Sponsored by the American School Counselor Association, National School Counseling Week, (NSCW)Â highlights the tremendous impact that school counselors have in helping students achieve school success and plan for a career. It is always celebrated during the first full week in February.
HCPS takes this week to honor, celebrate, and thank the 35 school counselors within our District who play pivotal and skilled roles in supporting students from kindergarten through high school.
Each day we are featuring one of our school counselors as they share a few timely and relevant topics: mental health, student attendance, crisis, and this year’s NSCW theme, “School Counselors: Helping Students Dream Big.”
Student Attendance with Anne Dwigans, a school counselor at Hillandale Elementary:
How do school counselors work with administrators, parents, and teachers to implement counseling programs that focus on improving student attendance?
“Student attendance is an area that involves all hands on deck. The interconnected work and communication between counselors, administrators, families, teachers, school social workers, and school support staff are essential to monitoring and improving student attendance. Counselors play an important role in helping discover what barriers exist to attendance for individual students and addressing those barriers through problem-solving or individualized support. This work can involve working with students on specific goals like: building connections to school, emotional awareness and management, and social skills. Counselors also work with families on resources and strategies to use at home and school staff on strategies to implement in classrooms that support students’ well-being, needs, and foster engagement.”
What incentives, programs or tools are you using to encourage/promote, or reward regular attendance?
“There are a variety of approaches to encourage strong school attendance. Some of these can help foster a school-wide awareness of attendance – like bulletin boards and school-wide attendance challenges where the school sets a goal for attendance and tracks that goal. A fun event like spirit days and dress up days are a way to celebrate the school meeting our attendance goal! Individual classrooms can be celebrated for their strong attendance rate or for improving their attendance rates. Most of all, attendance takes dedicated work from school staff to have procedures for reaching out to families when students are absent and checking in regularly on attendance data to make sure we are supporting students and families in building strong attendance. Our interdisciplinary team meets regularly to ensure we are each sharing a part in helping our students be successful in attending school and setting them up for a bright future.”
