Early childhood professionals can build partnerships with families that allow them together to guide the learning and development of the children whose lives they share. In this article, the author shares a system of indicators in professional practice that might be helpful in building partnerships with families that enable the full effectiveness…

Suggests that middle schools have not yet achieved guidance as a viable and essential part of the middle level curriculum. Considers the importance of identifying student characteristics and needs, the organization of support services, basic components of support services, and advocacy programs. (JPB)

This article looks at the history of a guidance program in a west Texas school district bordering on Mexico. Due to the high drop out rate and low test scores, money was pulled away from guidance programs because of the lack of success of the services. With persistence, a comprehensive guidance program was eventually introduced. Advocating for the…

The shortage of qualified school counselors in the past few years has been a concern of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). Efforts to address this issue were largely contingent on encouraging students to enter counselor-training programs. Recent research pointed to the fact that a large number of counselors were…

The guidance and counseling profession is evolving from a collection of crisis-oriented services to a comprehensive program with a curriculum emphasis on student outcomes linked to social/personal, educational, and career success. Ways in which school counselors and administrators can move from an ancillary service mode into a comprehensive…

School counselor supervision, evaluation, and professional development are critical to the successful implementation of a school guidance program. This discussion contributes to understanding the benefits and necessity of an appraisal system for counselors that is aligned with the comprehensive guidance program model. This document describes the…

When the State of Utah implemented a comprehensive guidance program, it began with a state-sponsored training of school guidance teams. Successfully identifying and displacing non-guidance activities (NGAs) in the comprehensive guidance program was a complicated process and was dependent upon communication and building positive relationships with…

The Tucson Unified School District made a goal for 2000-2001 for all counselors to have their own computer at school. This article looks at how these computers are used to enhance the counselors' jobs. At the district level, the staff communicates with counselors through e-mail. Meeting reminders, general information, and upcoming events are…

This article describes how one high school addressed the time-consuming problem of registration by looking at an electronic solution. Typically counselors were spending 50-60% of their time with registration and schedule change. This school worked with a software company to produce an Internet/telephone registration system. The system took into…

School counselors' job descriptions leave room for many unexpected and unplanned activities. The Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland chose to address the challenge of counselors being assigned non-guidance tasks with a combination of approaches. Data collection, development of a transdisciplinary service provision model, revision of the…

It has become the role of student support services to delivery strategies to enhance academic achievement and success for their students. In this paper, several strategies are described that several school districts in South Carolina used to bring about change. One strategy involved adopting a comprehensive guidance program that promotes and…

The Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in northwest Houston has grown extremely fast. During the 2001-2002 school year, an additional 4,000 students were added. Because of this growth, it was difficult for the district to adopt the state model for guidance and counseling programs. Many counselors followed what was recommended but it was…

Results-based evaluation and assessment of guidance and counseling is a difficult task. How to best evaluate whether the comprehensive guidance program was getting the intended results became an issue for Omaha Public Schools. They set about to draft a framework for measuring student behavior or learning resulting from activities associated with…

This document presents a model used by the Davis School District (Utah) to revise their comprehensive guidance program. The model addresses the four primary purposes of education (essential learning skills, civic responsibility, career preparation, and personal development). Counselors collaborate with individual students and their parents to form…

In the late 1990s the Texas Education Agency advocated the transformation of all counseling services into developmental guidance programs. This document describes the process undertaken and the lessons learned when evaluating a small, rural school district in north Texas in order to begin this model transformation. The purpose of the study was to…