Whether it’s new freshmen or experienced upperclassmen, each student has a counselor who is there to assist students through every aspect of their high school career. With the start of the 2023-2024 school year came a new transition for counselors and students alike. 

Previously, counselors handled a caseload based on a small range of last names, such as Mas-Pi, from all grade levels. This has now changed to each counselor taking on students with last names from half the alphabet of a specific graduating class.

Anthony Bridi, the principal of RUHS, put this plan in motion with hopes of developing closer student-counselor relationships and creating a focus for grade level-specific academic opportunities. 

“[This new system] builds consistency throughout the years of freshman to senior to maintain their connection with those counselors. The counselors will rise with the classes and will be able to provide the most amount of support with those kids,” Bridi said. “It also helps [the counselors] maintain a grade level focus, because in years past, the focus was on grades nine through 12, which can be challenging.”

The motivation to implement this new system came from the increase of counselors on staff which allowed them to take on a wider range of students compared to prior years. One counselor adapting to the new dynamic is Ashley MacDonald, who is now responsible for the class of 2025 students with last names L-Z. She has worked at RUHS for three years and has taken advantage of the different mindset that came with the new system. 

“It will allow us to narrow our scope rather than working from students who are just coming in here as new ninth graders or seniors who are at a different level right now,” MacDonald said. “When you have all different grade levels you have to be thinking about all of the unique challenges and situations that every single grade level has and every person in that grade level has, whereas now we’ll [as the junior counselors] be able to focus more on what juniors need to be the most aware about.”

With these benefits came a challenge for non-freshman classes to adjust to a counselor switch. 

“The biggest challenge anytime you switch and shift caseloads is having new students because everyone has a story, everyone has a situation, everyone has their unique circumstances,” MacDonald said.

According to a letter sent out to inform parents of the change, previous counselors will continue to provide support, such as letters of recommendations, for their previously assigned seniors. However, non-senior students that established a strong connection with their previous counselor will have to adapt to this new change, which according to MacDonald, may complicate communication and comfortability with the new counselor. 

 “Hopefully, some students are excited about the change but anytime there’s change it makes people a little bit uncomfortable at first,” MacDonald said. “It’s going to take a minute for all of that to get to a place where we can start really focusing on having those meetings, conversations and starting to build that rapport.” 

Junior Sidney McCann has experienced multiple changes with her counselors, having a new counselor each year, adjusting to each one in different ways.

“My freshman year I had Ms. Goo, she was in charge of the last names Mas-Pi. I really liked her, she was one of my favorite counselors,” McCann said. “She met with me regularly, which made it really easy for my 504 plan.”

McCann’s 504 plan allows for accommodations in educational settings, but requires a meeting to be arranged with teachers to go over the level of accessibility provided for that year. The navigation with McCann’s 504 proved to be difficult with a change in counselors during her sophomore year, as she had to take on more responsibilities to compensate for the new switch.

“It got a little bit difficult because Ms. Goo ended up leaving and I got a new counselor and she was trying to get integrated with [all] her new students, and so I did not have my 504 meeting until halfway or near the end of the school year,” McCann said. “I had multiple problems with my 504 and the counselor change didn’t make it very easy, especially because there was no set plan and so I relied a lot more on my 504 counselor rather than my actual counselor.”

The current change in counselors provided McCann with an opportunity to create a relationship with her new counselor, who proved to be “extremely effective at integrating [her] and her new students,” which allows her to prevent the repeating of conflicts of prior years. However, McCann recognizes the complexity of a larger number of students within a counselor’s caseload.

“From a counselor perspective, you don’t really get to know your students too well unless you’re frequently talking to them,” McCann said. “We only have two counselors for our grade, so you’re breaking up these hundreds of kids just into two people. It can be frustrating on both sides, for the counselor because they have so many students they need to take care of, and for the students because it’s not very time efficient and so it might take a while to [connect to their counselors].”

Coming into this new school year as a junior, McCann can impart advice to all who are adjusting to a new counselor.

“It’s a lot of change within just a year so a lot of people are trying to figure out how to really do this [new system],” McCann said. “It’s good if [students] keep communicating with their counselor because it’s what I did my freshman year and that’s why my counseling experience was so great rather than last year, where I didn’t even know there was a counselor change.”

When students become aware of this new system, they have the opportunity to develop new connections with their counselor that they can maintain throughout their high school experience. 

“I want to thank our counseling team for moving forward and really embracing this and seeing the big picture of how this is going to have a really positive impact on students, over the course of time,” Bridi said. “We have a robust counseling team to support [almost] 3,000 students and so if we have the resources to support this [new] model, then I want to do that for our learning community because this makes sense to build connections piece by piece with our students.”