Message from the School Counselor

The Inside of School Counseling

Hello iLEAD Family. We want you to know that school counseling is available for every learner, but one may wonder what is the difference between School-Based Counseling and Clinical Counseling. Let us explain.

School-based counseling is when a learner is granted counseling based on a brief need (4-6 weeks), and/or when something is impeding their academic progress. So, let’s dive deeper into that. If there is a learner who might be experiencing some anxiety surrounding testing, or group work (social-anxiety), these are examples of reasons we as counselors would move in to support the learner. We would come up with strategies that your learner can utilize in order to move past anything that is holding them back from learning.

Another example would be if a learner might be experiencing grief due to personal reasons (family, relatives, friends), we support your learner through that tough time by helping them to learn ways to positively cope with sadness. With both examples above if the anxiety and/or sadness is extended over a long time, we do access the needs of learners to find out rather they need clinical counseling moving forward.

Clinical counseling is what may occur when a learner’s needs exceed the scope of practice of a school counselor. These services are completed by licensed professionals who do evaluations for diagnosis and/or therapy for long-term care. Some examples may be, but are not limited to, when mental health is impacting beyond the educational setting and intended to heal or relieve mental health or psychological concerns. When we as school counselors see that a child may need more than what we offer we refer the child to outside services, after speaking with parents, depending upon the situation and age of child.

There are other kinds of school counseling that are sometimes granted through special education services as well.

Lastly, there is brief solution-focused counseling which allows us to deal with peer to peer conflicts as it pertains to disruption at school. We do this through restorative practices. Being a school that practices restorative justice, we seek to find what was done, how one may have been harmed and/or impacted, and how we as a team can restore harm that has been done. This is a promising practice and teaches learners that there are positive ways to resolve conflict in a way that allows all of us to be heard; leaving them with the tools to navigate conflict as they move onto high school, college/and or careers of their choosing for the rest of their lives. To find out more about your school counselors and what we offer, feel free to click here.

We also would like to reintroduce our weekly slogans.

• Make it happen Mondays
• Talk about it Tuesdays
• Win-it Wednesdays
• Thoughtful Thursdays
• Fantastic Fridays

We will talk about it more on Tuesday! (did you see how we did that?)

Stay tuned for more upcoming messages from your counseling team every Monday.

Thanks,

Shaana Scott

School Counselor

iLEAD Lancaster