Starting back to school in a “normal” school year has been nice. In the counseling center, we have been working on meeting every student in the school individually and making sure they know how to access our services. We started with 6th grade students since they are new to our school. We wanted to make sure they felt welcome at WMS and in the counseling center. We have also started small groups. Many students have a lot of anxiety and we are working on building some coping strategies in several different ways. Last year we did small groups focused on emotion management. This year we have started with friendship groups as there were a number of students who felt like they could use this support. As we all know, relationships and how to handle them can cause anxiety. We thought this would be a good place to start. We will also be running some new student groups as we have a large number of students who are new to Westwood. One of our biggest goals is to make sure all students feel welcome and have a sense of belonging in the Westwood community.