Program Overview

Guidance and Counseling is the process of helping students by assisting them in making decisions and changing behavior. The purpose of guidance and counseling is to impart specific skills and learning opportunities in a productive and preventive manner which ensures that all students can achieve school success through academic, career, and personal/social development.

Guidance is defined as the help all students receive from parents, teachers, counselors, and others to assist them in making appropriate educational and career choices. Counseling is defined as the help some students receive from credentialized professionals to help them overcome personal and social problems which may interfere with learning.

As educational reform efforts increase, guidance counselors will assume more of a responsibility for student growth and thus become more accountable in the process. The activities that guidance counselors conduct should have a link to defined student competencies. The Revised Guidance and Counseling Curriculum has standards and objectives that are aligned with the State Quality Core Curriculum (QCC). These standards, as well as an evaluation, are included in the guidance curriculum. The Department of Education is in the process of developing a Training and Implementation Guide as a companion to the curriculum.

Guidance and Counseling Activity Log

In part because of HB 1187, but also to help provide services for all students who are "at risk of not being at promise", school counselor's must develop guidance and counseling programs which are more results driven. It is difficult to measure some activities in a guidance and counseling program, nevertheless, a structure must be developed and implemented that will bring about better results and accountability.

The Guidance and Activity Log is designed for school counselors to use as a source of data collection and assessment of their guidance and counseling programs. This is a suggested timeline structure, which has been adapted from the Missouri Comprehensive Guidance Program, and is designed for school counselors to comply with the guidelines of HB 1187. This time log can be used to analyze the distribution of the counselor's time and the various tasks the counselor is performing and to provide base line data for the redistribution of the counselor's time if necessary. It is also useful for determining where more educational support may be needed. Please remember that these are only recommended time allocations.

Note: If too much time is being spent on Non Program activities, an evaluation of the Guidance and Counseling Program should be done to determine what program areas are being negatively affected and thereby not reaching all students.