After the departure of school counselor Patty Lancaster at the end of last year, Jaime MacDonald has joined the community as a new resource for both students and faculty. 

MacDonald started working as a teacher approximately 20 years ago in what was then called an ED classroom, a term for “emotionally disturbed” students. 

“I would say I was working with the smartest kids in the school, but something was getting in the way of them being able to be in the mainstream,” MacDonald said. “There were a lot of things happening: family problems, and there was some drug abuse. So we actually had a counselor that was assigned to our program who used to come and do crisis counseling.”

Despite the counselor’s presence, MacDonald, an English teacher at the time, felt there was a barrier to the students learning. 

“I thought, I need to learn more about how I can make sure that I understand what’s getting in the way of their learning — and not just learning disabilities,'” MacDonald said. “I really needed to understand more about the emotional side of things.”

MacDonald didn’t become a therapist immediately: after her second year of teaching, she returned to school to earn her masters in counseling from Kean University. Soon after obtaining her degree, MacDonald continued working for schools as a teacher and learning specialist at Sinai Akiba Academy. Most recently, she was a learning specialist at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences.

 “I loved that [position], and it allowed me to have a small private practice on the side. Learning disabilities and emotions go hand in hand, and so I liked the idea that I had both jobs,” MacDonald said. “But when I had the chance to interview here, to actually just focus on the emotional side, that really excited me, especially in an all-girls school. I saw what was going on in terms of private practice, and I thought, let me merge my two worlds and be able to be in a school and be a counselor.”

MacDonald has many goals for the upcoming year, the main one being wellness. She hopes to embed this idea into Archer culture and curriculum.

“I know our [Human Development] program does a phenomenal job at that, but making sure that everything that’s happening there is also happening in other parts of the school,” MacDonald said. “And again, I go back to this shared language [of wellness], so that we can have conversations about it and it’s both wellness from a faculty standpoint and a student standpoint.”

Even though MacDonald has worked outside of a school environment, she finds herself “coming back” every time. 

“There’s something about being in a school, and especially this one, that the second that I walked in, it has an energy,” she said. “Working with adolescents that are so passionate, as you should be, about everything…really is my love.”