The goal of Family Counseling Service is to make professional counseling services accessible to everyone, regardless of income. Those who come for counseling are typically well-functioning people who are experiencing some sort of life crisis. This may be the death of a loved one, a divorce, parenting issues, blended family problems, family stressors or other situations that have drained their mental and emotional ability to manage. Family Counseling also offers free counseling to school students who are suffering from an emotional crisis at home and, as a result, are experiencing problems at school. Since 2008, FCS has conducted over 1,000 free counseling sessions for these students! The results have been a full letter grade improvement in academic performance and a drastic reduction in days absent. In conjunction with this, the agency provides free counseling at Davis-Emerson Middle School, which has a high rate of students from low-income families. This is also one of the areas most affected by the 2011 tornado. Counseling deals with many mental, emotional and social needs that extend beyond what the School’s staff can address. Last school year, the agency provided 145 individual and group counseling sessions at Davis-Emerson. The agency also offers free adolescent programs targeting at-risk youth. These programs help equip teens with the skills and opportunity to choose a new path of action. By empowering them to resist negative peer pressure, understand the long-term consequences of their behavior and recognize healthy boundaries for themselves and others, they become better able to make decisions that will enhance their own lives and those around them. These services also involve the parents of the adolescents so that they can develop improved skills in parenting, decision making, discipline, and changing the home environment to achieve better results.
