Proof Points: School counselors hit 30+ yr high

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By Jill Barshay

The professional title “guidance counselor” is out of fashion with school staff whose jobs involve college counseling and career planning as well as student discipline, social-emotional development and addressing students’ individual academic needs and learning problems. Their trade association prefers “school counselor.” But whatever you call it, the job has certainly become more prevalent recently with five straight years of increases, reaching an all-time high since the federal government began counting them in 1986.

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Key Findings

According to the most recent federal data from the 2018-19 school year, there are now almost 118,000 school counselors in U.S. public schools and just 430 students, from kindergarten through 12th grade, for each school counselor.
Today’s ratio represents a 27 percent improvement in national caseloads since 1986, when there was only one counselor for every 588 students.
Despite the dramatic increases in counselors, the current 430-to-1 ratio falls far short of the association’s recommendation of 250-to-1.
Increased hiring of school counselors is partly in response to school shootings and concerns about bullying.

Teacher Takeaway

National or statewide ratios don’t reflect actual caseloads inside schools. Some schools still don’t have any counselors.
Federal data counts any staff involved in counseling activities, not just licensed counselors. Local school numbers may differ.
Some school leaders sometimes still use counselors to administer annual state tests, handle lunchroom and bus duties and fill in as substitute teachers which means they are not always engaged in counseling.

Lit Review

“Student-to-School-Counselor Ratio 2018–2019” by the American School Counselor Association, April 14, 2020.
Additional data supplied by ASCA and retrieved from National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data, “State nonfiscal public elementary/secondary education survey,” 2018-19 V.1A (Run your own data tables by district at https://NCES.ED.GOV/CCD/ELSI/)
Mandy Savitz-Romer (May 2019) Fulfilling the Promise: Reimagining School Counseling to Advance Student Success, Harvard Education Press