2022-2023 OCA Award Winners!

Each year the Oakland Counseling Association recognizes a few of our members for outstanding work in the field of counseling.

Here are your winners!

The Counselor of the Year award is intended to celebrate one of our exemplary counselors who has made a positive impact in their community.

Christina Belsky, LPC, NCC

College and Career Counselor at Berkley High School

1977 was the year of the very first Oakland Counseling Association Counselor of the Year Award. This award recognizes a counselor who has made an outstanding positive impact on their school, students, parents, staff, and/or community. We look for counselors who have shown effectiveness in their practice/profession, strong professional and community involvement, and personal characteristics that demonstrate passion and commitment to students/clients and the counseling profession.

This year, our 46th Oakland Counseling Association Counselor of the Year Award goes to a counselor who was nominated "for her innovation, for her risk taking, for her out-of-the-box thinking and for leading our department in expanding our career education programming in so many different areas."

This counselor is described as having:

"developed life changing relationships with her students"
"spent over 2 years developing, designing and implementing our website, working with our district communications"
"overhauled our weekly newsletter using the same design flare... worked to organize information in a viewable and easy-to-read format for our school community"
"updated, developed, and perfected our scheduling process... from applications, curriculum guides, student-information-system organization, overhauling the scheduling section on our website and creating systems that are detailed and complete so that the information we provide to students and families during the cumbersome scheduling season is clean, accurate and understandable"
" advocated for five years that our College and Career Center Coordinator role be filled by a certified school counselor instead of a paraprofessional"

Oakland Counseling Association is very pleased to announce our 2023 Counselor of the Year winner, Christina Belsky!

Congratulations Christina!

The Terry Hood Lifetime Achievement award is intended to celebrate a retiring or recently retired counselor who has contributed to their community and the counseling profession.

Stacey Rosol

School Counselor at Farmington High School (Retired now!)

In her nomination, Stacey is described as "altruistic, kind, caring, generous, passionate, efficient".

Other examples from throughout Stacey's career include:

"For the Counselor Cafe, she has set up our Amazon Wishlist, promoted our initiative on her personal Facebook and other personal social media accounts. She has written a grant for funding as well through the Farmington/Farmington Hills Foundation to help supply our endeavors. It has been a costly initiative, but we see approximately 400 students EVERY time we hold the cafe, so it has truly been a valuable way for us to reach a large number of students and to help build a positive culture here at school."
"Stacey goes above and beyond to help students. She does this regularly, but I can think of one example just recently where she had two oldest siblings on her caseload that were academically at risk, but through her work with them, discovered the whole family was in need of basic needs. During the pandemic, she delivered them weekly food from the FPS Nutrition Services Department, and coordinated getting the gifts for the holidays and clothing and other basic necessities. This family received so much assistance from Stacey, they are eternally grateful."
"Stacey was a teacher before a counselor and helped to write curriculum that would be effective for students. Once she moved into the role of counselor, she helped to establish a class called Guided Academics for at risk students that helped to create an additional support for our most academically at risk students."

Congratulations Stacey!