Providing students with academic support, emotional support, behavioral support, and college career readiness, the Kennedy High School counselors are hard at work behind the scenes making sure every student is given the opportunity to have comfortable high school experience.

Around 300 students are assigned to each counselor and in a normal week, the counselors visit with about 25 students each, not including email communications. During a busy week, or when pushing to meet with all kids, they could end up dealing with up to 75 students.

The counselors tend to face lots of criticism from both parents and students. Whether it’s about scheduling issues or a perceived lack of respect, people don’t hesitate to assume the counselors are rude and don’t know how to do their jobs.

“We have a lot of people that are willing to share their opinions about what we do and what we don’t do, we tend to hear about the things that people wish we would have done, we tend to hear about the things that don’t go well,” Lori Clore, counselor at Kennedy High School said. “We don’t tend to hear about things that have gone well, and there are a lot of things that we do that people don’t realize that we do. We don’t get a lot of thank-you’s, but we do get a lot of feedback.”

The overall amount of students, having to prioritize and think on your feet makes it difficult to meet with student requests in a timely matter. The counselors try to respond within 24 hours, but with their unpredictable days, it can make it difficult to get back to students within that time frame.

“If you thought about any professional, even if you have a broken tooth, your dentist is like ‘I can get you in in two days’ and that’s for a broken tooth.” Tracie Guenther-Yoke, a counselor at Kennedy High School, said, “So I think one of the struggles is you know that we are professionals who have to really do that juggle, who really try to say ‘Man we like really want to get everyone in today’ if we could, we would, right? So I think it is that patience and knowing that, and I guess the big thing too is knowing is that a concern students have that they don’t feel it’s timely enough.”

Even with all the students that meet with their counselors, there are many people who simply don’t, either feeling that they don’t need to or they don’t realize that their counselor would be a helpful source.

The counselors encourage students to stop in and ask for help, but there is also an abundant amount of information available on the Kennedy Homepage, anything from scholarship information to college and career planning.