Nathan Scarbrough
Week 11 Discussion: Brown
Chapter 12 – Designing and Implementing Comprehensive K-12 Career Development
Programs within the Framework of the ASCA National Model
I agree
with the points made by Julia in her blog.
While the ASCA has developed a heavily structured and comprehensive model
that counselors may use to examine and guide decisions regarding children’s
career development, I do question the ability of a counselor to institute all
of these steps and policies for each of their clients.
One
study we looked at during our peer review suggested that the average student
counselor has roughly 250 clients. Given
the extensiveness of the ANM, I’m not sure that it is realistic for a counselor
to be able to hit each step for each student.
How is one counselor supposed to keep up with the work that would be
required to guide a child through all of these steps? Organizing and managing action plans,
calendars, results reports, program audits, mission statements, responsive
services, support systems, preconditions, planning committees, needs
assessments, goals, objectives, budgeting, parental involvement, career
classes, community resources, special needs considerations, etc. is a lot for a
counselor to go through for just one student, much less 250.
I
understand that the counselor would not be solely responsible for each of these
steps. That said, schools have limited
resources and these considerations would most likely be handled by a handful of
staff at best. To give the other side a
fighting chance, I also understand that a counselor would not necessarily use
each step of the program for each child, and would instead pick and choose
beneficial strategies based off of each child’s needs. However, even with that considered the ANM
still requires a ton of factors to be sorted out and managed for each
individual student.
I know
that the guidance counselor at the school I work at is also the guidance counselor for two other
schools in the area. I believe this is
due to recent budget cuts. I know that my client has special needs, but only
gets to see the counselor twice a week for about ten minutes at a time (less
than a third of the amount of time he got to spend with his previous counselor last
year). I know that my client’s counselor
cares about him, but she is falling behind with his needs. She is often late to his already short
meetings, and has yet to bring in the “helping tools” that she has been
promising to create for the last month.
I do not blame her directly. Instead, I realize that she is overloaded
with the stress of being responsible for too many students and traveling
between three offices. If the ANM were to be attempted at my place of work,
there is no doubt that it would fail, as my client’s counselor cannot keep up
with the minimal amount of attention she is required to provide to my client
alone, much less this extensive model for a few hundred kids. If the financial
issues affecting this cannot be resolved, there is little hope for an effective
career-development program to take hold.
Long story short, I love the plan, but I do not think it will be a
realistic one until the ratio of counselors to students dramatically changes.
Brown,
D. (2012). Career
information, career counseling, and career development (10th ed.). New
York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.
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