Havre Public Schools celebrates School Counselor Week

With National School Counselor Week being celebrated this week, some Havre Public Schools counselors talked to the Havre Daily News about what they do and the importance of counseling in the school system.

Julie Monson works alongside John Ita as the counselors at Havre High School.

Monson said the counselors’ do the academic planning, help with college preparation with the students at the high school, work on the the Leadership High School program and more.

 “We do everything,” she said. “We help out, we do any counseling within the day that any students need, we help them prepare for life beyond high school.”

She said she has been a counselor for four years at the high school, and before that was a counselor at Highland Park Early Primary School and a counselor with AltaCare for nine-and-a-half years.

AltaCare is an outside counseling agency providing outpatient mental and behavioral health care services in the schools, she said 

She said she received her counseling degree from Montana State University-Northern.

She said the school counselors are always ready to help students.

“Our doors are always open and if anyone ever needs to come to talk to us, give us a call or come see us if they have a concern,” Monson said. 

At Highland Park Early Primary School, Patrick Campbell is not only the school counselor, but has had a private licensed practice as a counselor for eight years.

He also received his degree in counseling at Northern.

He said that in schools with kindergarten to fifth grade students, the counselors use Second Step, which is a program rooted in social and emotional learning, encouraging children to thrive. The program has been in the Havre school systems for the past three years.

According to Second Step’s website, “Second Step’s holistic approach helps create a more empathetic society by providing education professionals, families and the larger community with tools to enable them to take an active role in the social-emotional growth and safety of today’s children.”

  Campbell said kindergartners and first graders are taught skills from the program in their classrooms once a week.

“My role is working with the student body and teaching social and emotional learning and children have the opportunity to learn basic skills of interaction with each other and their teachers,” he said.

He added that students also learn how to do problem-solving through this program.

“I believe the school counselors are advocates for all the children that go to school and we’re here for them,” Campbell said.

Sunnyside Intermediate School counselor Lorraine Don is in her first year as a counselor, she said, adding that prior to being a counselor she taught for 30 years.

She said what drew her to being a counselor is the desire to help children and to be a child advocate, which led her to earning her degree in counseling from Northern.

Along with the Second Step program, Sunnyside, Lincoln-McKinley Primary School and Highland Park also use a bully prevention program.

“(The benefit of having a school counselor is) letting the students know they have a warm and welcoming place with someone they can talk to and trust, as well as the faculty and administration in the building,” Don said.

Melissa Stokes has been the counselor at the Lincoln-McKinley Primary School for four years.

“With our world today, there is so much going on for kids in their home environment, the world in general, they need help adjusting,” she said. “I help teach kids how to regulate, how to learn, how to be good friends, how to be productive citizens. I think all of those skills are very important to learn as they are very young and it’s going to help them for the rest of their lives.”