Your 30, 60, 90 Day Plan as a New School Counselor
Your first year as a school counselor can be intimidating. A clear plan can reduce overwhelm, keep you organized, and help ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Use this new school counselor plan to navigate your first 30, 60, and 90 days and set yourself and your students up for a successful year!
What to Do During The First 30 Days
1. Create and send a needs assessment
Using a needs assessment is a great way to understand the needs of your student population. By sending a few questions out to teachers and staff, you can quickly determine which topics to base your small groups and SEL class lessons around. I love using Google Forms to create a quick questionnaire.
2. Meet with your principal
Meet with your admin to discuss your expectations and role as the school counselor. Remember, it's never too early to start advocating for your position. You can even bring this 30, 60, 90 day plan to the meeting as a discussion guide.
If you're able to contact the previous counselor, they can provide you with a wealth of information about previous students, programs they implemented, etc. Just be sure to take it with a grain of salt and get to know students yourself rather than judge them based on what the previous counselor shares.
3. Teach a meet the counselor lesson
I absolutely love teaching a meet the counselor lesson at the beginning of the school year! Presenting a 'Meet the Counselor' lesson achieves 3 things:
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Advocates for your role as a school counselor so it is very clear what duties you are and are not supposed to do.
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Helps all students get to know you in a fun, positive way. This sets a good foundation instead of the first time someone meets you is during a crisis.
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Shows the students how the monthly counseling lessons will look.
You can play a fun game show like this one to make the content engaging.
4. Attend or host a back to school night
If your school has a Back to School Night or Open House, I highly recommend setting up a table. You can explain the program, detail what preventative services you'll be offering, and introduce yourself to parents using brochures and infographics. This is a great way to share what the role of the school counselor is, further advocating for your position. If your school doesn't have a back to school night, consider hosting your own!
5. Establish a referral process
You will determine which students to see based on referrals from teachers, parents, or possibly the students themselves! Check out the referral form I use here. You will need to clearly communicate how people can make referrals. You can have a digital form on your website or a paper-based system.
6. Map out SEL Class Lessons
Figure out if your school has a curriculum and what you're going to use to teach SEL lessons. Determine how often you will be teaching lessons, which topics you'll cover, and when you will teach each topic.
7. Decorate your office
This is the fun part! The work you do as a school counselor is so valuable, and while decorating your school counseling office is definitely not a top priority, it is a fun, simple way to make students feel welcome and accepted.
What to Do During The First 60 Days
1. Establish your counseling caseload
It’s important to remember that your priority is creating a proactive and preventative comprehensive school counseling program.
So in addition to collecting parent, teacher, and student self-referrals, try the following methods when forming your caseload to ensure no one slips through the cracks.
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Meet with your admin to discuss high needs students
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Email teachers and ask directly which students they think would benefit from counseling
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Compile a check-in list of students seen last year
2. Schedule class lessons
I set up this system of teacher sign-ups and love it! I have used it at multiple schools for multiple years. Taking the time to do the legwork upfront helps you avoid the back-and-forth yo-yo and eliminate the logistical nightmare of trying to plan everything individually.
Tech Tools for Teacher Sign-Ups
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Google Sheets: List available times and share the sheet with teachers so they can fill in their ideal times. Set this up in August and have them sign up for the entire year!
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Google Calendar: Use a Google Calendar (or Outlook) to create an event for the class lessons. This sends the teacher an invitation. Simplify the process further by using a recurring calendar invite. Note: Keep holidays in mind when scheduling to avoid confusion.
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Calendly: This is a free website where teachers can sign up for appointments with you. It is super user friendly on both ends. You write in your available times and it does the rest for you! It syncs with your calendar to keep consistent scheduling.
The initial set-up for teacher sign-ups can be time-consuming, but it’s way better than feeling stressed and crunched for time throughout the year. Plus you are likely seeing less kids in August and September, so it’s a good time to get your systems in place before referrals start coming in.
3. Prepare data collection tools
Determine how you will be collecting pre and post-counseling services data so you can measure your program’s effectiveness and later advocate for your position. Read this post to see my favorite data collection methods.
4. Plan small group curriculum
Figure out which groups you plan on leading based on referrals you have received. Ask your school to purchase a curriculum, work with what you have, or create your own!
5. Organize school-wide activities
Decide if you’re going to help organize any school-wide activities. These school-wide initiatives can be a lot of fun but do require some planning. For example, a bullying prevention fun run is best done in October, Bullying Prevention Month!
What to Do During The First 90 Days
1. Teach SEL class lessons
Now that you have planned and scheduled your class lessons, it’s time to start teaching!
2. Facilitate small groups
You’ve selected curriculum and received referrals; now you get to start group counseling. This is my favorite part of the job!
3. Meet with individual students
Like small groups, after you’ve received referrals and scheduled students, it’s time for boots on the ground intervention! Check out this guide for everything you need to know about individual counseling.
4. Conduct pre-counseling self-assessments
Self-assessments are a simple way to measure your program's effectiveness. At the beginning of each group or individual session, ask students to fill out a pre-counseling self-assessment on the topic you will be working on with them. During their last session, have them complete the same self-assessment. You’ll then compare the results to see where progress has been made. Simple as that!
5. Send out behavior surveys
Behavior Progress Monitoring Surveys have a long name, but they are really quite simple. You send these surveys to parents and teachers now, before services have started, so they can rate how their child/student is doing.
Just like the self-assessments, you’ll send them again after counseling services have ended. You can also send one mid-services to ensure your counseling methods are on the right track. Use this feedback to adjust and tweak your program to best serve students’ needs.
Final Thoughts
Now that you have a 3-month roadmap to get started, you can stress less and focus on helping as many students as possible! You’ve got this, counselor friend!
Click here to sign up for my free School Counselor Bootcamp so you can be confident and prepared going into your first year!
