Spring Branch ISD Featured News

 

There are more the 21,000 schools in Texas. This year, only 76 have won the CREST (Counselors Reinforcing Excellence in Texas) award from the Texas School Counselor Association.

The counseling group at Northbrook Middle School recently learned their team is one of the 76 CREST award winners. The stringent requirements for the award were met by restructuring their time, space and purpose to better provide solutions-focused, goal-oriented services for their students.

The NBMS student support team consists of two professional school counselors, a social/emotional learning (SEL) support teacher, a Communities in Schools (CIS) students support manager, and a paraprofessional employee.

Thanks to the buy-in of school principal, Sarah Guerrero, non-counseling duties were reduced to provide more time for student support.

“We have more time now for proactive interventions,” Robin Lanehurst, NBMS counselor, said. “We get to be true counselors!”

“Our roles make more sense now,” Brian Jaffe, SEL support teacher, said. “The assistant principals are better equipped to make academic and discipline decisions, and we have more time to focus on SEL goals.”

In order to create as many interactions with students as possible, and thus build relationships and trust, the award-winning team has implemented:

• Guidance lessons on topics that bubbled up in a needs-assessment survey taken by the students at the beginning of the school year. Pre- and post-assessments of the lessons showed at least a 50% increase in the number of students understanding of lesson topics such as self-regulation, coping skills, goal setting and conflict resolution.

• Counselor Corner in the lunchroom, to increase the team members’ visibility with students, and provide extra activities that align with the guidance lessons.

• Counselors Advisory Council, comprised of teachers, students, parents, and community partners, meets to review the NBMS comprehensive school counseling programming.

• Center for Student Support, where students can self-select to go to participate in relationship-building activities during lunch, and request connection time with the counseling team, whose offices are located nearby.

• Staff development for teachers about the effects of trauma on teaching and learning, and theories of change.

• Lunch workshops on T-2-4 topics requested by students in a needs-assessment survey, such as choosing an endorsement, how to use Naviance (a college and career planning resource), understanding high school credits, options after high school, and more.

Through Professional Learning Communities (PLC) groups, and one-on-one meetings with each student at least twice a year, the team has analyzed data and set counseling goals for every student at NBMS.

The results speak for themselves: In the first semester, more than 200 NBMS students chose to submit “I need to talk” requests to the counselors. Incidents of students in crisis mode have dramatically dropped (half as many as at this time one year ago) since the implementation of the comprehensive counseling program.

Although the counseling team won the CREST award, the real winners are the students at NBMS. Congratulations to all.

Submitted by Becky Wuerth, SBISD Communications
Becky.wuerth@springbranchisd.com