A Conroe ISD counselor will be honored with a statewide award in February for her work in providing guidance to elementary school students. Through her work in preventive counseling, Bradley Elementary School counselor Ashley Wright was named Elementary School Counselor of the Year by the Texas School Counselor Association. Wright was notified of her win during a surprise celebration at Bradley Elementary on Jan. 10, and she is set to formally receive the Rhosine Fleming Award on Feb. 10 in San Antonio at the 14^th Annual Professional School Counselor Conference hosted by the TSCA. According to the TSCA, the award is given annually to an outstanding school counselor at each level, including middle and junior high school, high school, counselor supervisor and more. In an interview with Community Impact Newspaper, Wright said she has worked for CISD since 2012 when she was hired as an elementary school teacher at Armstrong Elementary School. Before CISD, Wright worked for Spring ISD for three years as a prekindergarten, second- and third-grade teacher. While being a teacher allowed Wright the opportunity to build relationships with her students, she said she recognized that students all over the campus needed additional support. “[The state] forgets that most of our students don’t have social skills or they go through transitional periods where something may happen—whether its poverty, whether it’s divorce, whether it’s someone that just passed away,” Wright said. “I found myself many times teaching to the rigor that I needed to teach, but at the same time my students were feeling depleted … so I wanted to do more.” So when Bradley Elementary opened in August 2017 as a prekindergarten through fourth-grade campus, Wright transferred from Armstrong Elementary to be a counselor. When counseling elementary-level students, Wright said it is important to focus on preventive counseling and help students build resiliency before they enter intermediate school. Bradley Elementary students are encouraged to complete their work at a young age and ask questions if they do not understand the academia. Additionally, Wright said she teaches students to accept diversity, increase their self-esteem, adapt to new environments and build character. “What we’re seeing across the board—with a lot of the suicidal ideations, a lot of the self-harm, a lot of just the inabilities to cope—with our older kids is because they have not built up strong character traits in elementary to help them when situations arise,” Wright said. Since she became the counselor at Bradley Elementary, Wright has implemented various initiatives at the campus, including the Den Squad program in which student leaders are encouraged greet fellow students in the morning and provide words of wisdom during the daily announcements. “A lot of time what I’ve found … is students don’t understand what a counselor really does,” Wright said. “But I think it’s safe to say if you ask a kid even in kindergarten, ‘What does Mrs. Wright do?’ They’ll say, ‘Oh, she’ll help you if you feel sad.’ That’s important because we’ve changed the language.”