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Schools

BHS Peer Counselors: Helping Fellow Students for 25 Years

Program encourages students to help each other navigate high school.

When Brookfield High School (BHS) students encounter personal problems they know that they can discuss them with one of the members of a group whose pictures, in their signature blue and yellow tie-dye t-shirts, are posted prominently in the main foyer of the school.

“We will talk to them before or after school or during a study hall,” said senior Rachael Deutsch, one of the BHS peer counselors.

School nurse Angela Hazelwood, a co-advisor for the program, which began in 1985, said it has provided a valuable service for BHS students.

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“It was partly just understanding that children sometimes related better to other kids when they had issues,” she said regarding the decision to start the program, which was one of the first of its kind in the Danbury area.

“Being the same age, it’s easier to talk to a peer counselor,” said Mallory Delinski, a senior, who just began her third year in the program.

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Hazelwood said family issues and conflicts with boyfriends or girlfriends are among the most commonly discussed topics.

“They’re taught how to really listen,” she said of the peer counselors, who must complete a training program that runs from January to June before they can become a member.

“A lot of people don’t listen when a person talks,” Hazelwood said regarding the efforts that the peer counselors make to be able to relate to obstacles that other students are encountering.

She said after listening to a student’s problems, the peer counselors refer the issues to one of the advisors.

Hazelwood, who began working at BHS in 1980, has been a peer counseling advisor since the inception of the program.

Her former longtime co-advisor, Gene Newell, retired last June after about 35 years of teaching English and more than 20 years with the peer counseling program.

Hazelwood said she is still trying to recruit his successor.

She said the advisors have considerable responsibilities, since “they could get a call from [a peer counselor] any time seven days a week” and “have to be willing to go somewhere and talk to a student” at various times during the week.

The peer counselors, who usually number between 18 to 20 each year, meet each Wednesday after school and sometimes hear guest presentations from Gary Gramling, the Brookfield Police Department’s youth officer, or another professional.

Through the years, the program has sponsored fundraisers to assist victims of the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake. Additionally, the peer counselors provide a dinner smorgasbord for the teachers before the annual open house for the parents, which this year will be held September 22, and an appreciation event for the staff members near the end of the academic year.

BHS Principal Joe Palumbo has said they are very helpful in assisting new students each year during the freshmen orientation meeting.

“Part of the reason I wanted to get involved was that it was the peer counselors that showed everyone around the school when I was a freshman,” Delinski said.

Photographs of the peer counselors in the blue and yellow tie-dye t-shirts that have been a signature of the program since the late 1980s appear in a display case near the main office of BHS. The counselors usually wear the T-shirts during the first week of the academic year to make them more visible to the student body.

Hazelwood said several of them have become residential advisors in their college dormitories and two alumni from the program have started peer counseling programs at their colleges.

Deutsch said peer counseling has provided an opportunity to meet many more students.

“I’ve become more Brookfield High School-oriented,” she said.

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