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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > July > 05 > Entry
Guidance when kids need it most
A press release from the California Association of School Counselors reports a deal has been struck for the state to spend $200 million to hire more counselors:
“…this is the first time in California history that this amount of funding has gone to provide school counselors. With the $200 million dollars, schools will able to hire 3,000 credentialed school counselors statewide. This will bring down the student/counselor ratio to 500:1 in middle schools and 300:1 in high schools. The new funding will bring the California ratios closer to the national average.”
This is big for a couple of reasons.
First, California is well known for its woeful guidance counseling situation, with high schools caseloads sometimes at 700 or 800 kids to each counselor. This new deal is a fairly stunning and well overdue turn of events given the history.
Second, California is a leader in education. Where California goes, others tend to follow. If they really get serious about guidance counseling on the left coast, other states may get with the program too.
Guidance counseling, in many ways, is more important than ever, given the complexity of the life problems kids face and the twisted roads they must navigate to services, college and careers. And the profession is moving toward more and better specialization and away from the days when the guidance office was a place where principals sometimes stashed teachers who hated teaching.
Many people my age have counselor horror stories. My counselor recommended for me a slew of low grade colleges I’d never heard of. Thank God my parents knew a thing or two about colleges. My best high school friend’s 80-year-old nun guidance counselor recommended he not retake the SAT after a very low score on the first try because “it wouldn’t fair to other kids who took the test just once.” (At my urging, he took the SAT five more times and raised his score nearly 200 points.)
Even at 300 kids to each counselor it’s asking a lot for students to get much in the way of the personal attention many of them need. But it’s a start. The question now is where will California even get 3,000 new counselors?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Comments
By Doug
July 5, 2006 8:58 PM | Link to this
The guidance counselors I have worked with in the past 15 years are the ones that are called upon to unpack, sort, distribute and then pack up and ship all these state mandated standardized tests. Somebody has to do it. You can’t have non-certified personel do these tasks because of liability issues. being the test fairy takes up a huge amount of a counselor’s time. The general public does not realize that many school districts have their guidance counselors heavily involved in the intervention process. That is, trying to help teachers diagnose why a student is not successful and helping to design a plan to get the student to be successful. Kids today are coming to school with more and more problems. Hiring more guidance counselors is a good move.By Andrew Pass
July 5, 2006 8:44 PM | Link to this
The truth is that guidance counselors alone cannot manage all of the students on their caeloads. Teachers must guide students towards the most effective classes and colleges as well. The best teachers develop trusting and mentoring relationships with at least some of their students. These relationships promote the giving of advice. Perhaps some of the money available for guidance counselors should be spent on additional professional development for teachers who are not guidance counselors by training but fill the role. Andrew Pass http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.htmlBy Oldprof
July 5, 2006 9:17 AM | Link to this
True, Mary. But the move is in a good direction. Doing the math, a 300/1 ratio means that the counselor could devote 30 minutes per month to individual students if that was the only thing the counsellor did on the job: holding group sessions and using self-tests would free up time for other tasks (like the volumes of useless required reports). But Scott raises a good point; guidance counselors now are often of marginal quality; hire another 3000 and you’re drawing from the population that couldn’t get hired in the first place—time will tell if this development provides one dollar of value for each dollar invested. HEY—TERRY RYAN! Do charter high chools have counselors? I doubt it, esp. the online ones.By Mary
July 5, 2006 7:12 AM | Link to this
Sorry, Scott, but reading this gets my blood boiling about priorities schools seem to have. While guidance counseling is in the ratio of hundreds of students to one counselor and class sizes approach the ridiculous, the same schools provide 15 or so boys or girls out of thousands of students a basketball coach, maybe an assistant coach or two, supplemental contract pay, transportation to away games, a trainer, uniforms, and all out assistance with college recruitment and scholarships. Don’t think this warped sense of educational priorities is not lost on the rest of the students.