$1.5 million grant funds counselors in Gadsden School Dist.

SAN LUIS, Ariz. – Seven schools in the Gadsden Elementary School District will each have their own academic counselors, thanks to a three-year, $1.56 million grant from the state.

The grant comes from the Arizona Department of Education’s School Safety Program, which awards the money on a competitive basis to districts around the state. The district was last awarded the grant six years ago.

“We are very lucky to have qualified,” said Antonio Garcia, director of the district’s grants department. “These funds will allow us to have a counselor in most of the elementary school, as well as to hire one each for the junior highs.”

The counselors, said Garcia, “will help in the schools to prevent and take care of problems that can affect students’ academic progress. To do that they make contact with those students, their parents, with teachers and school employees.”

The grant will be used for counselors at Arizona Desert, Cesar Chavez, Ed Pastor, Gadsden and Rio Colorado elementary schools, as well as to Southwest Junior High School and San Luis Middle School.

At present, elementary schools in the district share a counselor.

Left out in funding for counselors was the district’s sixth elementary

school, Desert View, which in 2019 ranked as the top academically performing school in Yuma County under the Department of Education’s evaluation system.

“We don’t know why (Desert View was omitted), because when they notified us that it didn’t qualify, no reasons were given. “It’s a complicated (funding) formula, with various factors (considered). We will have to ask for information to know those reasons.”

Apart from the Gadsden district, the Yuma Elementary School District 1 and Yuma’s Crane Elementary School District have received grants from the Department of Education for counselors.

Once its grant expires at the end of three years, the

Gadsden district has the option to apply to the state to renew it, Garcia said.

Meanwhile, Garcia said, the district is currently working with the San Luis Police Department on an application for a federal grant through the U.S. Justice Department to pay salaries for police officers to serve as school resource officers on the elementary and junior high campuses.