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Show Know Your Schools . . . . improved Services For Your Children . . . By Supt. Rowan C. Stutz A significant step in the improvement im-provement of educational services was taken recently when our local Board of Education added to the district staff a director of guidance guid-ance services. The parents and educators of Duchesne County have been greatly concerned for some time over the fact that many of the children in our schools are not responding satisfactorily satis-factorily to the very best efforts of teachers and parents. Methods of teaching have improved.. We are doing a better pob with more children than before. But still there are too many children in our clossrooms, particularly on the high school level with whom even our best teachers are not having success. We feel that when a child does not develop satisfactorily in relation re-lation to his abilities and purposes, pur-poses, educators need to do just as a good physician does. We need to diagnose the patient and re-examine the treatment he has been undergoing. Too often we have been diagnosing superficially and then prescribe the same old stuff only in larger, less palatable, more frequent doses. The basic psychological needs of children, whether they are succeeding suc-ceeding in school or not, are the same. All children must have self-esteem, self-esteem, security, status, success, self-expression. They must know that they are important members of the team, or their development will not be satisfactory even their progress in skills and "academic" work will be poor. We now know definitely through much' research that ministering to those psychological psycho-logical needs must be done first if one expects to improve "academic" "academ-ic" work of the child. We hope the new director of guidance services will help us with this problem. His work will be to help teachers and parents make a better diagnosis of the problems of students and then act as a guide in developing programs and adapting teaching methods to more adequately meet the needs of all students. The activities of the guidance director will be mainly on the secondary school level, but will be coordinated with the work of the elementary supervisor to give continuity con-tinuity to planning. It ought to be mentioned that the cost of this added service is almost reemburseable from the State Uniform School Fund. |