As Parks’ school year kicked off, counselors were faced with overwhelming amounts of work. Because of this, some students had a difficult time communicating about schedules. The number of emails counselors are receiving has caused delayed response times, which has been a challenge for Park’s students.
Park’s junior counselor Heidi Cosgrove said counselors have been faced with a tremendous amount of emails.
“The number of emails that we get sometimes feels like I can sit on email all day responding to students and responding to parents,” Cosgrove said.
Junior Milo Trebnick said he sees no problem with the response time he has experienced because of the counselor’s many other responsibilities.
“The time it takes for counselors to respond is reasonable for the amount of work they face,” Trebnick said. “When I emailed, it was two to three days, which was reasonable.”
Junior Crew Lund said increasing the number of counselors could help to balance out the amount of work.
“Having more counselors helps to reduce stress,” Lund said. “For juniors and sophomores, there should be more counselors because they are the most important grades in high school.”
According to Cosgrove, being a counselor means trying to figure out how to best split the workloads so that families and students meet their standards.
“Staff are at capacity,” Cosgrove said. “It’s trying to figure out the balance of what the job entails that you have to get done, how to meet student needs, how to meet family needs, and how to meet guardian needs.”
Trebnick said the Calendly app — an app that allows students to schedule a meeting time with the counselor — reduces the amount of stress and time wasted for both family members and counselors.
“(The Calendly app) is helpful because it’s convenient for the counselors and the student,” Trebnick said. “It creates a time that works for both of them because then the counselors won’t be overwhelmed by multiple people trying to set up a meeting at the same time.”
Cosgrove said using Calendly benefits families and students, but people still use email the most.
“I like the app because it gives students and family more power to say I want to look for a time,” Cosgrove said. “But the biggest communication between us and students right now is by far email.”
Lund said his experience when emailing the school counselor was easy and professional, he said he was able to send out his email and got an immediate response.
“I wanted to change up some hours and it’s been easy to communicate with our counselor,” Lund said. “It’s been overall a good experience.”
