By Beth Gilfillan, Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart
IACAC President
Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe the school year is halfway over and my time as President is as well! This year has been full of amazing programs, dedicated professionals, and significant progress in IACAC. While so many things have happened this fall that I’d love to talk about, I want to focus today on one in particular: Professional Pathways. Let me take you back to January of 2015. Annie Kremer and I heard about a program that WACAC (Western ACAC) does called District Directions. Essentially, they adopt a district’s counselors and provide them with over a year of data-driven, college-focused professional development. Annie and I attended the main portion of the program – the retreat – in San Diego that month. To say that this was life-changing for me is an understatement. On the plane home, I wrote a four-page reflection (or as some of my colleagues have called it – my “Jerry Maguire mission statement”). My reflection started with this, “It’s a great time to be a school counselor! I’ve been saying this all year, but I sincerely believe it! I had the opportunity to observe one of the best counselor outreach/professional development programs I’ve ever seen and I’m ready to bring this kind of focus and attention to school counselors in Illinois! You get the idea that this was incredible, right??
We shared the information about District Directions with the IACAC Executive Board and began brainstorming how we could bring this type of program to Illinois. Four brave souls agreed to join me in a committee: Drew Eder, Kato Gupta, Amy Belstra, and Chris Merle. This fall, we added Nicole Pinelli, an intern from DePaul University, to our team. Over the course of the next few months, we researched, surveyed, crunched numbers, and more, culminating in a budget proposal to the Executive Board in the summer. The budget was approved at $12,000; this is one of the largest expenses an IACAC program has ever had, but the Board recognized this work as important and worthwhile, and for that, the committee will be ever grateful!
After securing the budget, the committee set out to secure a district. Waukegan Community Unit School District 60 was selected for many reasons. It’s an under-resourced school, with many at-risk students (79% high school graduation rate, 49% of graduates enrolled in 4-year or community colleges, 62.7% freshmen on track, 73% low income). Waukegan High School counselors have reached out to IACAC in the past for help and resources, and when the committee met with Waukegan administrators, they were immediately on board and grateful for the opportunity to offer their counselors support. They even asked to include their Middle School counselors, which the committee supported, as well as the Board, for the additional costs. The Waukegan District has 15 high school counselors and 11 middle school counselors.
The committee met with all of the counselors in September to introduce the program and do a needs assessment through various discussions and activities. It was evident that the counselors were craving support as well as training, and appreciated their voices being heard. From the information obtained at that meeting, we developed a program for the main focus – the data-driven retreat. We recruited additional volunteers to present and lead the counselors during the 2-day retreat, solicited donations for the retreat, and continued to work with the counselors to develop a program that would be tailored to and relevant to the needs of the Waukegan counselors and their work.