Students who return to Benicia High School this year will notice several major changes: the construction of a new stadium, a new vice principal—Dr. James Brown, who was hired to fill Brianna Kleinschmidt’s place after she was promoted to principal- and a new counselor, bringing Benicia High’s total to four.

Mynor Maldonado will be joining Megan Guenther, Justin Keppel and Kathleen Wallace to make up Benicia High’s counseling department, where he will be assisting students with their academic goals, helping them with personal issues and overall providing them guidance throughout their high school careers. Previously, the department had to do all of this with only three counselors, which Keppel said created some problems.

“Our caseload was around one counselor to 560 students, and it was really hard to keep up with meeting all of the students’ academic and personal needs,” he said. “We’ve really been pushing for another counselor for the last three years, so we’re really happy to have Mr. Maldonado on board.”

Maldonado graduated with a degree in psychology from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, but it was through a volunteer trip to Colombia that he decided he wanted to become a counselor.

“I was working with some college students there, and I found that a lot of them were asking me for relationship advice,” he said. “When I came back, I looked into what kind of career I could go into where I could do counseling related work, and that’s when I decided to apply to the school counseling graduate program at Saint Mary’s.”

Maldonado also worked at a mental health agency in Pleasant Hill where he provided therapeutic behavioral services for students who had issues with school or foster home placement, and he also did an internship at the Oakland Military Institute. He had heard from Saint Mary’s classmate Lisa Douglass, Benicia High’s college and career counselor, that the school had an opening for a new counselor.

“She told me it would be a great place to work, and I had heard about how great it was because I had classes with her,” he said.

Benicia High’s counselor shortage has been an issue for a few years now. At a school board meeting in December, Benicia Unified School District Special Services Director Carolyn Patton, presented a statistic from the California Department of Education, which recommended a student-counselor ratio of one counselor for every 361 students. At the time, Benicia High’s ratio was 550-to-1, which is well above the recommended ratio. With the hiring of Maldonado, the student-counselor ratio is approximately 425-to-1. Keppel said the school would like to beat that ratio but is not sure if such a goal is feasible.

“Nowadays, I think 1-to-400 or 1-to-500 is pretty typical for California high schools,” he said. “In a perfect world, we’d love to have a fifth counselor, but with budget and all that stuff, I don’t think that would be in the cards.”

Nonetheless, Keppel says that having a fourth counselor will be good for the school. With fewer students on each counselor’s caseload, this gives them more time to meet with students faster, respond to calls and work on programs like Sources of Strength, which meets every other week in peer groups to foster positivity among students dealing with depression or anxiety issues.

“We feel we’re going to answer emails faster and meet the students’ needs better,” he said.

The biggest change will come in which students are assigned to which counselor. Previously, students had been assigned alphabetically in clusters to a counselor, e.g., students whose last names began with the letters A through G would be assigned to one counselor. This year, they will be assigned by grade. Freshmen will be assigned to Maldonado, sophomores to Guenther, juniors to Keppel and seniors to Wallace. Students will remain with their counselor until they graduate.

Keppel said the idea came from the administration, which had talked to local high schools that utilized the system and learned about the benefits.

“You get to know (students) much better, what their needs are and what track they’re on as they go through the grade levels in the high school,” he said.

Keppel also noted that it would be a good opportunity to get to know teachers of that grade level well.

“Having 11th-graders, I can work directly with 11th-grade English teachers or U.S. history teachers, so it cuts down on the number of teachers that we have to interact with and it’s better to know the curriculum of teachers specific to that grade level” he said.

Having a fourth counselor would also lead to more time to provide academic and personal counseling to students, Keppel said.

Keppel and the other counselors feel optimistic about the new year with four counselors, and they believe Maldonado will be a good addition to the department.

“We’ve heard good things about him,” he said. “He has good energy. Being younger, I think he’ll really connect with students, and he’s coming in with great training and background. I think the ninth-graders are really gonna love him.”

Likewise, Maldonado is happy to be starting his work at Benicia High.

“I’m very excited to be here and working with the students at BHS,” he said. “I’m looking forward to getting to know the freshman class and help them transition into high school.”