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Long-form interviews and conversations from Mason County, Washington. Host Jeff Slakey sits down with local leaders, legislators, small business owners, and community voices for unhurried conversations about what's shaping the Hood Canal region — government, education, healthcare, the outdoors, and the people making a difference.
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Folks, I got a great conversation now with a couple of folks who have been in and around the Shelton School District in the counseling capacity for many, many years. It's the worst bickies. It's newly retired and loving it, Brian.
Thank you. Suzy here at Choice and Cedar. And first off, good to talk with you guys.
Thank you. I was telling Brian that I remember him coming in when we were at the radio station downtown some 10, 12 years ago talking about Bordeaux and work that he was doing there. And you guys have been in the district for a long time in this counseling space.
And I think there's a lot of maybe misunderstanding about what a counselor does, not only for the students, but the staff support as well as the parental and family support. So I think this is just a good opportunity to talk about it, especially from an elementary and then a high school level and how it's changed even over the years. So Brian, you're newly retired, but you've done this for a long time.
Tell us a little bit about the background. Sure. I've been with Bordeaux now for 17 and a half years retired, as you had mentioned recently, and just really enjoyed the opportunity to work with the students, the staff, and the families.
And also more importantly, the support from the community over my many years. I think the role for the elementary school counselor has certainly evolved. I think certainly during the time when we had the pandemic, it did provide some opportunities for us to try to be as creative during a very unsettling time for many of us.
But I think overall, the role of the school counselor at the elementary is providing that connection for families as they start their educational careers with their children. And I think one of my experiences has been over the years is how incredibly dedicated our staff is to try to help families get comfortable with the opportunities that we're going to try to provide them. And then at the same time as the role of a counselor in terms of providing families, as I get to know them better, to provide them with the kinds of resources, whether that's through educational support or through resources within the community, mental health or food services or things that we can do to help make that transition as helpful as possible.
And Susie, what about here at the high school level? Well, I love the theme or the thread that gets woven that way and that the secondary level, it's all about supporting the student's launch and the family's experience in launching their student, which if you've ever launched a student from high school, it's terrifying and exciting and fun. So being able to be part of the team that supports a teenager making their own decisions as they leave high school and moving through high school is key. So like comprehensive school counselors are trained to support academic, personal, social, and career and college readiness K-12.
So that's all about like, who am I and what do I want to become? And then how do I do that? And who supports me to do that? And what's best for me in my life as I move through these chapters? And then I just, I mean, I say it all the time that we work for the students and the families, and we work in the schools with the schools. So a student needs to know and see us as their ally and their support. And so you two both also have an opportunity to get their, it's kind of, you know, the ins and outs, kind of the different paperworks that help, that can help support these folks in different ways at the elementary level, maybe being able to find opportunities for additional support outside of the schools, or at the end of the day, maybe additional food and comfort support, things like that.
So how does that all tie in to building that whole child, I guess, especially at the elementary? Well, at the elementary, we have an opportunity to do lots of assessments to get a better sense of where a student's strengths are. So just speaking with it from an academic lens, we have programs within the building and within the district that help support that. So we may have students that are in need of some additional reading support through our Title I program.
And then we also have opportunities to do some further assessments and to see maybe if they might need some specifically designed instruction through special ed. So my role is to try to help those families identify those areas and work with the teachers and our staff. From a social-emotional standpoint, it's also important for us as elementary counselors to, we do the social skills kinds of things.
We've been really involved with PBIS, which is a program that helps support developing programs within the school to help emphasize positive relationships with students and connections with the teachers, celebrating success that students have, identifying areas that we can do, working with the students and with the staff, and providing opportunities for students that see just a real connection with their teachers, connections with their friends, and then connections with the community at large. And so lots of positive celebrations in terms of helping students identify, making good choices, and then being able to work through problems at school through lots of different support programs. How is that different here between CHOICE and CDER, what folks may consider a non-traditional school model, and how much may be additional or just different types of support you do here? Yeah, I mean I think CHOICE and CDER are different, and we're both different than the larger traditional school.
So two different options for alternatives. CHOICE is an alternative program, they have an alternative waiver, they can have more fluid and flexibility in their scheduling. CDER is still a comprehensive high school, and yet we have a non-traditional way of approaching it.
It's a project-based school, we're part of this new tech network programming school, so everything is project-based, collaborative in nature, and in that means you have to learn how to be a co-worker. And like CDER itself stands for like collaboration and engagement, like deep engagement in the work itself. You don't have to like everybody, you do have to know how to like work with everybody, which any of us who have worked any place have had to do that.
