Welcome Back from Your DBS School Counselors!

Welcome back to DBS! The 2012-2013 school year is just about to start and we are very excited to see all our students and their families!

As you may know, the school counselors at DBS stay with the students as they move from grade to grade. This year, Rebecca Lallier will be working with kindergarten, second, and fourth grade students. Amy Wheeler, our new school counselor, will be working with first, third, and fifth graders. We work with ALL students - teaching in the classrooms, running groups, and working with individual students who need some help with feelings, friendships, and/or behavior. Here's some more information about what we do. Click on the image to enlarge.

School counseling today may be quite different from what you remember from your own school experience. Gone are the days when you only saw the school counselor if you were "troubled" or needed to change your class schedule. (And chances are that you called that person your guidance counselor - a term which is no longer used since we now provide a much broader array of services. Please don't call us the "g-word"!) Now we are known as school counselors and we provide comprehensive programs that include prevention, as well as intervention, to help kids learn and be successful in the areas of academics, personal-social skills, and career preparation. Here's a brief (and amusing) video that explains comprehensive school counseling:

Kids will see us often in their classrooms and around the school. They can ask us for help any time by speaking with us or leaving us a note. You can do the same. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about your child. You can reach us by calling school at 802.295.8647 or emailing us:

Rebecca Lallier (grades K, 2, 4) lallierr@hartfordschools.net 

Amy Wheeler (grades 1, 3, 5) wheelera@hartfordschools.net

Watch here for pictures, student work, and information about our class councils and other school counseling programs. You can subscribe to DBS School Counselor by clicking the email or RSS feed links on the right hand of the top of this page. And stay tuned for our new webpage, coming this fall. We look forward to seeing you at Open House on Tuesday, September 18 from 6:00-7:00pm.

Happy National School Counseling Week!

The week of February 6 is National School Counselors' Week. We won't be doing anything special to celebrate it at DBS, but this image was just too great not to share.

Unfortunately, school counselors CAN'T always keep up with their blogging. Working with kids, parents, and teachers has to take priority over writing about it. And they can't always do that either, like when they're forced to take time out of school to recover from surgery. I (Rebecca) have been out for a couple of weeks, but am hoping to make a comeback this Thursday. Until then, there's time to catch up on blogging about what kids have been learning in class councils and groups. Stay tuned!

Many thanks to the fifth grade girls who sprinkled me with magic fairy dust so that my surgery would go well (it worked!), and to my co-counselor, Erica Talbot, who has been filling in and working with my 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade students.

Here's a wonderful note I received from a student (complete with his spelling):

Sorry you broke your foot!
I hope it gets better soon.
I am working hard
Just for you
You are good
At wate you do
You are good at teching
You are good at prity much
Everything.

I feel very lucky to be a school counselor for so many reasons, not least of which is that I get notes like these!

P.S. Do you think the school counselor in this picture got arms like that from using crutches to get around school?