School counseling in the 21st century: personal and professional reflections - response to Stan Baker and others, Professional School Counseling, vol. 5, p. 75, 84, 96, 106, December 2001

Professional School Counseling, Feb, 2002 by L. DiAnne Borders

I have two very vague memories of my high school guidance counselor, the only counselor I remember from my 12 years in public school. Both memories are from my senior year. One is related to paperwork regarding a scholarship nomination I received. The other memory is around subtle messages from her that I very clearly understood as discouraging me from applying to my top college choice. Whether this came from her concerns about my academic abilities or my family's ability to pay for a private university education, I do not know (she was probably right on both counts).

My son, now in the fourth grade, has had two elementary school counselors. (Somewhat remarkably, both are male.) Within his first week of kindergarten, Jacob knew who Mr. Wiles was and why students might want to go see him. He also was excited to know that Mr. Wiles would be coming to his classroom often, hopefully bringing those cool puppets!

These personal experiences came to my mind often as I read the four pieces in the December 2001 issue of this journal on the current status of the school counseling profession. The differences between the two experiences are clearly reflected in the historical overviews provided by two of the authors (Baker, 2001; Gysbers, 2001) and illustrate several of the critical challenges identified by all four. My newly integrated rural high school was hardly on the edge of beginning to understand that the new student population would require multicultural understanding and skills. My son's kindergarten class alone included Latino, African-American, biracial, White, Asian-American, and Eastern-European students as well as a student who lived with a same sex couple. Last year, he learned how to take multiple choice end-of-grade tests (to guess or not to guess, that is the question), practiced taking them often, and fretted and worried about his performance despite being on the honor roll all year. Now, I worry how the results of those tests will be used when he is placed, by the school counselor, in his middle school classes. Dally, Jacob uses technology at his school that simply did not exist during my high school years. Monthly, I find products of a developmental guidance lesson in his bookbag.

Some 30 years have elapsed between my two personal experiences with school counselors. In between, I have earned a master's degree in counseling and a Ph.D. in counselor education and supervision, taught and supervised counseling students (including school counselors) in two states, and have offered some observations of the profession in professional journals. Currently, I teach in a master's and doctoral program where we educate "professional counselors who work in a variety of settings.' From our program's perspective, school counselors' identity as professional counselors is the underlying basis for how they approach all of their work. We acknowledge both that, given the context in which they work, (a) school counselors primarily use their counseling (and other) skills towards the goals of enhancing the academic success and life career planning of all of their students, and (b) they are the frontline mental health specialists in the schools, who thus must deal with the wide variety of societal issues confronting today's youth and their families.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to read, reflect on, and write about four perspectives on the current status of the school counseling profession, including accomplishments and challenges. As one of those who has lived some of the history and development of the profession as a student client, a professional, and a parent client, a step back from the day-to-day is a helpful exercise in gaining broader observations and perspectives.

In this reaction piece, I share my responses to several of the issues raised by Baker (2001), Green and Keys (2001), Gysbers (2001), and Paisley and McMahon (2001). I focus my remarks on those issues about which I feel most competent and/or passionate. This reaction article, then, focuses on the unending questions about the role of the school counselor, ongoing calls for program evaluation and accountability, increasingly complex diversity in the schools, and school counselors as advocates.

Who? What? When? Where? and How?

As I learned during my years as a high school newspaper advisor, these are the questions a journalist should address in an article. A journalist would have a difficult rime, however, covering all of these questions in an article about school counselors. The "identity vs. role confusion" (Baker & Gerler, 2001, p. 289) debate not only is a theme across the four lead articles; as the authors of the four indicate, but also is a pervasive issue that has been and continues to be debated. Has any other profession had such an ongoing difficulty defining who they are and what they do?

Baker (2001) and Gysbers (2001) provided a historical perspective on these questions. In particular, they described the numerous external forces that influenced the evolution of the profession--including forces that have expanded and continue to expand the scope of the profession as well as those that have limited its ability to define itself. As Baker and Gerler (2001) stated elsewhere, "There was no master plan" (p. 289). Instead, the profession has sought to respond to--and keep up with--shifting educational philosophies, social movements, economic swings, and federal legislation that have driven the needs for and expectations of school counselors. As all the authors illustrate, this is not a dead--or resolved--issue. Of the four pieces, Gysbers (2001) and Green and Keys (2001) advocated for a particular role, function, and/or approach, while Baker (2001) and Paisley and McMahon (2001) provided more of an overview of various aspects of the debate. This debate includes polarized discussions such as mental health vs. educational goals and appropriate vs. inappropriate roles as well as questions such as What is "comprehensive"? and What is "developmental"?