High school guidance
counselors can be the link between high school and college for many
urban youth. But in Washington, DC, the number of guidance counselors in
public high schools is decreasing, and as major school reform is
underway, the number of DC students going to college is startling – only
about 10% continue their education. Youth reporters from Radio Rootz DC
report.
{mp3}CNPI/Alarming Lack of Guidance Counselors Final 2{/mp3}
Mathews Mesfiin graduated from Calvin Coolidge Senior High School in NW Washington last spring.
He received a major scholarship through Posse, an organization that sends selected students to college with tuition fully paid for.
He got that scholarship because his counselor nominated him.
Mesfin said, “Posse is a really, really prestigious scholarship. They covered my four year scholarship, they gave me about $160 thousand, and I wouldn’t of got that scholarship if my counselor didn’t nominate me for Pose.”
Jerod Hairston graduated from Benjamin Banneker High School. He said he had a good relationship with his guidance counselor.
“It fluctuated. One minute we’ll be laughing and joking, next minute we’ll be at each others throat – figure of speech – and at the end of the day she was one person I knew she was in my corner,” Hairston said.
Hairston’s school, Benjamin Banneker, was one of only two DCPS high Schools to make AYP, the Adequate Yearly Progress, which shows that students are proficient in reading and math in the 2009-2010 school year.
Though, Hairston felt that most students do not have a productive relationship with their counselors.
Benjamin Banneker has one of the best guidance counselor to student ratios in DC. There is one counselor for every 129 students, which is well below the national average of 250 students to every one guidance counselor.
For the rest of DC public schools, the situation is far worse. DCPS had recently released a document stating the guidance counselor of student ratio based off the 2010 to 2011 budget, and the numbers are astronomical. Cardozo Senior High School is projected to have 602 students per counselor, and Roosevelt is expected to have 652 students per counselor.
Radio Rootz presented that document to DC schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to hear what she had to say.
Rhee said, “This is a time of contracting budgets, and often times our schools are in tough situations.”
But Rhee denied the situation is as bad as it looks.
“We want to strive to be at 250 [students] for 1 counselor, absolutely, and in some cases better,” Rhee said. “We have schools who make that but one of the things that helps us with that statistic is the fact that we have DC CAP counselors who don’t sit on the DCPS payroll but who are full time people who act as college counselors in that role, and that helps to bring our numbers down as well,” Rhee said.
But DC high school students say the situation is bad, and it seems to be getting worse.
Kimberly Pagease is a senior at Roosevelt High School. She described the changes.
“A lot has changed because last year we had 4 or 5 counselors and now we only have 1, and that’s a big change to our high school”
During the first round of teacher layoffs last year, 18 counselors were among the nearly 300 people laid off.
One of them is Dr. Bennet. She was a counselor at Calvin College Senior High School who had brought more than $5 million worth of student scholarships. Dr. Bennet is also the same counselor who got Mathews Mesfin his Posse scholarship. Dr. Bennet reflected on her lay off.
“I was very sorry about that, and I was more sorry for the kids then for myself, because Mathews, as you just brought up, was my student and counselors, if they are committed to a student and a student is committed to you, it’s almost like taking away their information source if you worked with them to get them at a certain level,” Bennet said.
“I’ve gotten students into Harvard and Yale out of a DC Public School, that DC Public School was Calvin Coolidge,” she said.
Radio Rootz asked Michelle Rhee why guidance counselors are being laid off. Rhee said the decisions are not up to her. “That’s a decision that the schools’ principals make. No we don’t make any decisions as to which positions are eliminated form the budget because we think the situations at every school are different and the best person to make those decisions are the school based principal,” Rhee said.
Council Member Muriel Bowser of Ward 4 said that guidance counselors are low down on the priority list at some DC high schools.
“Well, I think we have to look at the needs of each school, certainly in high school we want caring knowledgeable adults who are going to help our students get to the next level, but at Roosevelt for example you may need more nurses, or you may need more mental health support, or you may need more vocational support, so I think we have to look at the needs of every school and make sure it’s the right mix of adults there,” Bowser said.
The Youth Education Alliance, or YEA, is group of youth and adults who fight for change in schools. They are spearheading the campaign for more guidance counselors in DC public schools.
Eric Lowery is a lead organizer at YEA. He said guidance counselors are crucial to student graduation and post high school achievement.
“The current Campaign for Youth Education Alliance, we are working on guidance counselors, and what brought us to counselors is in 2006 Anacostia had one guidance counselor for the whole entire body of 900 students, and we wonder why our graduation [rates] are so low, so YEA is currently fighting for 1 to 100 on the middle school side, and 1 guidance counselor for the student body of 200 to 250 on the high school level,” Lowery said.
According to YEA, only 9 % of DC high school graduates go onto college. A statistic that high school students told us would be better if they had help in high school figuring out how to get to that next step.
This is Ingrid Ceron, Khalis Marshall, Sam Murray and, Josh Spriggs for Radio Rootz.
