School Counselors
Data: Does Your State Have Enough School Psychologists and Counselors?
Education Week examined ratios of school psychologists and counselors to students across the country.
School Climate & Safety
Schools Struggle With What to Tell Students About a Day of Terror
As adults in schools across the country struggled to come to grips with the news and sort fact from fiction, many had to make quick decisions about what was best for students.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Iowa's High Court Holds Counselors Liable
A high school counselor can be sued for dispensing academic advice that has an adverse effect on a student, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled last week in a decision that a dissenting judge warned could put a damper on academic counseling.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Abortion Debate: Do the Schools Have A Role in Counseling Girls?
Pregnant teenagers looking for someone to turn to can create painful ethical dilemmas for counselors and legal nightmares for school boards and administrators.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Opinion
Counseling: The Missing Link
An investment in counseling not only makes sense in light of school reform efforts, but can also yield important returns for taxpayer dollars, argues Charles W. Lindahl.
Equity & Diversity
Guidance Counselors Often Struggle To Help Undocumented Students
Trying to help high-achieving students who are undocumented aliens reach their college goals has become a routine as confusing as it is heartbreaking for many high school guidance counselors here and across the country.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Cranked Up
With more young people getting caught in the maelstrom of methamphetamine abuse, school and community leaders are struggling to come to their rescue.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Meth 101: Hitting the Heartland
For the past two years, Iowa state officials have had to rely on a 20-foot-long trailer to get the word out about methamphetamine. The drug isn't covered in depth by existing drug-abuse-prevention curricula, they say, and is too big a problem in the state to go unaddressed. So officials have depended on the Iowa National Guard to help them haul a mobile methamphetamine exhibit from one town to another.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Prevention: Los Angeles Reaches Out To Students With Systemwide Approach
With the help of a district-run mental-health clinic, a city teeming with psychological clinics, and a $14 million annual investment from the district’s budget in mental-health services, the number of suicides in the district dropped from 35 in 1989 to 19 in 1997.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Nurturing Atmosphere: One School Strives To Be Kinder, Gentler
Squinting into the lunch-hour sunshine, Jackie Garcia scans the vast, blacktop playground for signs of altercations. Spotting a scuffle between a pair of 2nd graders playing kickball, Jackie, 11, bounds toward them, her bright-orange slicker, emblazoned with the title "Conflict Manager," flapping as she runs.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Memphis: A District Under Emotional Renovation
Architectural terminology glides easily off Barbara Jones' tongue. Metaphors of renovation come in handy, the associate superintendent of the Memphis public schools said last fall, when she began a campaign to systematically knock down the administrative barriers that stand between students and their emotional needs.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Suicide: Many Schools Fall Short on Prevention
Most schools that teach suicide prevention generally opt for quick units in health class or school assemblies. Typically, they show videos of healthy-looking adolescents who have survived a suicide attempt. But psychologists warn that such an approach can do more harm than good.
Student Well-Being & Movement
Alone on the Range: S.D. Psychologist Covers Far-Flung Systems
Like a one-man emotional ER, Tim Harmon bolts into a classroom and conducts a 15-minute one-on-one counseling session with a student who threatened to hang himself last year. Then, satisfied that the boy is stabilized, he speeds off to his next case, at a school more than 100 miles east.