Feb. 7-11, 2022, is recognized as National School Counselor Week by the American School Counselor Association. This year, the theme of National School Counselor Week is “School Counseling: Better Together.”

Bob Jones High School has four counselors, Mr. Van Dorn (A-Go), Mrs. Anderson (Gr-O), Mr. Delbridge (P-Z), and Dr. Bostick (College and Career).

To celebrate this week, we spoke with Mr. Delbridge about his role as a counselor at Bob Jones. According to Mr. Delbridge, the best part of being a counselor is connecting with their students and building relationships.  In his opinion, the best counselors will “be flexible, compassionate, patient, organized, professional, and have the mindset that the title of school counselor will not always represent the roles you truly play.”

He went on to explain that the workload of a school counselor goes beyond just helping students; he felt the title could be changed to “Academic Advisor or that of Executive Secretary or Data Entry Clerk” because much of their work falls into one or more of those categories. These necessary but also unfortunate tasks take away time that counselors could be using to build better connections with students.

The biggest obstacle to effective counseling is the sheer number of students they are responsible for. As any student who has spent one moment in the halls during transition could point out, Bob Jones is a crowded school, harboring almost two-thousand students. Each counselor at Bob Jones is responsible for over six hundred students as well as dealing with the parents of the students, ensuring students graduate, and juggling other factors that may pile onto their workload. As a baseline, the American School Counseling Association deems that for a school counselor to be effective, they should only be managing about two-hundred-and-fifty students.

Even though they have many students to counsel and many responsibilities, our Bob Jones counselors do their best to take care of student needs and keep everyone on track.