December 1, 1998

A successful boys varsity basketball coach at Mukwonago High School, Christiansen

increasingly had difficulty focusing on hoops as he fretted about the troubled

students he counseled. It’s hard to concentrate on the “big rival on Friday

night when you’ve been dealing with a suicidal girl for four hours,” he said.

So a year ago, he stepped down as head coach — with a 63-30 record over four

seasons — to devote himself to counseling kids at the Waukesha County high

school.

Like Christiansen, guidance counselors throughout the state are feeling the

rigors of jobs they say are increasingly demanding as society and its problems

grow more complex.

“They are getting stretched thin because there are many more demands on

counselors’ time and expertise,” said Robert “Pete” Havens, a professor in the

department of counselor education at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and

coordinator of its school counseling program.

When people ask Mark Kuranz about his job, the lead guidance counselor for the

Racine Unified School District and a counselor at Case High School tells them:

“I have an appointment book just like a doctor and it’s filled up. But I’m

also working an ER and handle every crisis that comes up.”

Years ago, counselors spent their time advising students about class schedules

and colleges while occasionally helping kids experiencing rocky times at home.

Today, while still handling those traditional tasks, they juggle many more

duties, including: Violence prevention, sparked in part by a wave of deadly

school shootings across the nation and more students bringing weapons to

schools.

Grief counseling, to help students, teachers and others cope with tragic

losses, such as the death of a student in a traffic accident.

Career planning, in which counselors spend more time preparing students for

specific jobs after college or technical school and, in some cases, right

after high school graduation.

Community outreach, working with social service agencies to set up

educational, recreationaland counseling programs for children after school.

Case High School works with the Bray Center, where kids go after school for

recreation,tutoring, career planning and anger management workshops.

“We’re doing a lot more connecting with communities,” Kuranz said. “That

wasn’t happening 10 years ago.” Betty Miller, a guidance counselor at Waukesha

West High School, said: “The job has certainly changed since I became a

counselor in 1976. Then, we had the luxury of meeting with a student once a

week for several weeks. We don’t have that luxury now.”

Miller, who is responsible for about 375 students, has found herself in recent

years at funeral homes to “help kids through crises” or coached them on

“funeral etiquette.”

“I never thought I would be doing that,” Miller said.

It’s all part of the complex role of guidance counselors today, said Michael

Thompson, the director student services/prevention and wellness for the state

Department of Public Instruction.”The specific role of the school counselor is

not very well understood,” he said. “So they are pulled in many different

directions. . . . They do get stretched thin.”

Counselors say they are feeling more harried at a time when students could use

more individual attention. “As counselors, we went into the profession to help

kids be successful and help get them through tough times,” Christiansen said.

“We do some of that, but that’s becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the

job.”

In Milwaukee Public Schools, as in other districts, guidance counselors are

spending more time on educational and career planning “to make sure kids are

prepared for work and college,” said Lynn Krebs, the district’s coordinator of

guidance and career education.

They are targeting their efforts in those areas because 75% of the district’s

students are from homes with low to moderate incomes and many have “no college

role models and increasingly no high school role models,” Krebs said. Those

students need to hear from counselors about the importance of maintaining good grades

and how the choices they make will affect their chances of getting into

college or landing a job,Krebs said. Additionally, MPS counselors increasingly

spend time trying to secure college and technical school scholarships for

students, so they can have the same educational choices as their peers in

other districts, Krebs said.

All of these added duties come at a time of tight

budgets, when districts have little financial leeway to hire more counselors.

While the DPI recommends a 250-to-1 student-counselor ratio in grades 7 to 12

and 400-to-1 in grades K-6, many high school counselors handle 300 or more

students. In MPS, the ratio is 425 to 1 at the high school level and 500 to 1

at the middle school level. “We were making progress in getting more

counselors, but what with budget cuts and things . .. my sense is the ratio

has begun getting larger,” said Havens, the UW-Oshkosh professor.

Racine’s Kuranz handles about 325 students and some of the duties formerly

held by the district’s counselor coordinator, a position that was cut about

four years ago.

“If I could have a much smaller ratio, I could touch more kids’ lives,” he

said. “There simply isn’t enough time to get to know them all.”

At Homestead High School in the Mequon-Thiensville district, administrators

this year had hoped to add another guidance counselor. But the new position

was trimmed as part of$400,000 in budget cuts. The five counselors at the

Ozaukee County school handle about 1,400 students. “We’re sitting here

swamped writing letters of recommendations (to colleges). With 94% of our

seniors going to college, we spend almost all of our time writing letters of

recommendation and processing applications through December,” said Lin Lesar,

the co-director of guidance at Homestead. The Homestead counselors also run

college workshops for parents, hold college conferences with each student and

his or her parents, and schedule and conduct college entrance exams and

National Merit Scholarship tests. “I think every day we feel stretched thin,”

Lesar said.

“I’d like to spend more time with the students, especially freshmen and

sophomores. What happens now is you put so much focus on the seniors and their

applications. But you can’t be in two places at once.”

Journal Sentinel Online

Tags: counseling, counselors