This year the students and staff are welcoming a new member of faculty to the Rolla High School, Zach Rogers, who is the new student counselor for letters L-R. Rogers was born in the Rolla and St. James area and attended both schools there. After graduating high school, he attended college at Missouri State University in Springfield, where he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in counseling. He is now a nationally certified school and mental health counselor.
This year is Rogers’ first time back in the Rolla area since high school. He counseled at the Cherokee Middle School in Springfield for four years before transferring to RHS.
“You get to really have some deep meaningful conversations about life, whether personal life, career stuff, career planning,” stated Rogers. “[For high schoolers], life is happening…but now it’s about that next stage after high school, and all those options there because there’s so much there that is possible. And it can be overwhelming if you don’t have a guiding hand there.”
So far Rogers is enjoying RHS and can’t wait to get acquainted with each of his students and the faculty members.
“It’s been fantastic. They have treated me like family in all the best ways. [They have] just really brought me in and have been very welcoming, always open to the many, many questions I have of ‘How do you do this? Why do we do this?’ All of those how and why questions,” claimed Rogers.
Rogers hopes to get involved in clubs and school activities such as Tabletop gaming, football games and more. To give Rogers a final word, he was asked what being a bulldog means to him.
“I don’t even know where to start with that. As odd as it is, just with my experience that I’ve had so far, it’s just a welcoming, tight knit community that came from Cherokee where we always described ourselves as a tribe,” stated Rogers. “So here I don’t know how I would tie that to a bulldog but I get the same sense of like, we’re all together. We have pride in being who we are, being there for one another.”