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In the Middle: Joey Waddy

In the Middle: Joey WaddyAt first glance, Joey Waddy, Ed.M.’13, C.A.S.'14, with his tattooed arms and tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses isn’t who you’d imagine counseling middle school students. But after talking to the Florida native, who came to HGSE to study in the Prevention Science and Practice (PSP) Program, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else.

“Counseling is the only position in a school that allows me to partner with students and their families and provide support across all domains,” he says. “I love the flexibility of working with students individually, in small groups, classrooms, or schoolwide.”

It was watching students struggle as a teacher that first attracted Waddy to counseling. Every day, he would see students struggling with issues as diverse as homelessness, domestic violence, self-injury, and more.

“[For many students] it’s impossible to leave your home, come to school, and carry through your day,” he says.  “There are so many barriers to accessing education that it made my job difficult. I had a really hard time knowing something was going on with students. Then, I was handing them off to someone else to deal with the issue.”

Directly following a stint with Teach For America, Waddy came to HGSE to enroll in the PSP Program with an eye toward a future in counseling. “I believed in the PSP model,” he says. “I also felt like I’d get a diverse education experience here.”

During his two years at HGSE, Waddy has focused his efforts exclusively on middle school students — an age often described as “tough” by educators. It also happens to be the age group with whom Waddy relishes working, he says, noting that the students are constantly changing, and going through transitions both physically and mentally.

Waddy’s HGSE internships have offered him a chance to work directly counseling middle school students. This year, while interning at the Clarence Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, Mass., he managed a caseload of seven students. As part of the internship, he had an opportunity to work on a special project co-facilitating a girls group with Charlestown Substance Abuse Coalition (CSAC) program coordinator Gretchen Wagner, Ed.M.’11. The group, which included eight pre-selected eighth grade girls, met weekly for a year and focused on helping their transition to high school.

“All the girls were struggling with transitions, what happens next, and what’s happening with themselves,” he says.

Wagner said that, as the lone male, Waddy’s presence added a unique perspective to the group, and provided insight for him in a way that perhaps he didn’t see before in his work. But perhaps most noteworthy was how all the girls – who had diverse backgrounds and experience – related to each other and society’s expectations of how women should look and act.

In one particular exercise the girls were asked to use magazine and newspaper clippings to decorate the inside and outside of a box. The outside depicted who they were expected to be, and the inside box was filled with images of who they think they are. “These girls are in the eighth grade but can already see that society is telling them how to look and how they are going to be,” Waddy says. And, ultimately, it opened his eyes to how much more is needed to educate people about gender roles in our society.

The intent of the group was to help use the experience to build supportive relationships among the girls so they can keep each other from falling through the cracks in high school. The group’s meetings recently concluded but Waddy hopes that they seek each other out as support in the future, especially when things become difficult.

After graduating this spring, Waddy plans to head to New Orleans, where this fall he’ll work as a school counselor in the Dolores T. Aaron School. In many ways, it’s a dream come true seeing as how Waddy had hopes of going to the city many years ago following Hurricane Katrina. In fact, he picked New Orleans as his first choice for TFA, but ended up being placed in Florida instead. Now, he’s excited about having a chance to work in the city, which has undergone immense educational change. As for one of his first plans, Waddy says that he will start a similar girls group as Charlestown in hope to help with the gender issues young girls face.

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