Counseling-Bill Probert

The Counseling department is a little different than other departments at Dallastown as it is not staffed by teachers working on a curriculum.

“This time of year we review scheduling.  We would have met just before the break and then after the break about the junior assemblies.  We do a power-point together. . . it’s a lot of planning at certain times,” Counseling Chair Bill Probert explained.

Probert has been the Counseling Chairperson for eight years and before that he worked in the middle school counseling office for 10 years.

“I was a new counselor 23 years ago so when I came in we had an established department chair–she was a great lady–and she retired, so before she retired she mentored me to become the next department chair.  They’re always looking for the next person, who’s going to fill my shoes when I leave or when I step down as the department chair, so my role now is to look at the counselors and prepare all of them to fill that role and whoever wants it can go for it,” Probert commented when discussing his time in the middle school.

When asked about his transition to the high school, Probert said, “Honestly, there weren’t a whole lot of people who wanted the extra duties and I had already done it for so long.  It was just a natural fit because I knew how to do the job already.”

Since Probert became head of the Counseling office, he has accomplished a lot.

“When I first started there were only five or six kids in the high school doing dual enrollment–that’s not okay!  There needed to be more kids; dual enrollment is set for the average student, so when I went to the counseling team and said ‘how do we expand this beyond these five or six kids?’ we started talking about marketing.  How do you get it out to students? how do you make it relevant for them? How do we fit it into their schedules?  So there’s a lot that went into doing that and now we have 150 kids doing dual enrollment.”

The expansion of Dual enrollment is only one of the counseling office’s successful stories about improving the school through teamwork, which is one of Probert’s favorite aspects about being the Department Head.

“I have ideas and I have a really good team of people in this office that I can bounce things off of and to see an idea come to fruition at the end it really exciting to me.”