If you have read my previous blog posts, you know that I was once a music educator and clarinet performer. It was easy for me to write about those careers because I lived them decades ago and they were virtually a part of another lifetime. My life as an elementary school counselor is another story as it ended recently – on January 1, 2021. It is with new and strange emotions that I write about that part of my past. I chose to leave the job I once loved because it had evolved into one I loathed and I was allowing it to make me feel depressed. Reaping the benefit of aging and a long career, I chose to retire to re-establish a healthy quality of life for myself.
When I left my job as a music educator in 1993 I began my journey towards something that I viewed as a dream career – helping young children navigate life. Against the advice of professors, I chose to spend the entirety of my internship in elementary school. After teaching pre-school through college-age students, I knew that I belonged with K-5th grade and was willing to narrow my focus to achieve that goal. I worked for one year in a K-8 school and was fortunate enough after that to be offered the chance to be the first elementary school counselor in Montville, New Jersey. Montville has 5 elementary schools and I spent one day a week in each of them during my first year. With the support and guidance of Montville’s Supervisor of Guidance, Mr. Dewey Slayton, I was able to lay the groundwork for their new elementary counseling program.
Within a year the guidance program in Montville expanded, and as it grew I loved every moment of my time there. By year 5, I was able to split my time between Valley View and Woodmont elementary schools. I truly valued my time in Montville, but with the support of Dr. Vincent Aniello, I was able to become the full-time school counselor at Eastlake Elementary School in Parsippany, New Jersey. I was in awe at the honor of becoming part of the fabric of one school community and devoted myself to the well-being of Eastlake’s students, staff, and families.
For those of you reading who aren’t familiar with what elementary school counseling entailed (without administrative interference), it was the most fulfilling experience of my life. I was able to spend every minute ministering to the needs of the community. I developed relationships with every student in the building and consulted daily with teachers and parents as we all worked together to make life at Eastlake Elementary School feel safe and secure. Each individual student was treated as the unique human he or she was and every effort was made to meet any need that presented itself. Needs that ranged from the devastating loss of an earring in the girls’ room interfering with learning in the classroom to the overwhelming grief accompanying the loss of a parent.
There is no truth to the phrase, “Little children, little problems.” Children are not immune to pain or difficulty in life and their depth of feeling is often overlooked. Thankfully, with the commitment of the Parsippany-Troy Hills School District to having a full-time counselor in each of its ten elementary schools, our students’ needs were met without fail. My favorite part of the job was the prevention aspect. I was able to run small groups addressing social issues, adjusting to family change, academic motivation, increasing self-efficacy, and more. In addition, I met with students from every classroom bi-weekly in large groups providing them a forum in which they could discuss anything on their mind. I “lived” with the students every day at recess as well and treasured every minute of my job.
When Sunday evening rolled around there was no stress that the next day was Monday. Heading into “work” at Eastlake on Monday morning was simply a drive to time spent with my second family. I know with certainty that I would not have retired had my role been able to remain that of purely the school counselor.
The sad truth is that somewhere along the road “powers that be” began to place less importance on the work done by elementary school counselors and viewed us as dispensable. Lacking a true understanding of the scope of our work, my perception was that administration (not including Principals) began to feel we needed other obligations to justify our roles. I can only speak for myself, but am certain my nine colleagues from the other Parsippany elementary schools had their days filled as completely as mine with not a minute to spare for extraneous “duties.”
The first intrusion into the well-oiled machine my elementary colleagues and I nurtured was the added designation of “test coordinator.” The erosion of the job I loved, had been prepared for, and believed in, began when coordination of state testing arrived squarely on our plates. In my opinion, there is nothing of value related to administering standardized tests to elementary school students and I had spent a lot of time over the years helping them handle the stress. How could I combine being the person they relied on to help them handle stressful testing situations with being the person who was in charge of shoving it down their throats? That marked the beginning of the bifurcation of my role.
With each passing year and the over-reliance on technology to document, document, and document more, my life as an elementary school counselor became consumed with data entry. There was limited time left over to foster the human connections which were all that truly mattered and had allowed me to be an effective counselor for our entire school community. With each added secretarial responsibility came the deletion of something directly involving counseling – fewer small and large group interactions, less time for effective 1:1 support, less availability to parents and teachers… For the first time in my life, I began to dread Monday mornings.
I first attended a retirement seminar 4 years before I had the strength to leave what had been the most important role of my life. Being an elementary school counselor, for me, had morphed into a job in which I spent significant portions of my days (and evenings) focused on duties that were counterproductive and depressing. It was not possible for me to feel pride in myself as a counselor while becoming disillusioned and bitter. In my efforts to continue being the best counselor I could be given professional constraints over which I had no control, I found myself developing health issues that I knew were directly related to the stress I was increasingly unable to manage.
My decision to retire after almost 25 years feels so bittersweet. I truly miss with all my heart the amazing students and staff of Eastlake, but leaving was one of the best decisions I have ever made. The health issues I was facing have disappeared and I am very much at peace with my decision. I hope that someday in the future the focus of all education will return to valuing human lives above data.