Some schools get counseling help

By Julie Rausch

Two WSU professors are evaluating a federally funded project called "Helping Children Dream," which is designed to help children succeed in the classroom in public elementary schools.

Ruth Hitchcock, assistant professor, and Joseph Mau, associate professor, in the department of administration, counseling, educational and school psychology, are working with USD 259 on the second year of a three-year grant.

The grant provides more general school counseling services in schools where services don’t exist or don’t meet the needs of students. The grant also includes programs to enhance social skills among children.

Some of the schools included in the grant are eligible for federal funding through Title I, which is designed to help disadvantaged children meet high academic standards. Other schools have high numbers of students for whom English is not the first language. All nine of the schools benefiting from the program are slightly or well below the state average scores on standardized tests, Hitchcock says.

Money from the $400,000 per year grant primarily goes toward salaries of the school counselors. Part of the money goes toward adding preventive programs for the children and professional development activities for the counselors. The rest of the money, $23,000 per year, is for evaluating the program’s effectiveness.

Mau and Hitchcock collect data through interviews with school administrators and counselors about how they perceive counseling roles, progress and continuing needs as well as through focus groups with parents, teachers and students.

They also look at such things as how the intervention programs impact academic performance, attendance and office referrals.

The American School Counselors Association recommends one school counselor for every 250 children. USD 259 has one school counselor for every 983 children.

A primary reason for the absence of school counselors is a lack of funding for those positions.

The purpose for the study is to show the link between social skills and emotional well being and academic success in school, says Mau.

Although data collection and analysis is ongoing, preliminary results show children, parents and school staff see the program as very positive.

The bottom line, says Hitchcock, is that "children who are not happy and have unmet needs don’t do well academically. These are great and capable kids who carry a tremendous amount of baggage to school with them.

"With all the cuts in school funding, counseling programs have to say, ‘We are worth it. And what we do is meaningful and it does make a difference in the lives of children,’" Hitchcock says.

In addition to showing the worth of counseling services the grant demonstrates the clear purpose of a school counselor.

"The grant makes the purpose of school counselors very clear," Hitchcock says. "Sometimes there’s a tendency for schools to use counselors in ways that take away from the professional services."

Those ways might include playground duty or substitute teaching or other roles, says Hitchcock.

Those duties, if requested on an occasional basis, don’t always have to be seen as negative unless they interfere with the counselor’s primary purpose, Hitchcock says.