Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, July 5, 2006
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?
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Carnival is up
You can find Campus’ Watch’s post about iPods, my post about Dayton schools’ reverse black-white achievement gap and much more at the Carnival of Education, hosted this week by NYC Educator.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
