When you ask Annie Goldberg how it feels to be named the 2024 North Carolina School Counselor of the Year, she quickly deflects the spotlight to her fellow school counselors.
“I feel just so humbled and lucky to be named the North Carolina School Counselor of the Year,” she said. “North Carolina has some of the strongest school counselors, some of the most dedicated school counselors.”
“I was just the one that was lucky enough to be recognized.”
But talk with Goldberg (’16 B.A., ’17 M.Ed.), a school counselor in the Alamance-Burlington School System, about her work, and it becomes clear that she has and continues to make her own luck when it comes to advocating for her students and her profession.
After earning her Master of Education from the UNC School of Education in 2017, Goldberg took the knowledge learned and the experiences she gained in the School Counseling program to Broadview Middle, a Title 1 school in Burlington, N.C.
“The UNC School Counseling program really focused on being strength-based when working with students and families,” she said. “That really shaped how I view my work here and how I work with students and families.”
Goldberg said that oftentimes “it’s easy to identify the problem” a student has. Taking a strengths-based approach – drawing upon a student’s strengths – is the very first step in creating a solution to a student’s challenge and is foundational to a school counselor’s success.
“That [approach] really changes the conversation and the attitude surrounding the conversation.”
While Goldberg has spent the entirety of her school counseling career at Broadview, no day has ever looked the same. The only constant has been her approach, and that approach centers her students’ and families’ needs.
“As a school counselor, I really like that my days look different,” she said, “But when I’m designing my days or setting up my calendar, it’s always driven by student need. That always comes first.”
Utilizing data and creativity
To support students academically, socially, and emotionally, Goldberg said she relies on school-level data to see where her students need help. In the last year, she said that data helped to shed light on the needs of Broadview’s “newcomer students” – or student who have lived in the U.S. for less than two years and often less fluent English speakers.
“I really noticed these [newcomers] popping up in areas of concern,” she said, attendance being the most notable.
She partnered with the school’s English as a Second Language department, hosting newcomer socials that included presentations and activities.
“We built community with those students,” she said, “but we also gave them information about attendance policy, the importance of coming to school, and also resources here in Burlington.”
With those interventions, Goldberg said they we able to reduce the number of students with 10 or more absences by 30 percent.
“That’s huge because if they’re here in school, they’re forming those relationships,” she said. “They’re meeting adults in the building, and then they’re also learning the language and getting more acquainted with life here in Burlington.”
As a school counselor, Goldberg also works with teachers to find ways to support students’ academic outcomes. In conversations with English language arts teachers, she identified an opportunity to help students on “the cusp” of reading proficiency.
Goldberg gathered a group of 15 students from across the school, and their project was to make their own books which they would read to Broadview’s two feeder elementary schools. She led sessions focused on vocabulary, how to start and end a book, how to illustrate a book, and more.
Two students paired up to create a book about how to take care of a pet. Another wrote a book about a friendship issue they were experiencing and how to handle it.
“They were so invested,” she said. “They went to those schools and got to see their old teachers, and the elementary kids just they looked at them like celebrities, like ‘Oh my gosh these middle schoolers want to read to us!’
“Then, of course, that experience had some academic outcomes as well,” she said. “Those students’ helped their grade meet growth for ELA when they took their end-of-grade tests.”
Broadview Middle also met growth as a school at the end of the 2023-24 school year.
Becoming an advocate for her students and profession
In the past few years, Goldberg has also seized opportunities to create impact beyond Broadview Middle, taking on leadership roles among school counselors and educators.
She has served as Region 4 director for the North Carolina Association of Educators’ Student Services Division and as co-vice president of Government Relations for the North Carolina School Counselor Association. She’s also led professional development sessions for fellow counselors.
“I’m really proud of the professional growth that I’ve been going through the past few years,” she said. “Taking on these leadership roles has really allowed me to get to know counselors in other regions of the state. There are things they do really well that I need to learn from. When we can come together and have an understanding of what every school counselor is facing, it really helps our advocacy efforts and ability to learn from each other.”
Goldberg is a member of the Public School Forum of North Carolina’s Education Policy Fellowship 2024-25 Cohort and a U.S. Department of Education School Ambassador Fellow which has provided her an opportunity to implement a restorative justice practices at Broadview.
She is also only one of 57 school counselors to earn the American School Counselor Association’s Certified School Counselor® designation this year.
While Goldberg might say she’s “lucky” to have been recognized for her school counseling, it might be more appropriate to say school counseling is lucky to count her among its professionals.
As an undergraduate at Carolina studying psychology, Goldberg worked on a research project called the Classroom Memory Study. The faculty member leading the project knew a school counselor in Durham and connected Goldberg with her.
“After shadowing that school counselor, I remember thinking, ‘This is it,’” Goldberg said. “I really liked being able to remove barriers, and I loved seeing her build relationships. That blended everything that I was interested in and what I was looking for in a career.”