How to Best Support Students at Every Age, According to School Counselors

WRITTEN BY LIZ REGALIA | PHOTOS BY ALICE KEENEY

Every week, Ashley Hall counselors Katie Neighbours, Lyndsey Bowles, and Jennifer Vaughan leave their respective corners of campus to meet as a department. Between them, they work with students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Despite their daily conversations with students being different, they come together each week to share resources, advice, and current trends they’re seeing in both the news and the School’s very own hallways.

While it may seem small, Ashley Hall’s counseling department is now the largest it’s ever been with the addition of Bowles, the team’s counselor dedicated to working with students in grades 5-8, who joined at the start of the 2022-23 school year. Prior to her arrival, Neighbours worked with grades 7-12 for eight years, and Vaughan with grades K-6 for six respectively. “Last year, we both noticed we felt stretched very, very thin in terms of trying to meet the needs of all our students,” Neighbours says.

“I think the pandemic highlighted a lot,” Vaughan adds. “The rise of depression and anxiety among kids is now not only very much in the news, but also on people’s minds. It was a really rough time for a lot of our students and continues to be. Some kids were out of school two or more years – talk about the emotional-social development missed during that time.”

In fact, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, more than a third of high school students reported they experienced poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 44 percent reported they persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past year.

“We are lucky that Ashley Hall has always prioritized the emotional and mental health needs of its students through supporting a robust wellness program,” Neighbours says. “Now, it has expanded its counseling department to give our students more resources. I’ve heard so many students say that the relationships they have with faculty here is the best thing about our School. We are just another extension of that strength. Our students know that they’re surrounded by supportive, caring adults, and they can reach out for help when they need it.”

This year, Neighbours worked with grades 9-12, Vaughan worked with grades K-4, and Bowles settled into her new role serving the middle grades. The ability for each counselor to focus on a smaller cohort of students has been a game changer.

“The social and emotional needs of students at each stage of development are so different,” Neighbours says. “In turn, they require different types of support. You can think of it as a progression: When students are younger, they’re naturally very self-focused and should be. Starting with early adolescence, they become more aware of their self in relation to their peers, which is both good and bad. Then in high school, the goal of a counselor is really to empower them to make good decisions and recognize that they can have an impact on the greater world.”

Here, in their own words, Vaughan, Bowles, and Neighbours take us through the different needs of their students to shine a light on how to best support them at every stage of development.

LOWER GRADES | K-4 | JENNIFER VAUGHAN

PARENTS AS PARTNERS As counselor for grades kindergarten through fourth, I probably involve parents more than the others simply because of the age of my students. Being partners with families as much as possible is very important because you need to work as a team with the teacher and the parents. This is a little different because when they get older, it is more important for the child to feel like there’s a sense of confidentiality. In kindergarten, first, second, even third and fourth grade, however, they tell their parents everything.

FOCUS ON SOCIAL I would say that one of the biggest things I deal with is problem solving with friendships. For a long time, social issues were always first in terms of prevalence and second was anxiety. During the pandemic, it was anxiety and then social, but partly it was because they couldn’t socialize with one another. But now it’s kind of flipped back. Anxiety now comes second to social issues and shows itself with perfectionism and the anxiousness that it brings in the lower grades.

BUILDING BLOCKS My students are still learning the very basics of problem solving. They still need a lot of guidance and help with that. So for example, I don’t even start talking about the difference between tattling and speaking up until second grade because they are just developing those skills. And they do develop them. Then, when they get to middle school, they start to develop them in context. So they may have learned a skill in second, third, or fourth grade, but it’s different when they have to use it with a friend in middle school.

MIDDLE GRADES | 5-8 | LYNDSEY BOWLES

GROWING PAINS During the middle school years, everything’s just rapid – rapid changes physically, emotionally, socially. Since the growth is so rapid, nobody can quite keep up. It creates some difficulty with emotional regulation for the students and those who are trying to support them, whether that be the faculty or the parents, so bridging that gap of understanding is important.

AIDING INDEPENDENCE When students move into those middle years, they have this extreme desire for independence from adults. They turn to peers more than they do to adults, yet they’re not quite cognitively or emotionally ready to manage the new situations they will face. So, they need guidance, and that’s why devoting time to grow relationships with students as a counselor is a priority during these influential years.

OVERCOMING INSECURITY Research is very strong supporting the fact that at the onset of puberty, female self-esteem and self-confidence just bottoms out. There’s a big gap that exists between boys and girls in that regard. But when it comes to my wellness classes, the level of openness, honesty, and vulnerability is immense compared to my previous experiences at coed schools. We can go places much deeper than I once could because while they are insecure, they feel they are in a room full of people who are their equals. Regardless of it being at a historically single-gender school, that is truly the culture that we’ve been able to cultivate at Ashley Hall, and it’s crucial to foster it in the middle grade years.

UPPER GRADES | 9-12 | KATIE NEIGHBOURS

SET VALUES With physical and hormonal changes in puberty, insecurities spike which then makes students ask: What are my values? Suddenly, they are comparing themselves to everyone else. In ninth grade, they’re still struggling to figure it all out. In tenth and eleventh grade is when you really see them take on a different maturity. Within the wellness class that I teach, which is a required course for high school students, we do a values exploration in the first unit. It’s the foundation, and it encourages them to reflect: What things are really important to me and what do I really care about? Then we circle back to that always when we talk about healthy communication, boundary setting, and peer pressure. It all comes back to your values.

TEAMING WITH TEACHERS In the Upper School years, I get mostly self-referrals – students coming into my office to talk. But I also attend teacher meetings and so every once in a while, a teacher will raise an observation and ask me to check in on a student. Counselors are really a team with teachers. Between us, we kind of all know what’s going on with pretty much all our students. That’s one big benefit of being in an independent school – it’s hard to slip through the cracks. As counselors, we also have the opportunity to meet with teachers and administrators and come up with a plan of how to best support students.

MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT As expected in any school, some of what I see in high school is more serious. The older the person, the bigger the problems. They can manage so many things on their own at this age, like friendships and social conflicts, because they’ve gained the skills. I get some of that, but I also get a lot of larger mental health concerns where students are feeling overwhelmed or stressed. Sometimes it may require outside intervention, but I think we see issues before they get extremely detrimental. That’s truly the benefit of having multiple counselors on campus – students always have a resource readily accessible to ask for help; then we can help manage from there.