Is School Counselors a waste of money?

Can someone please tell me when the job of school counselor went from teach our children how to settle disputes without violence and morphed into their only job being changing a student’s class schedule, handing out those class schedules and locker combinations?  Maybe it’s just me and this was always the case.  If so then please forgive my interruption but if it’s not then it is high time we looked at reversing that policy and put them back to the purpose of which that position was formed.

I thought that a school counselor’s job was to teach our children how to resolve disputes without violence even if that student home life and surroundings are filled with it.  I thought they were allowed to pull each student into their offices, find out what the real problem was and then find avenues to fix that issue so that student could proceed with getting a good quality education and not be allowed to fall through the cracks of a system normally comprised of people with grown kids or no kids at all.  I thought that when it came to a verbal or physical confrontation the first job of school administrators were to seek and find the true cause and then remove that cancer as a doctor would from their patient before casting that child out into the streets for those streets to educate instead of a school.  I thought maybe a counselor would be able to pull each of those combatants separately to find the problem, figure out a solution to that problem then pull them back in together and let them know what they needed to do to solve it.  This may sound too simple but not doing it could be the reason for so many other things that happens later in those children’s life.

To teach them how to solve disputes without violence will either teach them something that they are not learning at home or reinforce the education that parents are teaching their children.  It will teach them how to deal with people that they may come across later in life like some obnoxious boss and instead of going postal or quitting; they now know how to sit down and talk to that person.  Getting up and going to school, moving from one classroom to another in a specific amount of time and having a schedule of events that you need to adhere to should be a way to condition our children for employment like getting up to go to work every day, moving from work station to work station and showing up on time.  All these things need to be the lessons that are demonstrated and taught by school counselors but instead they seem only able to handle teaching our children how to avoid responsibility by running away from a class that they chose to take and keeping up with all those locker combinations just in case you child refuses to memorize theirs.  I guess teaching our children dispute resolution and making them aware that school is preparation for employment later on is not as important as making sure that they can get into their lockers.  Just my thought, I could be wrong.