It’s Wednesday morning. Counselor Karen Carpenter grabs her bag from the car and walks into her office. Pushing aside the massive stack of schedules and notes about parents she needs to call, she reaches for her binder— not the transcript binder, but the Girl Talk binder.

Every Wednesday during RTI, Mrs.Carpenter meets with a group of girls for Girl Talk, a program to help girls understand the importance of how words can affect them, both in social media, internally, externally, and how they can use them to empower others positively.

“I did a survey at the beginning, and basically it’s asking the girls what they hope to get out of the group,” she said. “The majority, the pattern that I saw was we hope to build relationships and to learn how we can use our words for good.”

Mrs. Carpenter decided to start the group after seeing some of the struggles girls were having in school.

“I got the idea maybe six to seven years ago. We did a club called PG tribe, that was the main way I got the idea, because that was so successful,” Mrs. Carpenter said. “Like, in the morning, we had our claim time, and so we would meet once a week, and we would just talk about things that girls struggle with.“

Each week they practiced a new topic of the series. Some topics they studied were the power of words, self thoughts, showing gratitude, and hooking topics (negative thoughts we often think about). It’s not your average just consoling meeting though — she likes to be interactive with activities.

“This helps with hooking topics, it’s called leaves on a stream where, basically, you put that thought you had on a leaf, maybe a negative thought that we tell ourselves a lot, we wrote it down,and then we see it like as a leaf on a on a stream that flows by,” she said. “We acknowledge the thought, but then it continues to flow by.”

The girls in the program have decided to extend from six weeks to until the end of the semester.

“I feel like we’ve started to meet that goal of building relationships, and I want to continue that,” Mrs.Carpenter said. “I don’t want to cut it off right now when they feel like it is happening.”