Guidance counselors Pamela Taylor, Kira Hague and Deonyha James speak in the hallway on Sept. 8. Photo by Kalissa Everett
By Fiona Fehrman and Ashley Lopez Pineda
The beginning of the school year is a busy time. Students have schedules to change and forms to turn in, both things that school counselors have to manage.
Every Riverside student has one counselor. But every counselor has about 300 students on their caseload.
This is Pamela Taylor’s fourth semester as a counselor at RHS. She’s changed hundreds of schedules in the past few weeks.
Students get their schedules before school starts in August, but most don’t know the process behind them.
“Once students complete their schedule, the counselors then are supposed to review them to ensure that they’ve signed up for the right classes,” said Taylor.
When students sign up for classes, they sometimes run into issues.
“Students are sometimes unsure about what classes they exactly want,” she said. “They might want to try an AP and because they’re unsure, they’ll choose an English 3 honors and AP Lang.”
Then counselors have to manually change the student’s schedule to only have one English class.
Common problems include students forgetting what they’ve signed up for or students changing their minds about their schedule, according to Taylor.
“The computer saved all of your requests, so we know that you requested it,” she said. “But we don’t want to make students feel bad, so we try to support them and changes that they do want to make.”
If a student is assigned different classes than they want, counselors try to help.
“I know we’re not supposed to take friends and lunch and all that in consideration,” said Taylor. “However, I think if students get most of what they want, they’re happier students, which makes happier teachers and happier parents when they get home, and then they’re enjoying school more.”
Many students have things they would like to change in their schedules. During the first few days of school, students could go to the media center to try and get their issues solved.
“I had to go to the library the other day to fix my schedule,” said senior Layla Hall. “There were a lot of kids in there. It was really packed. I waited for pretty much all of C lunch and all of third period.”
This time of year there are more schedule change requests than the counselors can handle. Changes must be made by the tenth day of the semester.
“I appreciate the patience of our teachers as the counselors try to navigate, getting all the students where they’re supposed to be in their classes,” said Taylor. “They’re six of us and 1,700 students, we are trying to meet the needs of all of our students, families, and teachers.”
