At Irene School we believe Guidance and Counseling is an important process of helping individual student discover and develop their educational, vocational, and psychological potentialities and thereby to achieve an optimal level of personal happiness and social usefulness.
This department is headed by one of the teachers together with a team student peer counselors, where they design and deliver comprehensive school counseling programs that promote student achievement. These programs are comprehensive in scope, preventive in design and developmental in nature.
One program that has been ongoing is the division of the students into families spearheaded by a teacher as a parent figure and a student peer counselor as their leader. So far we have Eight families comprising of a mixture of students from all the forms.
The families are as listed below:-
- INCARNATE WORD FAMILY – named after the “Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará, also known in Spanish as, Servidoras“, which is an institute of Catholic missionary sisters dedicated to prolonging the Incarnation of the Word through the evangelization of culture.
- ST. AUGUSTINE FAMILY – named after the great bishop of Hippo Regius in north Africa who was viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity for his writings in the Pastric Period.
- ST. AMBROSE FAMILY – named after Saint Ambrose, also known as Aurelius Ambrosius, one of the four original doctors of the Church. He was the Bishop of Milan and became one of the most important theological figure of the 4th century.
- ST. JOSEPHINE BAKHITA FAMILY – named after Saint Josephine Bakhita, who was born in a small village in the Darfur region of Sudan and subsequently spent her life as a slave. It is said her captors asked for her name but she was too terrified to remember so they named her “Bakhita,” which means “fortunate” in Arabic. Her fortune would eventually catch up with her where she joined Canossian Sisters and devoted her life into Christianity as a free woman.
- ST. MONICA FAMILY – named after Saint Monica of Hippo, was an early Christian saint and the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. She is remembered and honored in most Christian denominations, albeit on different feast days, for her outstanding Christian Virtues, particularly the suffering caused by her husband’s adultery, and her prayerful life dedicated to the reformation of her son, who wrote extensively of her pious acts and life with her in his Confessions. Popular Christian legends recall Saint Monica weeping every night for her son Augustine.
- ST. BRIDGET FAMILY – named after Bridget of Sweden, one of the six patron saints of Europe, the most celebrated saint of Sweden was the daughter of the knight Birger Persson of the family of Finsta, governor and law-speaker of Uppland, and one of the richest landowners of the country, and his wife, a member of the so-called Lawspeaker branch of the Folkunga family.
- ST. RITA FAMILY – named after Saint Rita of Cascia, she was born in the year 1381 in the village of Roccaporena, near Cascia , Italy . Her parents, Antonio and Amata Lotti, considered her birth a very special gift from God, for Rita was born to them as they were already advancing in age. As a young girl Rita frequently visited the convent of the Augustinian Nuns in Cascia and dreamed of one day joining their community.
- ST. CATHERINE FAMILY – named after Saint Catherine of Siena, born in Siena, she grew up there and wanted very soon to devote herself to God, against the will of her parents. She joined the Sisters of the Penance of St. Dominic and made her vows. She made herself known very quickly by being marked by mystical phenomena such as stigmata and mystical marriage.