Have a co-worker that you then find out what do I have in common with you, despite my first reactions, and look at that our community grows, and our engagement grows, and our agency is about how do I speak up for myself, and take up space in the room, and see my own skills in this place, and then grow new skills. And then diversity, like we're all very very different, and that's what makes us unique and reflective of our community. And then we look a lot about respect, we talk about respect all the time, it's a word that's just thrown around like coffee for me, like which I must have every day.
But it's also about like this deep respect for myself as a learner, and a community member, and reciprocity is the other piece of that R for us. So reciprocity is like I share what I have been given, and I give it back freely, and I make a community. Our school should reflect caring and supportive community.
We're also a high school, so people are growing and changing every day. We're good at it, and then we're better at it later, and then we keep working to teach each other how to do this. So I don't know, I think it's because we're smaller, we know each other, and we have courageous conversations to work through conflict, and learning how to do that is important for all of us.
There's, I think, and I might be wrong here, but one counselor for the school, so one per couple hundred students or something like that. So when you work on that ratio, do you do more of, you have your concepts of your social emotional, for example, that you take to the teaching staff, that then take it to the students, or over the course of 180 days, I mean, that's, how does that work out? Well, the prototypical model in the school is not what is suggested in the national model. So it's 250 to one is the recommendation, but if you look at our elementary schools, that's not true.
If you look at our middle schools, that's not true. If you look at our secondary schools, that's not true. If you look at our alternative programs or our ancillary programs like Choice and Cedar, that's not true there either.
So it very much, putting together a comprehensive school counseling program is very much unique to the needs of the building and the structure which you're in. So maybe you're doing social emotional education in the classroom through the second step program at the elementary programs, through Character Strong and a HOPE program that I've developed in the secondary programs. So they have social emotional curriculums, which are delivered by the teachers and supported by the students, by the counselors.
And then any student that has higher needs than what happens in a classroom gets referred to your school counselor to get supported either in-house, but counselors are not trained to do therapy, we're trained to do support services. So then we, our job is to be great at referring and supporting a referral. So it's not enough to say, hey, maybe you should see someone who has more skills than I do, here you go.
It's about the follow-up, it's about the support to get access. The district's done a great job of coming up with some support in-house that's a program called Daybreak that has support services for counseling that's therapeutic in nature. They also have a relationship with True North Counseling, which is therapeutic in nature.
So it helps counselors have referral resources when a student has a need bigger than in that social emotional strand, larger than you can get in a school counseling setting. Counselors are trained to do like skill building and brief therapy, but we're not therapists. We're not trained to do that.
You want us to, just like you want a math teacher to teach math and then everybody else to share and support math. Yeah, it's kind of a specialty, but then we're not trained to be the licensed mental health therapist. Sure, and you were that.
Yeah, we have the second step that Susie mentioned is taught within the classroom. We also have at Bordeaux, we had a Counselors' Choices program, which is a decision making wheel, has about nine different choices. And the premise is that to try to teach the students to identify a small problem, something that they can do on their own.
And there's this wheel that has choices like do an apology or talk it out, wait and cool off to where, or is it a bigger problem that I need to talk to an adult that you trust? And I think it goes back to what I had mentioned earlier about our PBIS. One of the things that we do at Bordeaux is we have our three themes of safe, respectful, and responsible. And so we build a program around teaching students in our sort of common areas, lunchroom, hallways, bathrooms, how to transition from one area to the next in a safe, respectful, responsible way.
And at the same time, celebrating those achievements through, we have what are called big paws. So we go in, we might play bingo with them, we'll hand out pencils or stickers, but it's also an opportunity for students and staff to help celebrate that we are a whole community. And then in order for us to all be successful, we have to all be on the same page in terms of expectations.
And so we, I think we pride ourselves at working really hard at that. And you see that as it moves through from elementary to middle to junior high, those kind of, they start to be baked in when you're there. And by the time they get to the high school model, a lot of those ideals have, it's second nature.
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think you reteach different things over and over again through time in a K-12 system.
And I think it's hilarious though, when I'll bring up to kids, like, did you learn anything like this about an elementary school? And they said, yeah, we did that frog thing. So I'm like, yeah, I know about the frog thing. Like the frog thing's been to my house.
Like I know about Kelso. Are you a friend of Kelso? Yeah. So we talked a little bit about the size ratio in the Shelton schools and kind of probably I would imagine across most schools in the state are at that ratio, but the expected ratio of 250 to one.
I mean, what happens when the numbers get even more skewed? Like how much more stretched thin would you as a counselor be as more students come into the system or things change like that? You can, I mean, you can delve into the details of it. I mean, there's the expectations that counselors will spend 80% of their time in direct contact with students and 20% of their time doing the maintenance and things. Teachers do this too, right? Like the grading and the preparing.
