How Aiken County Is Boosting Counselor Morale and Efficiency

Aiken County Public Schools, located in Aiken, South Carolina, serves 23,000 students. Discover how the district is streamlining CTE tracking and empowering their counselors to focus more on student outcomes and well-being.

Challenges

Aiken County Public Schools needed a more efficient way to track the complexities of CTE pathways.
With caseloads between 250-300 students, counselors were spending valuable time on audits, leaving less time to address the growing mental health needs of students.
Counselors needed a “double-check system” to prevent errors when it came to student scheduling and transcripts.

Solution

Panorama Pathways (known as Palmetto Pathways in South Carolina)

Results

Streamlined administrative processes have boosted counselor morale and allowed more time for meaningful student interactions.
Panorama Pathways allows schools to be proactive with scheduling and transcript errors.
Panorama's flagging of “off-track” students and course correcting capabilities offers immediate support for students.

Challenges

“College and career readiness is a huge accountability piece for our high schools—and part of that are the CTE pathways, which are incredibly hard to track,” says Sharon Worley of Aiken County Public Schools. As Coordinator for Counseling and Career Services, she knows the inherent complexity of CTE tracking. Students must complete specific courses; many courses may pertain to more than one pathway, and some students are earning two or three pathways at a time. “Keeping all of that straight is nearly impossible by hand,” she adds.

With surrounding South Carolina districts facing auditing challenges, Worley wanted to be proactive. “We're okay now. But who’s to say that tomorrow we're not going to uncover something that we could have prevented?” she says. What Aiken County Public Schools needed was an automated solution that could double-check their scheduling and transcripts. This solution would need to serve all student populations (e.g. students receiving special education services, whose graduation rates have remained low).

“There's so many little things that have to be exactly right,” says Worley.“ The room for error is quite large; even with the most diligent processes in place, things still slip by us.”

Additionally, Aiken’s counselors, who often have a caseload of 300 or more students, were stuck spending significant time on administrative tasks—which meant less time for meaningful student interactions. Worley is an advocate for shifting away from piles of paperwork, enabling counselors to do more direct counseling with students in order to meet their social, emotional, and mental health needs. With student mental health needs steadily on the rise since the pandemic, things needed to change.

Solution: Panorama Pathways

Worley was instrumental in Aiken's adoption of Panorama Pathways—a leading graduation and CTE program tracking solution that ensures students are ready for college, career, and life.

This platform has given Aiken County the ability to aggregate all flags into one place, alleviating the manual work of reviewing individual student records for its counselors. It has also automated transcript and scheduling audits, while also helping identify students who are off-track for graduation or CTE pathways.

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Panorama Pathways empowers districts to make decisions with actionable data

With daily scans of each student’s records and a holistic view of their journey to post-secondary success, Aiken County schools are able to easily find and resolve potential issues before they impact student outcomes.

“With Panorama, there's so much automation that we can use to our advantage to quickly see where our students stand.It’s a stark contrast to the former printing of hundreds of transcripts and going one-by-one to see how everyone’s doing,” says Worley. “For us, being able to pull up a student and see the full picture of not only their progress, but their potential for future opportunities—that’s probably what I’m most excited about,” Worley says.

Overall, this has meant less paperwork for counselors—and more time devoted to meaningful student interactions.

Results

Aiken County Public Schools was the first district in South Carolina to implement Panorama Pathways. Currently in year two of their rollout, they’re seeing a noticeable increase in morale amongst school counselors.

“I've had several counselors reach out to me thanking me for bringing this product to our district,” Worley says. She recalls a moment early on in the training: a counselor was exploring the platform and said to her, “Oh my gosh, Sharon, I just found a student who’s in Algebra 1 this semester, and I've got him scheduled for it again next semester!” Within five minutes of logging in, this counselor had caught and prevented a critical scheduling error that could have impacted that student’s graduation outcome.

Because Aiken isn’t prepared to completely move away from their existing process, they’re using Panorama Pathways as a “double-check” system for the time being. They just can’t afford the risk of process errors. “A huge part of our integrity as a school district lies in the accuracy of our student records,” Worley says.

Accurate Records, Data-Driven Decisions

Panorama Pathways helps ensure accuracy when it comes to student records. Aiken has been able to log institutional knowledge using the "counselor notes" capability in Panorama, which helps with caseload shifts and continuity. “There's some historical record-keeping there, so I can see, ‘Oh okay, the student really did want to retake art for a higher grade. That's not a mistake. That's an intentional thing.’ So having that continuity from counselor to counselor, or even within schools is really helpful,” Worley says.

With the capabilities of Panorama Pathways, Aiken can closely monitor students' graduation readiness by really honing in on different cohorts, different tracks, and even demographics. These insights allow counselors to provide targeted support, improving student outcomes and boosting graduation rates.

Worley has learned that when counselors are provided with better information, more meaningful conversations are had and better guidance is offered. She sees firsthand how Panorama Pathways is helping Aiken access data more efficiently. After all, data is what drives programming and interventions.

“Instead of just throwing darts at problems, [Panorama] is really helping us identify the problem," Worley says. "By providing counselors with better information, we can have much more meaningful conversations and offer better guidance,” says Worley.

Next Steps—Moving the Needle on Student Success

For Aiken County, next semester will see test scores loaded in and CTE pathways being built out. Scheduling issues will be the priority. “I’m eager to continue exploring the platform’s capabilities,” Worley says. “We’ve never had any product come close to what Panorama can offer us.”

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