Advocacy in School Counseling: Top 5 Tips

Advocacy in School Counseling: What & Why?

Advocacy is the practice of educating those in power about what duties our profession entails and what conditions we need to best counsel our students. Historically, school counseling has been and continues to be a profession that dumps huge caseloads on individuals and expects more time given than is compensated for. As a result there is a big need for advocacy in our profession. The hope in advocacy is to bring about positive change by creating more of a balance between the reality of our jobs vs. what we can reasonably do in a work day with the resources provided.

Advocacy in School Counseling: How?

Below are my top 5 tips to get you started or continuing on your advocacy journey! Following these tips will slowly, but surely, improve your work environment and your students’ counseling program!

1. Weekly Meetings with Your Principal

Have weekly meetings with your campus admin to:

Complete the American School Counselor Association’s (ASCA) Annual Agreement doc- do this during the first admin-counselor meeting only.
Share the school counseling (SC) tasks you are doing and discuss how they relate to the campus mission.
Share SC role/duties info per ASCA National Model or your state model.
Share your time-spent data- use EZAnalyze, ASCA’s Use of Time Calculator, or some other time-tracking tool. This will show your admin if changes need to be made because you are having to spend too much time on non-counseling duties.
Find out what SC initiatives your admin is interested in.

Here is a short video you can watch where I discuss what should take place in these weekly meetings: Stephanie Talks School Counseling!

2. Decrease Non-Counseling Duties

Work with your admin to gently decrease non-counseling duties (NCDs). To do this, you can follow the tips in my post “The Art of Saying No Gracefully” or follow the steps for this listed on page 117 of The Texas Model for Comprehensive School Counseling Programs. Use ASCA (and TEA’s) Appropriate/Inappropriate School Counseling Duties chart:

Identify problem areas and brainstorm solutions (let this chart guide you in your school counseling duties).
Gently and professionally discuss with admin how to move inappropriate duties off your plate to free up space to add in the appropriate duties.

3. Counseling Meetings

Meet weekly or monthly with your counseling professional learning community (PLC). Do a little research on what makes an effective PLC and incorporate this into your weekly agenda. We always divided our agenda into student concerns, upcoming week schedule, and then Texas’ four SC components (guidance curriculum, responsive services, individual planning, and system support); organizing our PLC meetings in this way helped us to stay on track with appropriate counseling role and duties. Your PLC members can include anyone who will help forward the mission of the SC program. At my PLCs, we had SCs, behavior specialists, school social workers, counseling interns, admins, and more!

4. Keep a Schedule

Keep a full, well-planned out schedule that you share with your admin & staff. For steps to set up your schedule, check out this post I wrote on scheduling: “Back to School for Counselors”. Remember, if people think you have no work to do, they will GIVE you work to do.

5. Set up a CSCP

I’ve saved the best and biggest for last: Set up a Comprehensive School Counseling Program!! Transition your program from “random acts of guidance” to a comprehensive school counseling program (CSCP). Set aside several days at the end/beginning of the school year when students are not in session to create your CSCP. To do this:

Read the ASCA National Model or your state model guide cover to cover and take some notes on the model’s steps that you will need to follow in order to set up a CSCP. The whole purpose of these model guides are too create a CSCP, so basically you will be just reading and following their steps- ASCA even provides a workbook to assist you further in doing this.
Once you have read the guide, set a meeting with your counseling advisory team or PLC and start following those steps.
Next, type up the results of following those steps into a Word Doc, submit to your admin for approval, and Voila!! You now have a CSCP!!
Be sure to use your new CSCP to guide all your program planning for the school year in those weekly PLCs.

Advocacy in School Counseling: A Final Thought

Another issue that needs our attention regarding counselor advocacy is the issue of bringing in outside agencies to take the social-emotional aspects of our job off our hands, in order to free us up for other aspects (usually non-counseling) of our job. THIS. IS. NOT. OKAY. We need to be advocating for hiring more school counselors to bring down student-to-counselor ratios, rather than bringing in outside agency employees to help us manage ridiculous ratios. I will explore this in more detail in a future post, but I wanted to make a mention of it here because it is such a big advocacy issue.

Do you need less non-counseling duties or lower ratios in order to have time for actually counseling students??

Newsy & Noteworthy

Super excited to announce that my SEL video game: Stars of Social-Emotional Learning is now available!! Here’s the link if you want to check it out!

I’m also excited to announce that I have a new guidance lesson on De-stigmatizing Mental Health Issues– here’s the link to check it out.

Finally, I’ll be in San Antonio, giving the keynote address on “SEL in School Counseling” at their Fall Counseling Conference! If you are in the neighborhood on October 11, come enjoy a fabulous conference- info here: https://fcc2019.sched.com/directory/speakers

WRAPPING IT UP

That brings me to the end of my October post. Please leave a comment because I’d love to hear what your thoughts are about advocacy in school counseling! You can catch up with me again in November for my monthly counseling post that I share during the first weekend of every month! In the meantime, you can find out about my latest promotions, free stuff, or counseling adventures by following me on my School Counselor Stephanie Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest pages!

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Newsy & Noteworthy

WRAPPING IT UP

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