Assigned Counselor: Fill & Download for Free

I attended a predominantly white high school. I was 1 out of 8 Blacks in a school with 4,000 students. I wanted to learn more about attending university. I would ask my assigned counselor Miss L. Roy to help me. She would always refuse. Finally, I set up an appointment for my mother and me to meet with Miss Roy.My mother and I get to her office and sit down. She proceeds to tell my mother that I am not college material. She goes on to say that not only am I not college material, I am also not junior college material. And she ends with letting my mother know that she won't waste any time helping me discover any universities.My GPA was a 2.4. I did suck at math and science. But I did either excel or pass the rest of my classes. Needless to say, I was transferred over to another counselor. However, I decided to handle researching in-state universities on my own.I'd like to thank Ms. L. Roy of Lincoln-Way Central High School in New Lenox, Illinois for your words. They became the fuel, along with words from other people, to help me achieve a bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2000 and a master's degree in Public Administration in 2010. Thanks for pooping on me and not realizing I used your words as fertilizer to grow my life.

It wasn’t until I was close to graduation that I learned that I had an assigned guidance counselor that I was supposed to meet with at least once per year.I was an out-of-state student, and my college (DePaul) had a special program for incoming out-of-state freshmen called “Discover Chicago.” We started a week before the other students and, as the name implies, we went on field trips around Chicago. It was fun. I made some friends.One day, before we loaded the bus for a field trip, we met individually with a college counselor to pick our classes for the upcoming semester. I went into the counselor’s office, we chatted for a bit, and he suggested some classes for me. Then he gave me a print out of my schedule and a sheet that listed all of the types of credit hours I’d need to graduate over the next four years.I kept the sheet and picked my own classes online from that point on.Three and a half years later, I got a letter saying that I needed to speak to my counselor before graduating. I didn’t know he was my assigned counselor. I thought he was just the guy who happened to be in the office at my assigned time all of those years ago.I went to his office and he pulled up my file to discover that I hadn’t seen him since that first day so many years ago. Then he looked at all of the classes I’d taken over those years, and started asking questions:“Why the hell did you take metaphysics and epistemology?!?!”“Because that paper you gave me said I needed two philosophy courses, and those sounded cool.”“You needed two general philosophy courses… The ones you took were 300-level courses for philosophy majors.”I didn’t know. Well, I knew they were 300-level courses. I didn’t know that meant “just for people majoring in that field.”That’s when he asked me why I didn’t come to him each year to help plan which classes to take.Because I had no idea I was supposed to do that! No one told me! I thought the whole reason for the sheet he gave me and the ability to sign up for classes on my own was so I wouldn’t need to keep coming to his office.Anyway, apparently I was supposed to check in with this guy from time to time to make sure I was taking the right classes. I ended up taking about six classes that were unnecessarily difficult, or just unnecessary, for my major.I wouldn’t be all that upset if not for the fact that I’m still paying for those classes now, some 20 years later.

At the beginning of my time in high school, the guidance counselors met with everyone and hammered home two crucial facts:Failure to graduate equals becoming completely useless to society. (I kid you not, my guidance counselor told us she could not think of a single high school dropout she had known who did not end up in the gutter with only alcohol and drugs as companions.)You must take XYZ classes and achieve XYZ GPA to graduate.In my band class, the instructors informed us we could petition for waivers so that we could take band instead of physical education. The waiver process was long and tough. If you failed the slightest stipulation or falsified something, it could set you back one year or even get you expelled. Waivers were serious matters. There would be surprise evaluations throughout the year to ensure we were obeying the terms of our waiver. The waiver committee would go over us with a fine-tooth comb. But if we really thought our record was good enough, we could apply for a waiver. And that was my original plan: Band class all four years in place of PE while also getting all of my required classes and electives.Of course, things don’t go according to plan. I accidently took far more PE classes than I intended, but somehow (despite the constant, constant handholding of the guidance counselors) I only took one semester out of the four required semesters of foreign language class. It wasn’t even on purpose; I just noticed it as I was going over my transcripts the semester before graduation. Panicked, I rushed down to the counseling office. I told the secretary it was urgent. She ushered me into a meeting with my assigned counselor.My counselor didn’t even look up from the computer she was typing on as I explained. She held up one finger before finishing. Opening a drawer, she produced a blank waiver application. The lady scribbled my name at the top and my graduating year. Then, she skipped the rest of the information on it. Instead, my counselor signed the bottom of it and ticked the ‘Approved’ box. She looked at me for the first time since I walked in and said “There you go. I’ll scan it in later.”Now, I was not a good student. I had to go through summer school. I got low grades. There were no awards or trophies I won for the school. But somehow, despite all their fear-mongering, I received a half-baked waiver after five minutes of one-sided conversation.At the same time, we had roughly 15% drop out rate throughout the four years I was there. 10% of the seniors in my class were held back or otherwise rejected for graduation. I worked for the yearbook team senior year; we had to edit six seniors out of the book because they became pregnant. Our AP classes had high attendance rates but low passing rates. We were on national news for an evening because our newly-minted humanities class lynched a teddy bear in the commons. The shop programs were cycled out (not properly preparing students for college) in favor of a biomedical program. That program had to be quickly altered my junior year because they realized it had accidentally incapacitated all of its participants’ ability to graduate. I graduated with a girl who commented on social media that she didn’t use tampons so that she didn’t have to take them out whenever she needed to pee.There are so many failures of education in that last paragraph, right?The administration saw fit to continue their On Track program, despite all this. We had to take time out of class to take four hour personality quizzes. Students were grouped together and lectured in special study periods about going to college. Everything was based on fear tactics. Don’t drop out— you’ll become homeless. You have to go to college, otherwise you’ll never have a job or a future. If you want to be happy, then you want a high school diploma. Most of us in my social circle agreed that the months leading up to graduation were stress-filled, anxious moments.But despite the propaganda war my school seemed to wage on us about graduating, I was able to waltz in and be handed a waiver (one I did not qualify for) by an uninterested administrator. That doesn’t seem quite right to me.