Going Beyond "Guidance"
In middle school, counselors take on serious social issues, such as cyberbullying.
In October of 2006, a 13-year old girl from Missouri named Megan Meier hung herself with a belt in the closet of her room. Later it was revealed that Megan was the victim of a relatively new phenomenon, cyberbullying, and that someone who called himself "Josh" and said he was 16 had been repeatedly tormenting her on her MySpace page. The relationship between "Josh" and Megan began as a flirtation, but turned increasingly mean; "Josh's" last message to Megan read, "The world would be a better place without you." That day, Megan killed herself.
More shockingly, it later came out that "Josh" did not exist; instead, the person who was doing the cyberbullying was Lori Drew, the 47-year-old mother of another teenage girl who lived down the street. The New York Times reported, "That an adult would plot such a cruel hoax against a 13-year-old girl has drawn outraged phone calls, e-mail messages and blog posts from around the world. Many people expressed anger because [county] officials did not charge Ms. Drew with a crime." (In a surprise twist, in May 2008 the Times reported that Drew has been charged in the State of California — where MySpace is based — with "one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization ... to obtain information to inflict emotional distress." Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.)
"Cyberbullying," of course, did not exist when I and parents of my generation were in middle school. But in the past several years, it has become topic #1 with middle school counselors all over the country. Of course, only in the rarest of cases does cyberbullying have such dire consequences as in Megan Meier's case, but it is a big problem nonetheless.
Nowhere to Turn
It used to be that if kids were having a hard time socially in middle school, they could at least look forward to the refuge of home — away from the bullies — and, traditionally, the comfort of their families. They had the after-school and evening hours to recharge, gain solace from home, and buck up before the onslaught the next school day. Today's kids have no such refuge. With their perpetual connectedness to the web via email, IM, text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites, kids are connected, for better or for worse, 24 hours a day.
"It is a huge problem," says Tammi MacKeben, a middle school counselor in El Paso, Texas, who was selected as the 2008 School Counselor of the Year by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). "Technology makes it possible for kids to say awful things about each other on the web. The kids can't escape it, it's all around them — and parents don't know how to stop it. Someone can spread a rumor about a kid and it's worldwide within five minutes."
This is where an effective middle school counselor can come in, says Jill Cook, ASCA's assistant director. "Fortunately, there are resources and programs available to today's counselors which didn't exist a generation ago," she says. Also, she points out, counselors today are trained to be much more proactive, to try to pre-empt the kinds of behavior that lead to social torture (and, for some of us, tortuous memories) in middle school.
Risky Behaviors
Of course, bullying (cyber or otherwise) is just one of many issues facing today's middle school counselors. Middle school is an age where "kids start to 'try things on for size,'" says Laura Weiss, a school counselor at Mill Valley Middle School in Mill Valley, California. "They can start to be disconnected from their old friends and looking to see where they belong. This can in turn lead to kids taking on risky behavior." Any parent not living under a rock understands that some kids begin to experiment with alcohol and drugs in middle school. Other typical issues on the middle school counselor's plate are friendship/clique formation and exclusion; academic challenges, often tied to social issues; death and divorce; and more positive subjects like community service, career and future planning, and cultural diversity programs.
For example, Mill Valley has a brown-bag lunch program where kids can learn about different jobs. Recently, Weiss has brought in an ER doctor, an Oscar-winning writer for Finding Nemo, an Olympic skier, and a county coroner ("'CSI' fans came in droves," recalls Weiss) to teach kids about these diverse career paths.
Overall, says MacKeben, "we are trying to set goals for the kids in life, and we start very early to help them explore what their strengths are." If kids are having trouble academically, she says parents should understand that the school counselors are there as an advocate for the child. "Often, parents don't know what to do when a child is failing academically," she says. "Their school counselor is a good resource."
A Day in the Life
For MacKeben, a typical day means spending about 30 percent of her time in the classrooms, conducting group lessons (for example, self-esteem, anti-bullying, career planning) and another 15 to 20 percent seeing students individually. The rest of her time is spent planning programs or seeing groups of students with specific needs: in El Paso, this includes groups of English-language learning students, anger management groups, divorce support groups, and 8th graders who need help choosing their high school curricula.
Weiss wryly compares her job description to that of an emergency physicican: "If there's a crisis, we need to be able to roll with the changes, to triage and respond quickly," she says. "The crying kid will always get prioritized in the triage." One crisis she faced was a group of girls who were "cutting," a form of self-mutilation. She dealt with it immediately but said some of the parents were in denial: "Many of them were shocked, and several said to me, 'Gee, I didn't think I'd be dealing with this yet.'" Although there is an expectation of confidentiality in the counselor-student relationship, "if kids are self-injuring, or threatening to put others in danger, we are allowed to break confidentiality to notify the parent," Weiss says.
The communication goes both ways, adds Weiss. "Parents often call me to discuss their children's behavior at home, to ask me if I'm noticing the same thing at school," she says. "They want to know, what can we do about it? It can be anything from their children not sleeping, to saying they hate school, to getting ugly text messages, to spending hours on MySpace. Parents want to know, is this normal? Should I allow this?"
What is "normal" can also depend on the age and sex of the child. I drove carpool this spring, taking several students to the theater where they were performing the middle school musical. The contrast between the behavior of the girls and the boys (I was driving three of each) couldn't have been more stark. The boys sat sullenly, their iPods attached to their ears, and said not a word for the entire 20-minute drive. The girls, on the other hand, talked literally nonstop.
Middle school counselors need to have a keen understanding of the psychological, hormonal, and emotional changes that are taking place — and which may affect girls differently than boys. Compared to primary school counselors, the issues facing middle school counselors can be described as more specific (less theoretical), more serious and impactful (both social and academic issues), and in some ways, more dangerous (the introduction of drugs, alcohol, cutting, severe bullying, etc.).
Cook of ASCA makes a point of saying that much has changed about school counseling in the past generation. "The old image of the balding, middle-aged 'guidance counselor' sitting in his office, drinking coffee and waiting for the 'troubled' students to come to him just isn't accurate anymore," she says. "Today, the primary purpose of counselors is to deal with all the kids at the school, not just the few at the bottom or at the top. Their goal is to help kids be successful in school and in life."
Adds Weiss, "If you like having to think on your feet, and being thrown off your feet, you'd be a great counselor."
