Joan Emerson has some students at Central High School who are grieving the deaths of parents and others who are watching their parents' slow deaths to drugs and alcohol. As school guidance counselors, Martinez, Herrera and Emerson are privy to an endless supply of these stories. They help where they can. They listen always. But like school guidance counselors elsewhere in Hernando County, they find that counseling must compete with part of their job that seems trivial by comparison.
Counselors frequently play a role in class scheduling and truancy matters.
They help decide if a child needs special education, remediation or dropout prevention counseling. And, at some schools, they seem to be magnets for any odd job a principal is tempted to throw at them. All of it adds up to paperwork, which accumulates like an endless snow. But chief among the distractions to keep guidance counselors away from their students is the state's growing obsession with standardized tests. At Powell, Herrera estimates he spent 11 weeks last year doing nothing but dealing with standardized tests.