How Washington Township won two state-wide awards for school counseling

If you walk into Northview Middle School on any given Wednesday, you’ll likely be greeted by a big friendly yellow lab named Charlie at the front door.

As the sixth, seventh and eighth graders enter the school to start the day, the students rush to greet Charlie and his owner Molly Henry in the Northview atrium.

While some students stoop to pet Charlie, others high-five or hug Henry, who received the Indiana School Counselor Association’s Trailblazer award this year. Just a stone's throw away at North Central High School, counselor Aaron Shelby snagged the association's high school counselor of the year award.

The work Henry does with Charlie along with other preventative programming throughout the school year represents a shift in the way the district approaches school counseling.

School counselors, sometimes known as guidance counselors, had mostly been relied upon to step in to respond to crisis situations or help with class scheduling. Now school counselors like Henry and Shelby take a more proactive approach to their work, said Jen Dodson, Washington Township’s district lead school counselor.

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“We’re doing some strategic things to be really intentional with how we approach school counseling, so it isn’t just come knock on my door if you’re crying, but instead addressing all of the needs that our students have now,” Dodson told IndyStar.

Those needs have increased over the last few years, especially with the rise in mental health concerns for youth in the U.S. since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Molly Henry, Northview Middle School counselor, Trailblazer Award

Henry’s career has been shaped by the pandemic. Her first full year of working as a school counselor was the 2019-2020 school year. That difficult year made her adaptable and flexible to any situation.

“I think it's never a good idea to just have what you're doing look the same every year because your students aren't the same every year, their needs aren't the same every year,” Henry said. “If you’re truly going to have data-driven programs and practices, that means you have to dig into the data and analyze it every year to figure out what best practices look like.”

Her use of data to create programs helped Henry win her Trailblazer award.

After student survey data showed Henry that her students lacked social awareness skills, she riffed off the school's mascot to create the “feeling like a falcon” program which brought programming into individual classrooms to help kids identify complex feelings beyond the typical vocabulary of mad, happy or afraid.

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The next semester students worked on ways to cope with those feelings. Meanwhile, Henry worked on communicating with parents to help them understand what the students were learning.

Henry credits her relatively low caseload with her success. Henry advises around 270 students, close to the recommended ratio of 250 students to one counselor that the American School Counselor Association recommends.

Typically, Indiana school have some of the worst ratios of students to counselors in the country with an average of 694 students to one counselor, according to data from ASCA.  

Henry’s low ratio is thanks to Washington Township's investing in more counselors by using referendum dollars to fund an additional counselor at Northview.

Henry has been with her current cohort of eighth graders since the sixth grade. As they prepare to move to high school, her big push this year will be to help students with failing grades. She turns to the data to identify students who are failing classes and uses small group or one-on-one work to help them catch up.

“If you want an effective school counseling program, what you’re really looking at is what are this specific group of student’s needs, and what can I do because it’s not a one size fits all approach,” Henry said.

Aaron Shelby, North Central, high school counselor of the year

Shelby has been a school counselor for close to 20 years and most of that time he has been at North Central.

He started his career at Eastwood Middle School and then moved to North Central. 

Dodson said the work that Shelby does is unique because he focuses on helping students figure out the strengths they already have.

To do that, Shelby implemented a peer-mentoring program within the last year called Champions 101, based on a student-athlete mentoring program created by Travis Daugherty, an Indiana high school basketball coach.

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The program focuses on training senior and junior student-athletes to mentor sophomore and freshman athletes.  

“So there are two wins,” Shelby said. “The young kids are learning from the older ones and the older kids are also learning because they’re taking their celebrity platform and saying this is what you’ve got to do to succeed.”

North Central senior Christian Woodson works with Shelby as a student mentor and said he has always tried to lead by example for his younger classmates, but the Champions 101 program teaches him how to lead in other ways.

“I know I have to lead vocally and if guys start lashing out, I need to be able to speak out and tell them how to do it the right way,” Woodson said. “Mr. Shelby has been teaching me how to do that.”

Shelby, a North Central alumnus who played high school football, said that although he never received any intentional coaching on how to be resilient, he wants to share that knowledge with his current students.

“I think part of that is also replacing this narrative of ‘victim of COVID’ to instead saying ‘we have the most resilient kids that the nation has ever seen’,” Shelby said.

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Winning Indiana’s high school counselor of the year is humbling, Shelby said, but also energizes him to keep doing the work.

“I want to make sure I’m practicing what I preach,” Shelby said. “So that students are also learning how to change and adapt and discover their strengths and apply them to any situation.”

For Henry, winning the award has been another reminder that she is on the right path and the work that she’s doing matters, she said.

Henry’s school surprised her during a school convocation on the morning the winners were announced. Afterward, her students rushed to congratulate her and tell her how proud they were to be her students.

“And all I said to them is that it’s all thanks to them,” Henry said. “I wouldn’t be here without them.”  

Contact IndyStar reporter Caroline Beck at 317-618-5807 or CBeck@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @CarolineB_Indy.

Caroline’s reporting is made possible by Report for America and Glick Philanthropies. As part of its work in Marion County, Glick Philanthropies partners with organizations focused on closing access and achievement gaps in education. 

Report for America is a program of The GroundTruth Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening local newsrooms. Report for America provides funding for up to half of the reporter’s salary during their time with us, and IndyStar is fundraising the remainder.  

To learn more about how you can support IndyStar’s partnership with Report for America and to make a donation, visit indystar.com/RFA.