Are Your Students Prepared for College or a Career? Working for Disney was my singular career goal throughout high school and college. Yes, my career interests were pretty much set once I realized that my baseball talents had topped out by 9th grade! But not every...
College and Career Readiness Get ready because College Week is coming! Do you celebrate it in your school? It occurs this year from April 30 to May 4 and its most exciting point occurs on May 2nd, which is College Signing Day. College Signing Day and College Week are...
These Worksheets Will Help You Develop Student Leaders Student leadership is part of a rock solid foundation for strong school culture, but steering students in that positive direction can be a challenge. That’s why our leadership expert, Stephen Amundson, has...
Crisis Prevention and Intervention Dealing with student crises is a sad, but very important part of our job as school-based counselors, educators, and administrators. With so much tragedy in the news these days over school violence, I thought it was time that I share...
We must take action to create peaceful and positive school culture. Here’s how: The recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida has rocked educators and students across America to their core. Once again, schools are faced with terrifying concerns for safety. We...
You Don’t Have to Break The Bank to Make An Impact I just heard about a really cool event called “Hug Me!” In this event, students and staff wrote their story – spoke their truth – on a poster board and held it out in front of...
Daily Themes: Creating Culture in Class If you’re looking for cultural direction within your school, a great place to start is with a MISSION. Your mission statement should be brief, precise, and direct. For example, if attendance is poor, your mission statement...
Stress & Anxiety Management During Testing Season Unless you’ve been living under a rock or inhabiting another planet, you know very well that we are hurtling headfirst into testing season! In this post, I’d like to address stress management during...
School Shootings: What You & I Can Do! School shootings are one the hardest things to digest because they fly in the face of everything we believe. We love kids. We love our schools. We love the work we do. I’ve been in this fight since we first made the TEEN...
3 Ideas to Help Relieve Stress On Your Campus Stress! You feel it, your staff feels it, and your students feel it. As a marriage and family therapist, I help my clients and my schools work through this unrelenting issue. After years of graduate school, over a...
Winning the Battle on Lunch Time Stress When I first heard about lunch time stress, I had to look it up and I thought to myself, “Is this even a thing?” After all, I was the teacher who either offered students the option to eat lunch in my classroom with...
How to Create Student Leaders Are your student leaders on poster patrol, or are they actually being trained and directed to lead your campus culture? I often visit schools where student leaders are more focused on making posters and producing theme days than actually...
Student Support Groups in Schools To start off 2018 on an educational best-practice note, let’s talk student support groups! I am just bursting with so many ideas and resources on how to run support groups in the counseling office or classroom! A student support...
Three years ago I wanted to QUIT! I wanted out of student activities! My frustration level had reached an unhealthy point, and I was tired of the endless march of tasks and trials. Working in education is demanding, and sometimes those demands overwhelm us, but no...
Self-Care Tips for School-Based Counselors, Admins & Staff The holiday season is upon us and self care is more important than ever. Many agree that this is the most stressful time of year to work in a school! Student behavior zooms all over the spectrum as...
Quick and Easy Daily Themes to Student Leadership How can I encourage excellent student leadership as an Activities Director? I ask myself that question every few months, and one of the most effective tools I’ve discovered is Daily Themes! Highly successful and...
Cyberbully Prevention With the rise of social media over the last decade, cyberbullying has become a huge problem for students and for schools. To follow up with my October post about bullying prevention, I thought it would be timely to explore the cyberbullying...
A Guide to Stopping Bullying at School As much as we don’t like to admit it, bullying is as prevalent in schools as gym class and homework. According to the Cyberbullying Research Center, school bullying rates have increased by 35% from 2016 to 2019. Sadly, some...
We all want maximum exposure for our big school activities, but sometimes people just don’t show! How can we draw interest in our next event from parents and students who already have a full schedule? That answer is in stacking several small events to lead up to your...
The 5 Best Ways to Save Money on School Assembly Programs $600 to bring a TEEN TRUTH assembly to your school would be a crazy deal, right? Well, that is exactly where we started. I was making most of the sales calls back then in 2006, and let me tell you, not everyone...
“Your school is too diverse for this to work.” “Your teachers are too dumb to pull it off.” “Your time, funding, and testing practices will stop you from making it happen.” As you might have guessed, I call total B.S. on those notions! Click here for this CNN article...
5 minutes! That’s all it takes for me to know if a school has strong culture or not. After visiting over 1,000 schools I can feel it. Great culture requires a strong admin team and a tightly connected community, but more often than not it is created by the Director of...
One of the biggest problems our school programs face is money. We have amazing teachers who want to do amazing things, but everything costs so much money! Cash shouldn’t get in the way of education, so here’s a great way to raise thousands of dollars in ONE NIGHT!...
The average Director of Activities (also know as Student Council Advisors) lasts for 3.5-years. Let’s take a moment to think about the significant implications this statistic offers in terms of building school culture. Honestly, if every 3.5-years a school is...
