An Interview with Mrs. Michelle Kefford, 2018 FSCA School-Based Administrator of the Year
By: Kari Rankine, 2018-2019 FSCA Emerging Leader
How do you see the role of the school counselor impacting the students in your school?
At our school, school counselors impact students through personalization and accessibility. Our school counselors go into classes and push-in regularly during study halls to talk to students in small groups about grade-level specific topics and concerns. Our school counselors also set up in the courtyard with their laptops during lunch periods to ensure that students can easily approach them and ask questions or get advice. Another way that our school counselors impact the students is by ensuring that every student gets a one-on-one meeting with their counselor every year prior to course selection. This allows the school counselor to ensure that the student is on track and allows the student to ask questions that are tailored to their specific goals and their future. It also allows the counselors to examine and tie in the student’s academic strengths and interests with their future educational and career goals and options.
How do you best utilize the school counselors in your school?
I believe that school counselors need to counsel, and they need to be able to have face time with the students to do their jobs. I am not a big fan of auditorium presentations, so at our school, we utilize opportunities to push-in to classrooms and have small group discussions with the students. In Broward County we have an every-other-day study hall for the students, so we also utilize this time. Our counselors also use Naviance to interactively guide students with information on post-secondary education, scholarships, career planning, and long term goals.
What changes need to be made in your district to best utilize school counselors in the schools?
We need more counselors. At our school, we recently got a family counselor on staff, which has been great. When you have even a small percentage of students who need to be checked up on, having more counselors to check in on them and provide resources can be a critical part of meeting the student’s needs.
In what way do you support your school counselors so they can be the front-line mental health leaders in your school?
One of the ways that I support our school counselors is through listening to their needs and not filling their time with other “stuff” so that they can have face time and provide direct services to the students. Another way I support them is through increasing their accessibility to the students by removing both physical and non-physical barriers. Advocating for additional staff, such as testing coordinators, is another great way to support school counselors as well.
How does the administrative/school counselor relationship set the tone for your school?
Our administration works hand in hand with school counselors as a team, and we set our tone as having a team approach. At our school, our administrators step in and do scheduling, schedule changes, and help with any other aspects as needed to free up our school counselors time so they can work with students in a counseling capacity.
What advice would you offer to new school counselors?
As soon as you become a school counselor, work form a collaborative/team approach. Make building relationships and offering personalized experiences the heart of what you do. People often ask me why our school continues to perform at such a high level, and I tell them that I continue to focus on the relationships between the adults and the kids in the building and everything else just falls into place. Another thing is to participate and work with the teachers and the administration to get in on the work. For example, at our school the administrators (including myself) step in and help run EOC help sessions to prepare the kids for their upcoming exams. You don’t have to be a teacher to get involved with teaching the kids, as part of the team you can use your experience to step in and help.
Mrs. Michelle Kefford is the FSCA 2018 School-Based Administrator of the Year. She also is the recent winner of both the 2019 Broward School District Principal of the Year and the 2019 Florida Principal of the Year awards. The purpose of this award is to recognize a school-based administrator who has promoted and supported the school counseling program in their school. The nominee must have consistently made a significant contribution to the improvement and/or support of the school counseling program.
Mrs. Kefford has been an administrator with Broward County since 2005. She supports existing and new developmental school counseling program(s) within the school. For example, she has made significant contributions to the improvement of the school counseling program, assists school counselors with their profession and implementation of their profession, and recognizes the importance of the school counseling program within the school.
Her Director of School Counseling stated: “During my interview I spoke of the importance of the ASCA model and once hired was invited to discuss how the ASCA model could be effectively implemented and employed at Charles W. Flanagan HS. With her support, I have been able to hold regularly scheduled staff meetings dedicated to the development and implementation of a true counseling curriculum based on ASCA National Standards.”
Her nominator shared, “As a principal who recognizes the value of school counseling Mrs. Kefford volunteered to host a session at her school in which area principals and school counseling directors met to analyze student data review school counseling needs assessments, set goals to maximize the impact school counseling on student success and collaborate on an effective ASCA program but also helped facilitate a process to assist several other schools in building and sustaining their own successful programs.
Mrs. Kefford, in coordination with her school counseling department, developed and implemented a monitoring program for struggling students and ongoing support for students in need, resulting in 69% of those students demonstrating learning gains. Congratulations to Mrs. Michelle Kefford the 2018 FSCA School Counselor Advocate-Administrative
