The Carbon School Board hosted a regularly-scheduled meeting last week to prepare for the 2021-22 school year.
Starting off the meeting, counselors from Carbon High School (CHS) and both middle schools were asked to present their data projects from the previous school year.
First to the podium was Karee Hunt from CHS to discuss their project entitled Planned for Career College Readiness (PCCR). The counselor’s goal for this upcoming school year is to increase the parents’ participation in the students’ PCCR projects.
“Hopefully, we can get more parents because it is just really important that parents are on board with this,” said Hunt.
Next, Mont Harmon Middle School’s (MHMS) counselor Randi Leonard approached the podium to present the school’s four-year data project on being able to assist students who were struggling in their classes.
MHMS accommodated the students last year with a weekly meeting with a teacher-mentor, the opportunity to work with student advocates who assisted students with missed assignments and several small-group classes, one being a social/emotional class taught by social work interns and another being taught by the school’s counselors, Leonard and Jessica Montague.
The school’s plan to improve the data project is still in discussion with the counselors on if they want to accumulate the grades weekly, giving the kids an update on their grades and where they need to work on excelling, or if more phone calls to the parents would be necessary for the student’s success.
“There is hard line between, ‘we are trying to help them and not do it for them,’” said Leonard.
Not only was the school helping the students excel in their classes, but they were also training the students to advocate for themselves and their own grades, which will go into consideration for future planning of the project.
“We don’t know how much more we would want to step in because we did help them, but we also don’t want to hold their hand and do it for them,” said Leonard. “That’s not going to help them when they go to Carbon.”
Lastly, Nikki Vasquez from Helper Middle School’s took to the podium to present the school’s behavior plan.
Going into the previous school year, their goal was to decrease the defiant/disrespectful/argumentative behavior five percent from the previous school year. However, they were able to decrease the behavior issues to 38 percent overall.
All of the counselors will begin yet another year of data projects shortly as classes start on Wednesday, Aug. 18.