LMS counselor Lucas Grant receives prestigious honor

After twice changing his major in college, Lovell High School graduate Lucas Grant found his calling. Starting with engineering and then moving to accounting, Grant found the third time to be a charm as he entered the profession of counseling and has loved his career ever since.

Grant was recently selected for the Bob Porter Service Award for his work at Lovell Middle School. The award is given in memory of Robert Carroll Porter, who was a teacher, coach and secondary school counselor in Riverton from 1946 to 1982. It is awarded for service to Wyoming youth at the secondary level.

It’s been a bit of a winding path for Grant to a career he loves. The son of Mike and Marianne Grant of Lovell, he was born in Laramie but raised in Lovell, graduating from Lovell High School in 2006. After a year at the University of Wyoming, he served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Tucson, Arizona, then returned to UW intent on obtaining a degree in engineering.

After about three years in the engineering program, he changed his major to accounting. He earned his Bachelor of Science in accounting in 2015, worked for a year as a loan officer at the Bank of Greybull, then returned to Laramie to work for the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center at the university as a staff accountant.

“I did the boring stuff,” he joked.

But deep in his heart, Grant wanted to help people, especially young people, so he entered the master’s program in counseling at UW in 2017, while working part time for Wyoming Survey and Analysis. He earned his master’s degree in 2019 after interning at Linford Elementary School in Laramie, then was hired at Livingston Elementary School in Cody.

In 2021 he had the opportunity to return to his hometown and was hired at Lovell Middle School as the LMS school counselor. There, he performs individual counseling with students, group counseling and guidance lessons in social, emotional and career topics.

His job is multifaceted. He helps students with their schedules and what classes to take through academic advising, and while he doesn’t perform as much college and career prep as a high school counselor would, he does help students discover their interests.

“I have a short unit that I give about helping them discover what they enjoy, give a couple little mini assessments we do online to find more about themselves and what they want,” he said. “And so it’s more about exploration of careers instead of trying to find what you want. It’s just getting to know yourself and know the different types of career options out there.”

He noted that Alana Thackeray also teaches an eighth-grade teen living class for exploring career choices.

Grant helps students in other ways, too, through his counseling work. For instance, he helps students focus so they can better succeed in the classroom.

“There are kids that struggle with distractions, whether they have a hard time focusing, or maybe they have stuff that they’re thinking of that keeps popping up in their heads and they’re having a hard time learning. And so my goal in individual counseling is to get them focused enough to get back to class and start learning.

“So that’s my goal as a school counselor, to help them learn some skills to calm down and access the learning part of their brain so that they can get back to class and learn some more.”

Grant has a variety of tools at his disposal including sand tray counseling using figurines.

“I like to implement some play in helping them,” he said. “Sometimes if they’re stuck on something and can’t really figure out what’s going on, I just get the sand tray out and let them kind of pick from a variety of figurines and put them in, and they can find their own meaning on what they’ve created. Being able to be creative helps them process things that they might not even know they’re processing.

“But that’s just one thing I use. I don’t use it with all students. It depends on their need. I like to get their mind off of things, and if they’re in a crisis mode or something like that, I like to get their brain focused on something. And so I have different puzzles to get them focused on something, and that helps calm the brain down, gets the cerebral cortex working.”

Grant also helps students with the difficulties of middle school.

“Another thing that I really have a focus on is building resilience in kids in middle school,” he said. “That’s one of my main focuses here. I use the guidance lessons where I focus on one grade level at a time where we do these weekly lessons. I teach them about how to respond to bullies and how to build resilience so that we don’t get upset all the time but take some control back for ourselves.

“I use a lot of solution focus counseling, and so instead of focusing on a problem, I work with the students to explore solutions that they might have. It’s a more short-term type of counseling, which is what you need in a school because I don’t have all day long to meet with every student for multiple sessions, and so we do short-term goal-oriented counseling.”

Helping students

The bottom line for Grant is that he loves helping students. It’s what he enjoys the most about his job.

“I get fulfillment in knowing that I’m helping students feel better, helping students learn and that every day is a different day. It’s not the same work every single day. You never know what’s going to happen. I didn’t like that part of accounting, that you go in and you don’t talk to anybody, and you just sit there and run numbers.

“And so that’s part of the reason I went to counseling. I’ve always wanted to help people. And so I found that, in helping kids, I find that experience to be a very fulfilling experience, because I believe that the earlier we can help someone, the easier it is. We have a lot of focus on mental health where we focus on adult mental health, but adult mental health occurs a lot of times because of our life experiences through childhood. And so I like being able to help out in the earlier ages.”

The Porter Award

Grant was presented the Bob Porter Service Award from the Wyoming Counseling Association, which is separate from the Wyoming School Counselor Association for which Grant is a board member. The Porter Award is not specifically for school counseling work, though it can be like in the case of Grant.

Grant is provisionally licensed as an LPC, a licensed professional counselor, and expects his official certification any day now, having completed the necessary classwork – a 61-credit graduate program – and supervision to receive the license. A school counselor is not required to have an LPC license, he said, but in order to be an outside therapist, Grant needed – and received – the classes and supervision from a professor of school counseling at Wayne State College in Nebraska.

“I’m only waiting,” he said. “I have all that finished, so currently I’m provisionally licensed. Any day now I can get an email that tells me I’m a fully licensed professional counselor. It’s a slow process. I have my application in, and I’ve completed all my supervision and everything I need for that.”

Grant received the Bob Porter Award during the fall conference of the Wyoming Counseling Association, of which he is a member, in Casper October 11-12. He was nominated for the award by WCA board member Rachel Ratliff, who he said nominated him for “your passion for helping your students, being creative in ways you provide services to best meet their needs and being willing to do what you can to help further the profession as a whole.”

As a potential engineer, working accountant and now a professionally licensed counselor, Grant’s career journey has taken him to a good place. He said he would like to explore performing some outside therapy work when he receives his license to help meet a community need, but he plans to always stay with the school.

“I don’t ever want to stop being a school counselor, but I would like to help out in our community,” he said. “We are limited on how many mental health professionals we have, being in a rural area, and so I still have to figure out how that will work and how it would look. But at some point I’d like to provide, at least on a part-time basis, some outside therapy.

“There’s a difference between outside therapy and in-school counseling, which is technically not therapy. It’s counseling that we provide. We still use the same techniques and everything, but we don’t diagnose in schools, even though I can. In the role of school counselor we don’t, because we need to be accessible to all students. It wouldn’t be right for a school counselor to provide intensive treatment in a school. It would limit my availability to other students, and also, it’s just not the right environment to be providing that.

“The role of the school counselor is to provide short-term counseling instead of intensive therapy. And so when I have a student that I know needs a little more help than I can give them here at school I’ll give resources to parents to go and see if they can get their child in to see someone outside of school.”

The role of a middle school counselor is important, Grant knows.

“Middle school is a time when kids are changing friendships; they’re finding out more about themselves. So it is a hard time,” he said. “They’re learning new things about themselves and trying to find what makes them unique.”

And in the end, Grant loves what he’s doing.

“I love it,” he said. “I love this job.”

Grant and his wife, Shanae, have four children: Connor, Carson, Corban and Cambrie.