“I get energy from the students,” Maple Grove Senior High counselor Janelle Gillis says. “They have an ‘I can conquer anything’ attitude. High school students are fun. If you give [them] the opportunity to be real, they embrace that. If you’re real with them, the trust that can be built is huge.”
Gillis doesn’t wait for students to come to her office for appointments to deal with career, academic, personal or family concerns. As often as possible, she’s out in the hallways when students are passing from class to class. She attends games, theater and musical performances. And that’s all part of her strategy: Talking with students informally in the hallway makes it easier for them to make an appointment when they need one.
Gillis sees more struggles with mental health than she did ten years ago. “I see a lot of kids that are really busy,” she says. “Social networking has changed relationships. They are used to instant feedback. When you tell them they have to wait for something, they don’t know how.”
She calls Facebook “Fakebook.” She tells students, “You don’t have 2,000 friends,” and then she helps teens understand that people only show their best faces on social media. The “friends” have hard times, too—they just don’t post all the details about them.
But, Gillis adds, “Things really haven’t changed. [Teens] just want someone to show they care. They’re just trying to figure life out.”
Beyond working with individual students, Gillis works with the other counselors at MGSH to help integrate incoming sophomores to the large school. Many of the new students don’t know each other, since they come from a variety of middle schools.
Since 2005, the school has used a program called Link Crew which helps organize a day of activities for sophomores prior to the beginning of the school year. They get acquainted not only with the layout of the school and the counselors, but with pairs of upper class students, who meet with small groups of sophomores in a variety of activities. This allows new students to connect with people they may never otherwise meet. A teen who loves music might meet someone who loves to skateboard. A reader might hit it off with a soccer player. They find things they have in common.
Gillis says, “It’s powerful to hear from peers, ‘It will be fine.’ Adults don’t have the same effect.” It pleases Gillis that more upper class students volunteer than needed. Those mentors represent a cross-section of the school; they are not all natural leaders. After the school year begins, the older students visit the homerooms of “their” sophomores to keep in touch. In this way, the community continues.
Gillis, who has counseled students at Maple Grove Senior High for more than 14 years, has also worked with elementary and junior high students. But, she says, “I think working with high school students is where my strength lies.”
When students graduate and say, “I’ll come back,” she says, “You’d better!” She loves seeing how students change during high school, but says it’s even more fun to watch them discover their paths as young adults.
“I don’t take lightly that they want to share things with me,” she adds. “It’s a humbling thing. You realize why you do what you do.”
Former students share their memories of Ms. Gillis:
“She would always go out of her way to help. She accepted people without judging; no matter who they were or what their past was, she was willing to help them.” —Blake Whitecotton “I would often stay after school just to stop by her office to say, ‘Hi.’ It wasn’t uncommon to find a handful of students in her office lounging around after school was over, simply to chat.”
—Kelly Butorac
