If you are a school counselor or other school professional looking to establish how your students are different as a result of your work with them, the Center for Excellence in School Counseling and Leadership (CESCaL) is for you!  This resource has been provided by counselor educator and national presenter, Trish Hatch. 

In case you haven't heard:

Last spring a report commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published by the Public Agenda elevated the concern that students are not getting the support they need when it comes to choosing a college or career or getting financial aid for college.  The report, titled Can I Get a Little Advice Here?, detailed the findings from telephone interviews that were conducted from May 7 – June 24, 2009, with 614 young adults aged 22 to 30 years old who have experience with some post-secondary education. Key findings included the following:

I hope you are not alarmed when I tell you that I have a little voice in my head that takes pleasure in taunting me with the notion that I really have no idea what I am doing...that I am some kind of impostor in the various roles that I take on...and that it will not be long before everyone around me finds me out.This school counseling blog hit home with me as it relates to keeping this voice in check.

If you are a school counselor and not signed up for the ASCA SCENE, you are missing out!  This networking site is a professional meeting place for school counseling professionals to share and learn from each other. Get answers to your school counseling questions, share your lesson plans and best practices, become the best school counselor you can be.

I subscribe to a listserv for counselor educators and supervisors called CESNET and this thread came up posted by Wes Irwin:

I was surprised to learn that the school district that I recently moved into, Mounds View School District, MN has replaced school counselors with "Deans." If you are interested you can read more about this on their website via a link to their electronic newsletter http://www.moundsviewschools.org/ from the Spring of 2010.  This school district is pretty highly rated. I do not yet know the background as to what brought this about. Is this a trend nationwide?

A current debate is raging in professional counseling associations surrounding the issue of professional identity of counselors.

The Association of Michigan School Counselors (AMSC) and the Michigan School Counselor Association (MSCA) are hosting a joint spring conference on April 27, 2009 at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Since the profession of school counseling has opened up to include non-teachers being trained as school counselors, there has been much debate surrounding the following question:  Does one need to be trained as a teacher to be an effective professional school counselor?

School counselor v. guidance counselor:  Does it really matter?  When we talk about the role of the counseling position in schools, many would argue that the title doesn't matter.