Southeast Alamance counselor Joy Toms named ABSS counselor of the year

Joy Toms has become one of the most important adults in Southeast Alamance High School’s daily life, the counselor students turn to for a tough day, a college plan or the family issue that threatens to knock classwork off track. Alamance-Burlington School System named Toms its School Counselor of the Year, recognizing work that reaches far beyond scheduling and paperwork.

Toms is Southeast Alamance’s lead school counselor and has spent 16 years in the profession. She started her career at Morehead High School in Eden, then moved to Alamance County in 2019, where she served as graduation coach at Eastern Alamance High School before taking the lead counseling job at Southeast. Her philosophy centers on three Cs: Compassion, Consistency and Communication.

That work fits squarely within the district’s own description of what student support should look like. ABSS Student Support Services says its mission is to holistically engage, advocate for and empower all students to achieve academic success. Southeast Alamance says school counselors provide consultation, individual and group counseling, academic advisement, and support for cognitive, socio-emotional and career development needs. In practice, that means a counselor like Toms is often part of the response when a student is struggling to keep up, needs help mapping out the future or needs an adult to help pull together school and home concerns.

The recognition also comes with broader context. National School Counseling Week is observed during the first full week in February, and the 2026 theme was School Counselors Amplify Student Success, running Feb. 2-6. Alamance County has already seen how visible counselor leadership can be: in February 2023, Gov. Roy Cooper visited B. Everett Jordan Elementary in Graham to honor Meredith Draughn, the 2023 American School Counselor of the Year. During that event, Draughn pointed to the profession’s workload pressure, citing the association’s recommended 250-to-1 counselor-to-student ratio and North Carolina’s 316 students per counselor ratio in the 2021-22 school year.

At Southeast, Toms’ recognition underscores how much of a school’s stability can rest on one counselor’s daily presence. The district has described her as someone who helps students through difficult days, works alongside families and supports staff, and that kind of steady, behind-the-scenes work is often what keeps students connected to school and moving toward graduation.