once every six days to all of my teachers, which brings me to about 13 lessons a week because I do have a co counselor, so she has half as well. So 13 lessons a week. And that's pretty, I want to say pretty doable. As you're establishing your counseling schedule, you really want to make sure that you have some white space in your calendar because things will come up. You don't want to have it scheduled too tightly. 13 classes is two to three lessons on a six day. A day, on a six day cycle. I think when you're creating your schedule, it's really important to kind of plan it out in a grid for the week with, I usually do half hour blocks at a time I put in when my lessons are going to be because those are kind of like my big rocks. I add in, I do have just a few, a handful, small handful of students that I see for IEP counseling. I put those students in there and then I know about how many groups I want to run because I do have a list of students that I've kept from last year. If you're brand spanking new, you probably won't be starting groups right at the beginning of the year, but you might want to know where those groups are going to fall into your schedule. And if you have any individual counseling sessions that you have to have, you want to make sure those are marked off, too. And I think you'll be able to see exactly how many periods in a day that you have. If you start blocking on a grid in half hour increments, you'll be able to say, wow, I have more time than I actually thought I did. Or I can do lessons every week, or, wow, four lessons a day is eating up most of my day. Maybe I need to back this off to every other week. Or maybe I can only do it once every three weeks or once every four weeks. So you really want to kind of create that visual of a schedule in advance. You also need to really communicate your role. And that's, I think, our number five things to do. You really want to educate the teachers, the students, the parents about your role as a school counselor. You want to clarify how you can support them and how they can reach out to you. I know I have some little brochures that I like to give, like the new staff members or have that open house that kind of explain what counseling services are, what we do in our day, how our services are structured and things like that. And if you have a referral process, what does your referral process look like? I do have a few forms that I use. I'm gonna drop a link to those in the show notes. It's kind of hard to explain it because they're kind of more visual than anything. So I think if you check out the show notes and you click on the link, you'll like what you say because I do really explain exactly what my role is. And I always say that you have to start with educating people first about your role before you can advocate about your role, because you can't advocate if they know absolutely nothing about what it is that you do or how you do your job. So you really have to start with educating people after that. You have to review your student data. You have to go over academic records, attendance, behavioral data from the previous year to really identify students who may need extra support. And even if your brand spanking new to a school building, reviewing last year's data is a really good place to start with trying to identify your kids. You can also ask the teachers for who they think might benefit from some of the services that you provide. So we're up to number seven, which is plan your SEL and your curriculum. You really need to have a plan of attack for your Sel lessons of how you're going to deliver them throughout the year. So if your school really celebrates bullying prevention week, so that in October you should have lessons that are really aligned around bullying prevention, so you really want to plan that out. And it doesn't have to be the exact lesson that you're going to do right at that moment in time. But you should have a plan in September. These are the topics I want to cover in October. This is what I'm going to cover in November, December, January, so on and so forth. Like I said, my counseling team in the district that I work with, this is what we've been spending some time on because we really want to make sure that we kind of align in terms of when we teach things because we do have kids that do move from one school building to another within our own district. And we want the kids, just like if they were in math or English or social studies, to have a really seamless transition even when it comes to sel lessons. So we want them, if they were studying bullying, that they're going to come to us and study bullying or vice versa. If they were with us studying emotional regulation, they're going to another school in our district and they're also going to be studying emotional regulation. So it's really important to plan and map that all out. It is a good idea to really establish a referral system. You want to make sure that there's a clear and efficient process for teachers and staff to refer students for your counseling services. I like to have paper and a Google Doc because some teachers like the old fashioned paper pencil. They like to see it, answer the questions and shove it in your mailbox. And others really like to have it on a Google Doc so they can just sit at their computer and fill it out when they're thinking about it at the moment. So. But you want to have some sort of referral system. This year our team is really trying hard to track how many referrals we had, how many lessons that we did, what types of indirect services we had, what types of tier one, tier two, tier three services that we're providing. We actually came up with a little Google Doc, a form, actually, I actually did it for our team this morning. And we're just once a week going to go in and say, how many lessons did we do, how many school wide programs did we run, how many emails to parents of teachers that we did? We do. And we're talking anything more than 15 minutes. We're counting as like a number one or two or, or as an instance, I should say. But you want to put all that together. Number nine of things to do is to participate in professional development because school counseling is ever changing. I have been doing this for a really long time, more than three decades, and from when I started until now, things are really different. But you have to kind of keep up with the times so participating in professional development is really important. Go to your state association if you want to wait for the summer conference. We do have a summer counselor conference every year. There's ASCA. There's a lot of ways to get your PDA, but PD is important. And last but not least, number ten, set personal and professional goals. You want to reflect on your goals for the year, both in terms of maybe professional development and the impact you want to have on your school community. Then you want to make sure that you create an action plan to achieve them. So, my friends, let's do a quick little recap. Set personal and professional goals. Participate in professional development. Start your referral system. Plan out your sel curriculum for the year. Review your student data, communicate your role. Remember, it's educating first, advocating second. Establish your counseling schedule, set up your office review and update your counseling program, and build the relationships with your staff and students. Anyway, I hope this was helpful. If there are things that you think that we should add, I really want to hear from you, and I think it's important that we share this stuff. We review it, and we really try to set ourselves up for the best year ever. I'm also going to drop a few extra links in the show notes, and one of them is going to be for the perks counseling program. Because as we're as I've shared about creating your sel curriculum, if you really are struggling with that, or you want something that's already done for you and you don't want to, you wish that there was a shortcut to creating those lesson plans. Perks has you covered. Whether it's individual counseling, small group, or classroom lessons, it has you covered. Plus it has the PD that you need. It has forms in there for data collection, has posters and bulletin boards and brochures to brag about your program or share what you do. It's all in there, so I'm going to drop a link for that as well. Whether you use perks or not, it's so important to just set yourself up for success. Like I said, if I've missed anything, I want you to let me know because we'll talk about it later and I'll share that on the podcast another time. In the meantime, I hope you have a fantastic week. And until next time, see you later. Bye for now.

Carol: Thanks for listening to today's episode of Counselor Chat. All of the links I talked about can be found in the show notes and@counselingessentials.org podcast. Be sure to hit, follow, or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And if you would be so kind to leave a review, I'd really appreciate it. Want to connect? Send me a DM on Facebook or Instagram at. Counseling essentials. Until next time. Can't wait till we chat. Bye for now.