And then the majority of your time should be spent in direct contact, either in a classroom or in one-on-one or in small groups with students and families. And the more you move away from that, the less contact you have with the actual person, the more you're actually serving. Maybe you end up serving a system instead of serving a human.
And that's not the purpose of school counseling. So do you here try to get in front of a certain amount of students every day, just even just as a check-in on what's going on? Yes. What do you see as that, the benefit of that, of the student finding, knowing that they have someone kind of in their corner that is a consistent part of their life like that? Yeah, you do have to get your face in front of the faces.
And that's really hard in a big setting like Shelton. I worked at Shelton High for a long time, you know, like that's really intentional in a system like that. In this setting, I make my rounds every day, I pop in, I say hi, kids that want to check in with me, they either make contact or say so or email me or come in and notate themselves in the office so I know who needs what each day.
Like staying close and tight matters because you want to be proactive in your school counseling. When you're reactive, you're trying to fix problems. When you're proactive, you're educating before the situation but turns into a problem.
And if you have outside of things, outside of school concerns that are getting in your way, you want to be proactive in building in supports. And if families need things, you want to be proactive in helping them be ready for those problems or situations or challenges. Yeah, I think one of the challenges that we have at the elementary level is, well, number one, at Bordeaux, I can't say enough about our administration support.
We have a very, very proactive principal and assistant principal that helps to build what I feel is important as in terms of a comprehensive counseling program. Again, I go back to the PBS. Our PBS, I think we have a very strong resource of staff that help my job in terms of being the eyes and ears out there.
Visibility, as Susie mentioned, is really important. I'll be out there in the hallways, playground, lunchroom. I like to think that I could walk down the hall and I think every student would know my name.
I think that's kind of the first step is, you know, who is this person? What's their role? I think secondly is that we have an incredibly proactive staff that helped me to be those eyes and ears. So during conferences, they will be able to share with me conversations with parents in terms of resources that they found that they're in need of. And so I think that collaboration within the school, regardless of how many numbers of kids you have, if you don't have that relationship with your staff, to be able to develop the kinds of resources that we can provide.
And some of those resources are unlimited, you know, in terms of what we can provide for outside counseling support. That's always a challenge for our families. But at the same time, knowing that we're working together to help find a solution has been always our main goal, first and foremost.
What are some practices that a school counselor's position has changed? I always like to talk with staff and administrators about what they are doing now versus what someone who's listening to this, who may not have been in school for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, remembers from school when they were there. So what are some things that you know to be not practiced anymore, changed, different, how? I mean, a lot of it is, and I think we talk a lot about the socio-emotional, and people still have a little bit of a hard time understanding that concept and new acronyms and things like that. So what are some of those things that you've heard stories from your mentors, maybe, and go, man, when we were in counseling, when I started, we did this, and now there's no way we would ever think that this was even a beneficial practice for our students.
We will have different answers, because Brian started off as a school counselor, and I started off as a teacher. But my very favorite story ever is, and I'm forever old now, but like when I was in high school, my high school counselor didn't know me. They knew that I had been like in plays and in ASB, but so they knew my name, but they had no idea who I was.
Zero idea who I was. They looked at my transcript. They called me in in my senior year in the, we were on semester, so in the winter, and looked at my transcript and went, oh, well, you're not college material.
And I looked at him, and I won't tell you the exact words that I said, but they weren't kind. And I said, yes, I am. Now, had I really planned to go to college? I thought about it in my family.
Everybody did it. I probably would do it just like everybody does what they said. But I had not made a plan.
I had not done that, but it made me so mad I was going to college. And then I was going to do this, and then I was going to do that. And like, I didn't really plan to be a school counselor, but it definitely turned out to be the right place for me at the right time when it did.
And I love back in that story. Like, don't tell me. And that guy was what we now call a guidance counselor, who the only purpose was to tell you what to do.
So we don't use the word guidance counselor anymore. People who are trained in school counseling now kind of bristle at that term. They're like, oh, no.
Like, we don't tell people what to do. We facilitate, and we roll around sides. We're educators.
Like, I have a master's in education because I want to teach people. But teaching people isn't preaching at them. It's sharing a pathway with them, and giving them skills along the way, and watching them do what they do with what they learned, and supporting that growth.
I think for me, I never had an elementary counselor growing up. I mean, when I first came to Washington in 1990 with my certification, I was thinking of working in the middle school. But every district I was applying for was like, are you interested in being an elementary counselor? We'd love to have you.
And so from my initial experience, it was like, wow. I just didn't think there were really any elementary counselors in terms of that role. So when I first started back in Kent, it was really eye-opening to me in terms of, well, what is it that I want to provide for students in that age range of 5 to 10 years old? And before, I think, buildings at the elementary saw the need for more administrative help through an assistant principal, I was working very closely with the principal on a lot of discipline.
