Meet the Outstanding School Counselor of the Year!

Editor’s Note: In recognition of School Counselor Week, Feb. 3-7, 2025, TeachSD visited with the 2024 School Counselor of the Year.

Amanda Bender is a school counselor at Lead-Deadwood Elementary School. She spends her days with students in kindergarten through 5th grade, helping them gain the tools they need to learn. Her work includes classroom instruction, where she works with groups of students to develop skillsets that will serve them throughout their academic careers: how to constructively deal with disappointment and frustration, how to have healthy social interactions with peers, and how to avoid pitfalls that can derail academic success.

It's a career she did not see herself serving in when she was an undergraduate at Black Hills State University – she majored in art, with an emphasis in graphic design. But while she attended BHSU, she worked as a hall director for her residence hall. It’s there that she found a calling in helping people to problem solve the issues that were getting in the way of their academic lives. “It was a gateway to working in counseling for sure,” Bender said. “It showed me I needed to be doing something where I am directly supporting people. I felt directly called to help people.”

Bender has been a counselor for over 13 years, first working with high school students, and then with elementary students. Her experience and dedication has led to her being named the 2024 Outstanding School Counselor of the Year by the South Dakota School Counselor Association.

During School Counselor Week, Bender plans to take time during the week to advocate for her profession, to help people in her school and community understand the ways in which school counselors can help teachers and students find success in academics.

“If our kids aren’t in a place where they can learn, then they won’t learn,” Bender said. “Collaboration with teachers is about making it so that we address the needs of individual students.”

Bender chiefly collaborates with teachers by providing support to all students. “We’re making sure that all students are getting ground level support,” she said. “We’re doing classroom lessons at the elementary school level. At the high school level, we’re meeting with students and talking to them about their four-year plan. Every single kid should get that.”

Bender also works with students in smaller group settings to help them work on skills they are missing, such as organization, having healthy interactions with others, and building themselves up to be successful. When a child presents with significant problems, she works with families to get them what they need through referrals.

Although her job is to primarily to see to the students, Bender finds that to be successful, it helps to be an ear for teachers as well. “The education field is hard. Teachers are stressed out. Some of my job is providing teachers a safe space to come and say what their challenges are.”