Meet Your Neighbor is a weekly feature by Spartan Weekly News staff writer Grace Anne Johnson. If you’d like to be featured, or know someone that would be a great candidate to be featured, please email us at sprtnwkly@aol.com or call 864.574.1360.
Everything that Ashley Hairr touches centers around one thing — connection.
The Director of Counseling and College Guidance at Oakbrook Preparatory School, Hairr says that when she first came to Oakbrook seven years ago, the school was new to offering mental health resources for students. A licensed marriage and family therapist, she built Oakbrook’s program from the ground up.
Now, the program is thriving, and Hairr shares that every day looks different. She holds regular individual sessions for mental health with students, and has organized group sessions and parent trainings in addition to crafting social-emotional learning curriculum.
While Oakbrook is home to students K3-12th grade, Hairr predominantly works with the high school students. In addition to counseling, she spends her Wednesdays in the classroom as a part of the College Connect program. During this time, her students learn time management, leadership, and begin planning their futures.
A tight-knit community, Hairr says that graduation season has become extra special the longer she’s been with Oakbrook. Classes are small — only 25 or 30 students — and bearing witness to each student’s growth over the years is one of her favorite parts of her job.
“Our graduation is really sentimental and emotional because we really highlight each individual student,” she shares. “Now that I’ve been here for so long and have become a bigger part of the graduations, I love getting to look back at pictures from when the students were younger and say, ‘Oh, I remember you.’”
“We’re a family here,” she says. “I love watching them grow and change and figure out what they want to do, and to get to keep up with them afterwards. We create such good connections with [our students] that they often come back or keep us in the loop about what comes next.”
In addition to her work at Oakbrook, Hairr has been a key part of building a rich, vibrant community of therapists in South Carolina through the power of social media — an accomplishment for which she was recently awarded the Mental Health Community Advocate of the Year Award by the Mental Health of America’s Spartanburg chapter.
She received the award alongside her friend Meg Chapman in recognition of the Facebook community the two women first began building in 2016. The group, Upstate Therapist Connect, first started shortly after the friends earned their Master’s Degrees from Converse University.
Their goal was to create a space in which South Carolina mental health professionals could connect, collaborate, and support each other. An out-of-state friend from school had mentioned being involved in a similar group, and Hairr and Chapman craved that kind of community in the Upstate. “We realized Spartanburg didn’t have anything like that,” Hairr says, “so we decided on a whim to try to create one of our own and see what happened.”
Today, the Facebook Group boasts 2,500 members, averaging 5,000 posts each year. It’s become a priceless resource for those working in mental health to build professional relationships, learn from each other, and connect their clients with other professionals.
“It’s cool to watch people have that resource to reach out to,” Hairr shares. “Now, I log on and see all these people I don’t even know. I used to know everyone by name. It’s grown so much.”
Whether online or in the classroom, one thing is certain: Hairr’s heart for the Spartanburg community will continue to make the Upstate a kinder, brighter place, one session or post at a time.
*** Know someone who should be featured? Nominate them via email at sprtnwkly@aol.com.