Now, that's a challenging hat to wear as a counselor, because for kids to understand, I would call them out, and mostly just to call them out to find out, OK, what happened? They would inevitably think they were in trouble. I would say even up to now, sometimes, I would walk in, and I would remind them, no, I'm not here for the disciplines. I'm just here to help you figure out what happened.
How can we work through that in a way that's more proactive next time? And so I think one of the things I've really appreciated from the Shelton School District is that administrative support, because that's allowed me to really do my job as a counselor. And as I go back to saying earlier, working with Kyle, our principal, and Amy really was an opportunity for us to find a nice balance between helping support when there were times that they needed me to help support them, but at the same time, them recognizing my role and making sure that the kids knew that when they came to see me, it wasn't necessarily because of a discipline issue. But early on in my career, I did a lot of that.
And again, it was really challenging to show the kids the different hats. But I think over time, I like to think that I was able to do more of the counseling piece. But it's challenging with 530 students.
I don't know if there's any magic answer to that other than to continue to work with your community resources and to build a strong connection within your staff in terms of what we're trying to do moving forward. Finally here, I want to talk about my sons in middle school. And we were heavily involved in the elementary system.
A lot of volunteers, a lot of families, when they have the opportunity, they're there at the meetings and this and that. And it slowly starts to dwindle up through high school. But what would you say and how important would you say it is for families to remain involved and continue at least maybe check-ins with the counselor or just even the general day-to-day or week-to-week of what happens with their students in the school system? And then the advisors.
There's an advisor role too. I love the analogy. I've used it with families for years of it's like when you have your kid in the car.
And in the beginning, they're in the back seat strapped into this beautiful like bubble. And then they get to sit in the seat. And then they get to sit.
Eventually, they'd sit in a booster seat. Then they get to sit in a booster seat in the front maybe. And then they get to sit in the front seat.
Eventually, they sit in the driver's seat and you sit over here. And then there comes that day where you just like hold, clutch your chest and let them drive away. And you might have some monitoring techniques on them too.
So I just love that analogy. It is like that. You're growing your student together.
You trust that you make your world of helping raise this beautiful being bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. But it's because your team should get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. You don't jump out and say, you take them.
I'll be back later. You just stay tethered. So tethered could be contact with the advisory teacher.
It could be having a really open conversation with your student. Could be having a meeting with your counselor once a year with the family to say like, hey, let's just stay checked in. Let's just keep our temperature checked.
There's no problem to solve or we are concerned about this. We've raised students too. Our students went through Evergreen.
And then because we live at Steamboat, they wanted to go to Griffin because they didn't know who their neighbors were. So we had our own transitions that way. But it's hard to know how to walk that tightrope and just know that the best of all things is to keep a relationship that has communication and your team gets bigger and bigger, not smaller and smaller.
Right. And from the elementary, I would just from the positive standpoint, I think just reminding and our administrators have really tried to reinforce this. And I think our teachers do really good job of trying to make sure you have some connection with your families in some way, shape and form.
A couple of times a month, let them know how your child's doing. Letting them know the little simple things that they've noticed some of the growth. Parent conferences are great, but those are only twice a year.
And we really do encourage our teachers to really reach out to parents on a more consistent basis. On the flip side of that, I would also encourage parents, and I've had many, many in Suzy as well, is when there are concerns and there are situations that your child comes home to and tells you as a parent, before sometimes jumping to a conclusion, make sure you get the other side and don't be afraid to reach out to the principal or the assistant principal or the school counselor. Oftentimes, we'll have situations where, and as parents, we try to encourage our kids to solve it, back to that Kelso, is this a small problem? But sometimes the problem continues and we're not aware of it.
And then something does happen. And then it exacerbates itself where the parent comes in expecting that something should have been happening when in many cases, not always because we're not perfect, that we just weren't aware of it. And sometimes just making sure that you check in with us, hey, I'm hearing this coming from my child.
I don't know exactly the whole story. What would you suggest? And we encourage them to reach out to the teacher first, of course, depending upon the circumstance, and getting the teacher's side. And then if there needs to be a further conversation with the administrator or the counselor, but oftentimes, those are the miscommunications that can make it very challenging for all sides moving forward.
And like I said, we are not perfect. And I will be the first one to admit that. And I think that's one of the things that we as a community just continue to need to revisit.
We're not a perfect. We'd love to be better. And the only way we can do that is if we're working together.
And so that's all I can kind of say on that. Counselors are an important piece of the school puzzle here. And talking with two great ones in the Shelton School District, Brian and Susie Wierzbicki.
And thank you for some time. And it's just fascinating to kind of see what the different roles are in the district and in the school level, and how they all fit together and work to help the students. So thank you very much.
Good to see you guys. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.