Shout-out to School Counselors and Speak Up Be Safe™ Facilitators!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog posts to give a big shout-out to all school counselors in recognition of this being National School Counseling Week!  To each and every school counselor we say thank you!  Thank you for your hard work every day in the schools to support students in their efforts to be successful, not only in their academic achievements but in their lives in general. 

One thing the MBF team has learned over the past three years in working so closely with hundreds of school counselors across the state of Florida is how hard each and every one of you work. You not only spend your days dealing with student testing and academic achievement, but you deal with student drama, unmet needs, stress, and even individual and family crises.  You are the go-to person in the school for all things academic and social related and you handle it with professionalism and compassion.  For this and more, we honor all Florida School Counselors today (and every day).

But the MBF team must take a moment and point out a group of very special school counselors – a group of over 650 very dedicated elementary school counselors across the state of Florida that we are so very grateful to know and work with, our Speak Up Be Safe™ (SUBS) Certified Facilitators.  These counselors decided that the safety and protection of their students was worth the extra time and energy, and in addition to their regularly scheduled duties, became trained and are implementing the SUBS program.

SUBS teaches kids in 1^st – 5^th grades strategies to help them identify unsafe situations and empowers them to help the adults in their lives better protect them from bullying, cyberbullying, digital abuse and all types of child abuse.  Despite the topics being uncomfortable, despite their days being filled to capacity, despite the fact they know the program will bring out disclosures and make additional work for them, these counselors choose to voluntarily implement this research-based and effective program because they know their efforts are worth it to protect their kids and prevent the potential damage of bullying and maltreatment.  Those kids, and our state, are lucky to have them!

So in honor of National School Counseling Week, here’s to all counselors, but especially to our SUBS counselors! We could not have provided SUBS to over 260,000 students so far without them – we are truly blessed to have each and every SUBS counselor on our team, and we honor them not just this week – but every week, and every day!