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Counseling and Guidance | Library/Media Center

Counseling and Guidance

  Meet The Counseling Staff:

The counselors at Bell Middle School provide proactive support for the academic and social well being of our students. They are eager to help students succeed and are available before and after school to assist in the following areas:

• Providing personal, social, family, academic, and career counseling.
  • Understanding your behavior and that of other people, including how to get along with others. Learning techniques of decision-making and problem solving. Helping with study skills.
  • Interpreting tests and inventories.
• Conducting counselor-facilitated conferences to help you, your parents, and your teachers to work together
• Making a referral to other resources and community agencies
• Conducting the Four-year Educational Plan Conference and the Promotion/Retention Intervention Plan Conference

Parents are encouraged to first contact teachers if they have any questions about a student's academic or social achievement. Teachers will schedule conferences with parents in appropriate situations.

Introduction to Results-Based Student Support

Guidance professionals have spent many years trying to define school counseling by answering the wrong question. The question, "What do counselors do?" leads us in an endless circle of describing a variety of processes and services available to students and staff. As these processes change, the answer to the prevailing question has to be readdressed to respond to our many publics. The new paradigm question to answer is "How are students different as a result of the guidance program?" Clearly students need to benefit from a guidance program by acquiring new knowledge and/or skills.

Focused on Student Results: The results-based approach is based on students need for a comprehensive, developmental student support program. The difference between this approach and "add-on" services is a basic philosophic difference between offering students an opportunity to experience and benefit from guidance at their own request or providing a planned, sequential program in which counselors take responsibility for assuring that all students gain specific guidance-related competencies. Services have traditionally been based on demand and local school need. Competencies are based on professionally identified educational, career and personal/social needs of students.

Bell Middle School counselors have begun the move to a results-based counseling program. As a beginning to this implementation, we wrote a results agreement:

I agree to make the following contributions to the students and parents during the school year.

• All 9th grade students will be given a career inventory and will be able to demonstrate skill and knowledge of high school graduation requirements.

• Eighth grade students will acquire and demonstrate knowledge of accurate information that will enable them to make positive curriculum choices for high school.

• Seventh grade students will demonstrate knowledge of when and how to avoid peer conflict.

Bell's Counseling Department Vision Statement

Bell Middle School counseling program is committed to helping all students by assisting them in making decisions and changing behaviors. The counselors work with all students, school staff, families and agencies in a proactive and preventative way to assist students in developing life-long learning skills. As an integral part of the total educational program, credentialed school counselors ensure equity and access to services so that every student is challenged and supported to achieve his/her highest potential.

Bell's Counseling Department Mission Statement

The mission of the school counseling program at Bell Middle school is to promote and enhance student learning so that there is routine infusion of important concepts as academic development, career development, personal and social development issues into regular classroom activities and in other activities throughout the school.