Counselors excited to build better student relationships

Serena Bettis • May 18, 2017

Fossil Ridge High School’s counseling department will be undergoing organizational changes that they want the student body to be aware of for the 2017-2018 school year. Instead of making students transitions between counselors after their freshman year, students will have the same counselor all four years and the counselors will be divided up only by alphabet, not by grade. This comes as another move to better integrate the freshmen with upperclassmen after lunches were combined for the 2016-2017 school year. The freshmen class originally had separate counselors as a part of the school’s attempt to aid their transition into high schools in 2009; it’s the same reason that all freshmen have lockers and most of their classes in the upstairs North Wing.

Counselors have been discussing this idea for multiple years, and are excited to finally be able to put it into action. Each counselor has said that they are greatly looking forward to being able to build a better relationship with students over all four years of high school. Mr. Murphy stated, “Relationships are probably the biggest piece that we are hoping to build with this change.” In addition to this change, Fossil will no longer have a counselor specifically for college and career help. Instead, the primary counselors will assist students with college admissions and essays, or exploring alternative postsecondary options. Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Switala, a new hire for next year, will occasionally station themselves in the College and Career Center as college coordinators, mostly to help organize college visits to the school, and to be able to provide more in-depth information about postsecondary options to students.

The list of counselor assignments can be found in the West Wing or in the Weekly Update sent out to parents. For the 2017-2018 year only, the counseling department will allow seniors to request to stay with their current counselor that they may have a good, solid relationship with if the new organization changes the counselor they have been assigned.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.