Students become more and more excited for the end of the year and the summer rapidly approaches. Meanwhile, the Bellevue West counselors are at work preparing for the beginning of the 25-26 school year. School counselor Emily Fenster said that her role is to organize the schedule and to make adjustments over the summer regarding both new students and class schedules alike.
“We will start working on the master schedule, kind of putting together how many sections we need for each of the classes and how that’s all going to fit for the upcoming year,” Fenster said. “And then over the summer time, pretty much the month of June, 1 part of July, we work on getting kids schedules. If they’re having difficulty scheduling students, then we’ll have to contact them to let them know there’s a conflict.”
With making the master schedule and preparing the new students, it is clear that the counselors have their hands full. However, problems can still arise.
“Some things that tend to happen is it’s possible, like a student who is maybe deficient in credits, if they’re unable to attend summer school, or they don’t fulfill the requirements of summer school, so then that means they don’t get that credit recovery done, then we have to make sure in the upcoming year schedule that we make either make room for those classes,” Fenster said. “For them to do the credit recovery or find a program that they can do credit recovery on so that they can stay on track. So it’s just kind of making sure that they fulfilled those summer school requirements to earn those credits.”
Counselor Melissa Minahan said that it’s important to meet with kids ahead of time to help prepare them for the upcoming year.
“I think it’s important, number one, to be able to meet with or talk with those families ahead of time to help them choose classes that will set them up for what their goals are for the future,” Minahan said. “So if it’s an incoming freshman just talking to them about the importance of staying on track and getting as many graduation requirements out of the way that freshman year as we can.”
Although counselors help new students with the new coming school year, not all of their work is during the school year.
“Counselors are available during summer school this summer, so there will be counselors at Bellevue East, because there are summer school at Bellevue East this summer,” Minahan said. “We’ll have a counselor there every day for students to meet with if they are struggling in their summer school class. If they have to adjust their schedules for fall based on how things are going in summer school, we can make those adjustments right there.”
