Lauryn Greggs was born on April 22, 1995 to her parents Rob Greggs and Brenda Gander. Lauryn is the oldest out of her siblings. She has a brother named Ryan and a little sister named Cecily. The siblings have a half-sister named Elizbeth to their dad. Lauryn also has a stepbrother named Coty Gander to her mother's marriage.
Lauryn went to Lakeview for schooling. When Lauryn was in second grade her parents got a divorced. Her and her siblings soon moved in with their grandparents until their mom started dating her high school sweetheart Tom Gander, who she soon married. Her father Rob ended up getting remarried as well to Roz Greggs. The divorce took a toll on all of them, but Lauryn had it the worse, being the oldest she had to experience it the longest. Soon after, Lauryn got into middle school where she started to experience people not being so friendly to her. Lauryn found refugee with her middle school counselor, which help a lot. Lauryn looked up to that counselor, because of what she stood for and how she helped anyone with so much and cared no matter who they were. But in high school things got worse for Lauryn, and the high school counselor didn’t help with the matters. So, Lauryn would go back to the woman that helped her all throughout middle school. Lauryn soon realized that this is what she wanted to do with her life, she wants to make differences in kids' lives by helping them through tough times.
“If you are going to work with people, you need to understand yourself,” Lauryn said
After high school Lauryn went on to peruse her dream by double majoring in psychology and sociology with a minor in social work at Clarion University. Four years later Lauryn applied for grad school at the wonderful Slippery Rock University. Where she is in the masters program for mental health counseling with the main focus to be an elementary school counselor or she has the opportunity to be a direct care counselor. Lauryn would enjoy helping the younger kids with imagination play and developmental skills.
“I also enjoy high school, with more social development and the academic organizations kind of things,” Lauryn said.
Lauryn is set to graduate on May 8th, 2020. Lauryn has already started to apply for schools to work at in South and North Carolina as well as Pennsylvania, but all of this has been put on a halt because of the virus closing schools down. Lauryn was currently doing her internship at Hickory high school, when the order for the schools to shut down came to be. Lauryn needs 300 hours for this internship, and half of it needed to be direct hours, which is face-to-face with the kids, and the other half which was indirect, being emails, training, and paperwork.
“I was lucky enough to get a lot of hours in the beginning of this semester, where a lot of people in my cohort were not so lucky to get as many direct hours,” Lauryn said.
Lauryn is so used to working with her students face-to-face and when all the sudden everything just stopped, and she lost contact with all her students, it became hard to figure out what to do for the rest of her hours. Lauryn found that virtual meetings worked the best with helping for her hours, she is meeting with her internship supervisor and the principal of Hickory high school. Lauryn is also doing a lot of online trainings now, which can range from autism awareness to suicide prevention to get all her hours in.
“If you don’t get those hours you have to take an incomplete,” Lauryn said.
Lauryn has figured everything out where she will not have to take an incomplete. A lot of her cohort will have to extend their hours to complete by May 8th. Even after graduating a lot of the schools are holding off on hiring people, because the schools don’t know how they are going to have graduation for their kids or how they are going to do scheduling for them or even getting their kinds to do their school work.
“There are a lot of things I believe schools are worried about right now, besides hiring someone for 2021,” Lauryn said.
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