Carol Miller (right), a member of the Lansing Faculty Association, receives her Counselor of the Year award from Gloria Jean, president of the New York State School Counselor Association. Miller is a middle school counselor at the Lansing Central School District.
Middle school counselor Carol Miller loves the “starfish story.” Sharing it with students, she has found, helps give them a sense of their importance and value as individuals.
In the story, a young boy sees hundreds of starfish washed up on the beach and is feverishly tossing them back in the water so they won’t die, when a passerby tells him he’s wasting his time – there are too many to save. The boy points to one of the starfish he has returned to the water and says, “But I made a difference to that one.”
Miller, a counseling veteran from Tompkins County, shared that inspirational story about making a difference with a roomful of colleagues recently at a conference where the New York State School Counselor Association named her the state’s School Counselor of the Year.
“As school counselors, we are the difference,” she said. “We need not to reach hundreds or thousands, but we need to reach ‘that one.’ So many of you have already reached one.”
Miller, a member of the Lansing Faculty Association, has certainly reached more than one student in the Lansing Central School District, where she has worked with students at every grade level in her 22-year career.
Embracing 21st-century technology, she has not only extended her reach over students and built a bond with their parents, she has forged a learning network with school counselors across the nation and throughout the world.
“Many counselors are alone in their building and their districts,” Miller explained. “They often don’t have the support from another counselor colleague to help them with problems, provide support, bounce ideas off of or share the resources.”
Technology helps Miller make that support possible. In addition to maintaining a professional counseling presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, she interacts with followers on her blog, The Middle School Counselor (themiddleschoolcounselor.com), and links them to other useful sites.
Students – “even the quietest of students” – find their voice in the videos she produces. A recent production encourages students to demonstrate how they inspire others. Some deal with timely topics such as bullying. Most can be found on YouTube, where they can be accessed by other counselors.
At the recent NYSSCA conference, Miller hosted a workshop on how to become a “tech-savvy” counselor and even filled in for a last-minute cancellation with a popular presentation on how to use social media to establish a personal learning network.
Technology, she explained, gives her access to thousands of counselors – and their good ideas.
“I use their examples to provide an even better program,” she said. “Each day, I’m inspired to try a new idea, learn a new program or practice a new technique.”
And each day, another counselor is inspired by Miller’s efforts. “Michelle,” a graduating college student in Virginia, commented on Miller’s blog that she was “really excited but really nervous” about her upcoming counseling internship in a middle school.
“I want to be the best counselor I can be,” she wrote, “and reading your site will be a great start for information and creative ideas that I can use while becoming the counselor I want to be. Blessings.”
Winning the statewide honor from the NYSSCA now puts Miller on the list of candidates for the American School Counselor Association’s 2015 Counselor of the Year national award.
-- John Strachan
(Carol Miller is a member of the Lansing Faculty Association)