A study of legal issues encountered by school counselors and perceptions of their preparedness to respond to legal challenges - Special issue: legal and ethical issues in school counseling

Professional School Counseling, Oct, 2002 by Mary A. Hermann

One of the most important findings of this research study was that school counselors who recently participated in continuing education related to ethics or legal issues in counseling felt better prepared than their colleagues who had not recently participated in this type of continuing education to respond to the legal issues encountered most frequently by the participants. For the legal issue reporting suspected child abuse, participation in continuing ethical or legal education was the only variable that had a relationship to the participants' perceptions of their preparedness to respond. Considering these findings, it is notable that almost one-half of the participants did not participate in continuing education in legal and ethical issues.

School counselors' perceived level of preparedness to respond to legal issues did not differ significantly considering the school counselors' years of experience or level of education. King et al. (1999) also found that counselors' confidence in their ability to identify students at risk for suicide did not differ significantly based on years of experience as a high school counselor or the education level of the counselors. Conversely, Gibson (1992) found a positive relationship between counselors' confidence in ethics beliefs and counselors' highest degree obtained, and Rawls (1997) found significant differences in counselors' knowledge of legal issues considering counselors' level of education. Once again, these conflicting results are worthy of future study.

In many states, school counselors are not required to be licensed as professional counselors, yet 49.8% of the school counselors in this study were licensed professional counselors. Furthermore, this study found that school counselors who were licensed felt better prepared to respond to being asked to reveal confidential information. This finding could relate to the laws in many states requiring a counselor to be licensed before a counselor can protect a client's right to confidentiality in a court of law. Thus, school counselors who are licensed may feel more comfortable in dealing with issues of client privacy.

Remley and Herlihy (2001) noted that malpractice lawsuits against mental health practitioners have increased dramatically in the past 10 years. However, they explained that the total number of lawsuits against mental health practitioners is still relatively small. In this study, the two legal issues which are likely to be indicative of involvement in litigation, being asked to turn over confidential records and being subpoenaed to appear as a witness in a legal proceeding, were encountered by participants least often. Furthermore, when asked to specify other legal issues encountered in the past year, only 3 of the 273 participants indicated that they had been threatened with a lawsuit or sued. Accordingly, the results of this study seem to support the premise that though counselors are dealing with legal issues more often, the amount of litigation involving counselors is still very low.