Counsellors’ rollout should start immediately

Dear Editor,
The Caribbean Voice (TCV) applauds the decision of the Ministry of Education to finally place counsellors in high schools across Guyana. TCV has been lobbying for this since 2014. We hope the rollout will start immediately, and that once all high schools are staffed, primary schools would also then get counsellors.
The fact is that the issues affecting students in high schools and negatively impacting their development usually have their genesis long before these students enter high schools, and addressing them at the entry level is so much easier than after the issues have become embedded, ingrained, and often times chronic.
We note, in the media, reports that counsellors would focus on addressing school dropouts (truancy). However, we hope that their ‘job descriptions’ would be much more embracing and inclusive, and that all psychosocial issues would be identified, diagnosed, and addressed. We further hope that these counsellors would also be tasked with addressing the psychosocial needs of school staff, and provide scope for staff to become partners in dealing with issues faced by students.
We also suggest that each school should have a family outreach/parent coordinator, who would liaise between the home and the school, ensuring timely communication and total involvement of the home, since issues often originate in the home/ community, and thus the home must become part of the redress and solution, even necessitating unlearning and relearning by parents. Without this school/home nexus, addressing the issues affecting students would be rather difficult, if not impossible.
Finally, given that parents must be facilitated and provided with scope to become part of the solution, the parent coordinator can be the person who would work with the counsellor and school to plan focus groups with, and training of, parents, as well as actual home visits when those become necessary.

Sincerely,
Annan Boodram
The Caribbean Voice