OVERWHELMED: Time constraints at Riverside Poly High School overwork counselors.
By Valeria Gutierrez, Staff Writer
Feet are tapping, eyes are rolling, phone batteries are draining and mouths are yawning. Next. Patience starts running low as the tedious line appears frozen. Next. One by one, the counselors call in each student until all 2,785 Poly Bears are registered for the new year’s classes. Over a month is put into the process of registering students, fixing classes and creating thousands of schedules, yet minor mistakes such as missing or double periods still occur annually.
Although these inconveniences are easily fixed, other errors may take greater effort to correct. Picture this: your dream college accepts you with reasonable conditions during your junior year before any other seniors can even apply. You happily inform your counselor, expecting his or her assistance with the college’s terms of enrollment. The last required classes for your senior year are set and ready to go, but within the first few weeks of starting off the year, a rejection letter arrives.
This nightmare was Tyler Demshki’s (12) reality, who was accepted to the University of California Riverside’s (UCR) Guaranteed Admission Program (GAP). GAP offered him an opportunity to reserve his entry into UCR during his junior year. In order to gain full acceptance into UCR, Demshki needed to complete one year of English and a fine art. During his junior year, Demshki signed up for Music Technology although at the time, the class was not considered an “A-G” fine art course. When Demshki’s counselor, Danielle Sovine, was asked about Music Technology’s eligibility as an “A-G” course this school year she replied, “It was to be approved, then it came in that [Music Technology] was still pending.” Although Demshki was able to transfer out to an “A-G” accepted course without difficulty, how could such important information slip through?
Counselors are busy regardless of the time of the year. Upperclassmen know this and lowerclassmen quickly learn. With only five counselors at Poly High School, each counselor must take on approximately 500 students. The counselors’ full-time jobs consist of anything from counseling to scheduling to keeping up with universities. When Sovine was asked about her daily tasks as a counselor, she promptly responded with a laugh and said, “I don’t know if I could tell you all of that in five minutes.”
With so much to do in so little time, it’s understandable why mistakes pass through the system here and there. Since counselors are only human, they can always use a few extra hands to help out. Poly offers teacher and office aids as an elective, so why not counselor aids? Although counselor aids wouldn’t have the same knowledge as the actual counselors, the extra help could be used for typing in necessary information and checking incoming paperwork. In order to protect other students’ information and keep sabotage out of the system, only selected students would be allowed to choose this elective. In the spring, instead of counselors taking one student at a time, rooms with computers could be utilized for multiple students typing in their own future classes. Simultaneously, the counselors would use master computers to monitor the process and answer any questions.
With these possible solutions, counselors would be able to save time, keep up with more students and eliminate more errors. The counselors are all for changes that assist the student body so it functions more effectively and efficiently. If they are willing to give us the fuel to go above and beyond, shouldn’t we be willing to take the wheel?