The Centennial High School Counselors have always been there for students to talk with about conflicts, feelings, and successes. Counselors Ms. Anderson and Ms. Kiekhofer are excellent examples of what it means to be a school counselor and create lasting impacts on students’ lives.
Counseling has been a job title since 1931, although psychotherapy, a term with the same meaning as the modern term “therapy,” has been around since the late 1800’s, and before that, people often told stories to let out their emotions.
Centennial’s counselors work diligently to give everyone they talk to their full attention. Just like any profession, counseling has its ups and downs and each counselor can have a different viewpoint. Counseling is a heavy-headed career, requiring the ability to balance work with one’s personal life while also making room for others.
“The first thing that is hard is the unexpected. You have a plan of what you want to accomplish today and then you have other things coming at you so you just have to learn to prioritize and shift gears really fast. The other part is being able to leave work at school, and not take it home with you. I have to turn off my work brain and then go home to my other brain. You will learn a lot of information and you just have to turn it on and off,” Anderson said.
Another CHS counselor, Ms. Kiekhoefer, who has been a counselor for six years, shared her insight: “I became a counselor after being a middle school math teacher and I found myself really connecting with students and then wanting to share more about their personal stories, but because I was a math teacher I was always conflicted with other responsibilities and duties in the classroom, so I chose to transition into counseling so I could spend more time with kids and less time looking at grade books and grading tests,” Kiekhoefer said.
When asked which grade levels Ms. Kiekhoefer liked to counsel more, she responded: “I actually like high school counseling the best, and I like that I get to focus on life beyond school with a focus on career readiness and college readiness. I also like that high school kids are more articulate with their feelings, and so they can communicate what they’re feeling and what’s going on in their lives better than a kindergartner. A lot of the meltdowns in kindergarten [are] usually related to something I don’t think they don’t really know how to communicate with.” Kiekhoefer said.
Interested in counseling others? Ms. Kiekhoefer gave her advice about counseling and the skills required. “You need to be a problem solver, and you would need to be a collaborator. Things aren’t always what they seem, so you have to be curious rather than judgmental about the issues that walk through your door.”
