Levittown Schools:
A New World for High-School Guidance
The old auto slogan read"This is not your father's Oldsmobile." The same could be said of the high-school guidance field.
"There's more of everything," said Christine O'Brien, the guidance chairperson at Division Avenue High School."There are more careers. More of them go on to college. There are more colleges. Whereas 20 years ago you tended to go to the college around the corner, now California and Texas and Michigan and all those other places are open to you."
As a result, O'Brien said last week, the students face more stringent graduating requirements, which include increasing mandates [see page-one story].
O'Brien and her counterpart at MacArthur High School, Bob Masone, talked about the changes in their field at a Levittown Board of Education meeting Nov. 12. She later said their talk was in part to give parents a window on aspects of guidance that go beyond college and job choices.
For all the educational changes come at the same time that students are facing a changing social and cultural makeup, more hours devoted to paid jobs, and family stresses that were much less prevalent 20 years ago -- such as both parents working, or not having a father and a mother.
As a result, guidance counselors say they are working harder both to help students plan a future, and deal with the day-to-day crises that students face in and out of the classroom.
Part of that, Masone said, is easing the transition students have from what people still call the junior-high years to the intensity of ninth through 12th grades."We try to make the transition from middle school to high school as easy as possible," he said.
Among the in-school groups set up at Division to handle special challenges, O'Brien said, are the student assistance team, crisis team, group counseling unit, peer leaders group and bereavement group.
"That's almost the hidden part of the profession," O'Brien told the Tribune."That's what the public doesn't see. A lot of what we do is behind closed doors. They (students) don't go home and talk about it, and they don't talk about it to their friends."
One of the guidance departments' major roles is to create a master schedule for the following year. Masone said that MacArthur does both individual and group scheduling and has yearly meetings with parents and students."We also consult with the committee on special education at the building and district level," Masone said.
Masone added that the guidance departments have taken on management of the Levittown district testing program at the high school level, as well as the PSAT, SAT and Advance Placement exams. The guidance department also determines which students have to do Regents Competency Tests (RCT).
That's on top of the counselors' best-known responsibility, that of helping juniors and seniors decide their post-high-school plans. O'Brien pointed to Division events like the mini-college fair and Blue Dragon breakfast.
College, career and scholarship searches have been eased by the use of the computer, and having a consortium of high schools work together in scheduling admissions visits has made the process easier for both the schools and the colleges, O'Brien said.
Guidance counselors also compute the seniors' rank and average, administer the application process for vocational students, provide student recommendations, and handle the diploma reports at both the state and regional level.
"More counseling services will be needed to meet new standards coming down from the state," Masone added. One of the downsides, O'Brien added, is that while the workload has increased, the number of counselors throughout the profession has decreased.
At Division Avenue, there are three full-time counselors besides O'Brien, and one half-time counselor, plus two guidance secretaries. One of the counselors handles all the special-education students, while the others break their responsibilities up roughly by the first letter of the last name, according to grade level. (O'Brien handles mostly letters B through D.)
"Sometimes what we do, the effect of what we do, is not apparent for years down the road," O'Brien said."Sometimes what we have done bears fruit 10 years later. Sometimes, a student will come back later and say, 'I remember what you said to me 10 years ago.'"
