St. Margaret’s New-Look Counselors Office Expands and Fine-Tunes Its Outreach
By Ryan Wood
As St. Margaret’s counseling team reflects on its first school year in a restructured, reimagined office, all-school counselor Janice Avalone can’t help but notice the many positives that have come as a result.
“The need to be more division-specific was evident,” Dr. Avalone said. “We are able to connect in new ways and are seeing much stronger relationships this school year. It has been a big positive.”
Dr. Avalone, who has been at St. Margaret’s for 25 years, is joined in the counseling office this year by two new all-school counselors, Derek McIntire and Victoria Anaele, who bring a wealth of experience in working with young people. In addition, St. Margaret’s counseling office works closely with Dr. Greg Koch, a licensed clinical psychologist who leads St. Margaret’s Learning and Enrichment Center (LEC).
As school-aged children work through mental-health challenges at a rate unseen in previous generations, St. Margaret’s felt an urgency to expand the counseling office’s scope and fine-tune its strategy of serving students. Starting this school year, one counselor is dedicated to each division—partnering with faculty and being the resident expert on the age groups.
Dr. Avalone focuses on Upper School and Early Childhood School, with Mr. McIntire in the Middle School and Ms. Anaele in the Lower School. The restructuring has led to deeper relationships between counselors and the students, teachers and deans they frequently work with.
Those division-specific labels, however, are not without flexibility. Each counselor has an open-door policy for students.
“We want our community to know that any student can come to any of us,” Dr. Avalone said. “We work in constant collaboration with our team and Dr. Koch. Though our outreach is often division-specific, we are all available for anyone.”
St. Margaret’s counseling office approaches its work as a three-tiered pyramid, with the goal to reach 100 percent of the student body at an appropriate level for each student’s individual needs.
For Tier 1, which encompasses most students at St. Margaret’s, those touchpoints come in the form of school-day programming, often around research-backed social-emotional learning opportunities. Social-emotional learning, or SEL, is an educational framework which builds competencies in key areas such as:
Self-Awareness: Recognizing feelings as they occur, having a realistic assessment of one’s own abilities and values.
Management: Handling emotions so they facilitate rather than interfere with the task at hand.
Social Awareness and Cultural Competency: Seeing what others are feeling; being able to understand and have empathy for diverse perspectives.
Relationship Skills: Handling emotions in relationships effectively; establishing and maintaining healthy relationships based on cooperation; establishing and respecting personal boundaries; negotiating solutions to conflict.
Compassionate Decision-Making: Accurately assessing risks, making decisions based on a consideration of all relevant factors and the likely consequences of alternative courses of action.
Such Tier 1 programming takes on multiple meanings. In the Upper School, it involves Peer Counselors facilitating workshops in grade 9 Advisory, seasonal programming such as Red Ribbon Week, class meeting workshops, and training for teachers and parents. Middle School students engage in SEL lessons in Advisory, digital literacy lessons with Upper School Peer Counselors, and seasonal programming. In the Lower School, monthly character talks take place in grades 4 and 5 with the counselors available to younger classrooms upon request.
For students in need of more outreach and resources, the counseling team sets up small group “Scottie Circle” small-group social-emotional instruction (Tier 2) as well as one-on-one support for individuals with an identified need (Tier 3).
This approach has shown promising results, and not a moment too soon. Studies have shown that young people have experienced soaring rates of mental health challenges, which was exasperated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption of daily life. The American Academy of Pediatricians, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Children’s Hospital Association jointly declared a national state of emergency in children’s mental health in recent years.
St. Margaret’s most pressing strategic priority has been dedicated toward student health and well-being. The work of the all-school counselors, according to St. Margaret’s Director of Community Health and Wellness Patrick Bendzick, is part of an overall holistic approach to support students as they learn and grow in a student community, including physical, social, emotional, academic, psychological, neurological and spiritual health.
“How this manifests itself is as unique as the individual, so approaching the issue from a variety of angles and utilizing many resources are essential,” Mr. Bendzick said.
It is through that assessment that St. Margaret’s chose to expand the counseling team from two counselors to three, and dedicate one to each division. Dr. Avalone, Mr. McIntire and Ms. Anaele work as a team, collaborating on individual cases, division-specific programming and overseeing the popular Peer Counselors program which brings together Upper Schoolers with younger students for connection and mentorship.