Overview
The Connecticut School Counseling Mission is to promote excellence in professional school counseling and to ensure the academic achievement, college/career readiness, personal/social-emotional development, and equitable access for all students.
The Connecticut State Board of Education (Board) believes all children deserve an excellent education that helps them reach high standards of performance. The Board believes the promise of an excellent public education is to equip every child with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college, careers and civic life. These expectations hold for all students regardless of age, gender, socio-economic status, race/ethnicity, native language, abilities, or disabilities. Schools must provide challenging and rigorous programs of study that integrate the knowledge and skills necessary to enable students to become productive members of society. School counselors play an essential role in safeguarding this belief.
School Counselor Defined
Connecticut school counselors are certified and/or licensed professional educators with a minimum of a master’s degree in school counseling. This makes school counselors highly qualified to have a whole-child perspective who understand, prevent and respond to the challenges presented today. School counselors are employed in elementary, middle and high schools and they have a far-reaching influence on the school community to address the needs of all student through culturally responsive strength-based counseling and tiered systems of support. Additionally, they provide proactive leadership and advocacy that engages all stakeholders in the delivery of programs and services to help student develop resiliency to overcome challenges that may impede a student’s academic success in school and beyond high school. School counselors deliver a data-driven core curriculum, group work based on need, individual student planning and course articulation, responsive counseling services, referrals and resources, crisis management, and family engagement. The school counseling department aligns the framework to the school’s mission and improvement plans to support student success. This work is accomplished through the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive, developmental, and systematic school-counseling framework. For more information, review the American School Counselor Association's (ASCA) publications, The Role of the School Counselor and School Counselor Competencies.
The Comprehensive School Counseling Framework Model
The Connecticut Comprehensive School Counseling Framework is an articulated, sequential kindergarten-through-grade 12 framework that is comprehensive in scope and sequence, preventative in design, developmental in nature, driven by data, and student centered. The Connecticut framework model reflects a systemic approach to build an accountable and sustainable model based on the ASCA's four components; foundation, delivery, management, and accountability. To learn more about these components, visit the ASCA National Model website.
The Connecticut Model identifies and prioritizes specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills students should be able to demonstrate as a result of a comprehensive school counseling model organized in three domains: academic, career, and social and emotional development. These domains provide a road map for school counselors to move students toward student achievement. Used together, these tools enable school counselors to promote and support college and career readiness for all students in global environment.
Students’ content knowledge and academic and career skills are only part of the equation for student success. A wide variety of factors intrinsic to students and the external environment shape students’ academic performance. Coupled with mastery of academic skills and social/ emotional/ wellness proficiency, this will prepare students to be positive architects of their lives (mindsets and behaviors). The focus is to address the needs of the whole child to remove barriers to academic achievement and ensure that students achieve their full potential.