Melissa Swenson, a counselor at Carbon High School, was recently named as an honorable mention candidate for the High School Counselor of the Year Award in Utah that is given by the Utah School Counselor Association.

Each year the association gives out an award for the best elementary, middle school and secondary counselors, with one person getting an honorable mention. That was the award that Swenson was given.

The honor was presented to Swenson during the organization’s annual convention banquet which was held this year at the Jordan Applied Technology Center in Salt Lake County in early October. She was given the award by the Executive Director of the the American School Counselors Association, Richard Long.

Swenson was nominated for the award last spring by Carbon High Principal Bruce Bean.

Swenson has been in the counseling field for 26 years, with her first 10 years helping students at the College of Eastern Utah (now USU Eastern) and the last 16 at Carbon High.

During her time at Carbon High she has been involved in many innovative and successful projects including using social media and email systems to increase information to parents and students, increasing identification of students needing interventions in the educational careers, initiating the Utah College Application Week at Carbon High, helped to increase college applications by 5 percent at the high school, worked with the district on the “Grow Our Own Educators” program and helped in the transition of moving ninth grade students to the high school as well as working on the transition from the eight class period regiment to the 10 class period schedule.

She and her husband Dave are both originally from Utah County, but now she says they “cannot call any place but Carbon County” their home.

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