Greenfield School District Making Elementary Counseling Additions

The Greenfield School District has addressed a glaring need for more guidance counselors.

The district has decided to eliminate the assistant principal position at Maple Grove Elementary and hire two new guidance counselors, leaving one for each of the district’s four elementary schools starting next school year.

The district has had just two guidance counselors servicing the entire elementary population of 1,749 students, not only making it virtually impossible for students to get the attention they needed, but also falling well short of state and national recommendations.

A 2007 study by The American School Counselor Association, cited by the Department of Public Instruction, and the United States Department of Education, both recommend a ratio of one counselor for every 250 students. And older study cited by the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction suggests a 1:453 ratio at the elementary level, less than half of Greenfield’s current 1:875 mark.

“By allocating elementary guidance counselors in each building, our school district will galvanize our belief that we must tend to the emotional and mental wellbeing of all students in a proactive manner that provides students with the best opportunity to ready themselves for learning,” administrators wrote in a memo to the School Board, which approved the plan May 20.

Interim Superintendent David Ewald said the counselors will be influential in the district’s focus to develop Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) throughout the district. He added current counselors have to be more reactive to situations and just weren’t always available when they were needed.

“They were going from building to building,” he said. “I talked to at least one parent who said they had to talk to a counselor and had to go to a school different than the one their child attended.”

The staffing move will require $70,000 to be budgeted in the general fund for one counselor. The other position will be funded by money that had been spent on the assistant principal position. Only Maple Grove had an assistant principal, but Tracy Flater resigned this month to become an elementary principal in Greendale, creating a vacancy the district decided not to fill.

“It fell in place as a result of her doing that,” Ewald said. “But we had been listening to a number of people throughout the district that were concerned that the personal needs of kids weren’t being met. It has nothing to do with the incompetence of anybody; we just had fewer people.”