School Counseling is here to serve *all* of the children at Summit Street School. More importantly, we have a lot of resources and programs already in place at Summit Street, like PBIS (see below,) to help students learn to be their best, every day.

If you want to learn more, please look at the pages on this section of the website.  We want to be sure that our school community, and families, are all steering in the same direction. Please reach out to me any time! 

Classroom Social Skills

Summit Street School works on issues around kindness, bullying, conflict resolution, emotional regulation, and much more throughout the year in the classroom setting and as a school. Learn more and find resources to help your child with this on our What We Work On page.

Diversity and multiculturalism is woven into classroom curriculum at Summit. Using books and conversations, we discuss similarities and differences across our community. We also discuss what it means to be fair, and about getting to know people “on the inside" rather than judging someone based on appearances. 

Our annual “International Potluck Dinner” helps bring the Summit Street community together through food and entertainment.  Families bring “special” dishes, dances or songs to share from a different country. Classrooms also choose a country to learn about throughout the year. In art, music, PE, learning center, wellness, students learn songs, dances, and work on projects about different cultures. 

Counseling Groups

School counseling offers supportive groups throughout the school year that are designed to assist children with certain areas of emotional growth and skills development. Learn more on the Counseling Groups page.

"Big/Little Friends” Program

In this program, an Essex High School Student (“Big”) who is in 11th or 12th grade visit with a Summit Street beginning of the school year and they meet about once a week throughout the entire year.  “Littles” love having a positive role model to look up to and the “Bigs” enjoy children and some hope to have careers working with them.

Family Resources and Workshops

Throughout the year, parents and caregivers are offered access to a variety of workshops geared toward ongoing needs in supporting children. We also work closely with families who reach out to us and self-identify as wishing to have extra help. Please visit our Resources for Families page to learn more.

Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support

We are a PBIS school. What is school-wide PBIS? One of the foremost advances in school-wide discipline is the emphasis on school-wide systems of support that include proactive strategies for defining, teaching, and supporting appropriate student behaviors to create positive school environments.

The approach has the goal of designing effective environments that improve the link between research-validated practices and the environments in which teaching and learning occurs.

Attention is focused on creating and sustaining primary (school-wide), secondary (classroom), and tertiary (individual) systems of support that improve lifestyle results (personal, health, social, family, work, recreation) for all children and youth by making targeted behaviors less effective, efficient, and relevant, and desired behavior more functional.