Guidance Department

Lead Counselor for Guidance Jacqueline Browne will be retiring this December, which will deal a huge blow to the Guidance Department and the student body as a whole.

Due to budget cuts, a position that encompasses the administrative tasks of both the Guidance Department and the Career Center will be created.

However, the Career Center and the Guidance Department have fundamentally different responsibilities and should be seen as two separate entities. The former Career Center Coordinator, Janet Gottesman, was in charge of creating job opportunities for students, coordinating college visits to the school and organizing community service opportunities.  Browne meets with new families, gives them tours of the school and processes all accommodation forms for the College Board and ACT. She also has organizational duties, including coordinating the administration of all school-based SATs and ACTs.

In addition to all of this, she manages her caseload of roughly 95 students and even maintains the guidance website.

It takes a lot of time and effort for one to hold all of the responsibilities that Browne has. In fact, she said that she sometimes feels like she wears too many hats.

It is detrimental to combine her functions as Lead Counselor for Guidance with the managerial tasks of the Career Center into the new role of Director of College and Career Counseling. Counselors are currently evaluated by Deans Diane Lande and Adrian Mims, a task Browne had in previous years when she was the Coordinator of Pupil Support Services. The person hired in the new position will regain the responsibility on top of the responsibilities held by the Lead Counselor for Guidance and the Career Center Coordinator. Economically this might sound like the right choice, but this overextended position is set up for failure.

As caseloads continue to increase and many of the efforts of the Career Center are rolled into the Guidance Department, the student and their families will suffer. High school presents stress and challenges to all students and families, so the reduction of total staff members between these two important departments will lead to a correlated reduction in the quality of services provided by each of the individual departments.

The functions of the Career Center Coordinator and the Lead of Counselor for Guidance are different. Each organization should have a distinct leader, instead overwhelming one person with both jobs. The administration must reevaluate their plans for the restructuring of these departments to ensure student needs are met.