College and Career Counseling in Rural Schools: A Review of the Literature.

The recent legislation calls for attention to be given to rural education. Although the minority of the Georgia population lives in rural areas, school counselors play many roles in the lives of students in rural areas due to limited resources. This review summarizes the current literature on strategies utilized by school counselors in rural schools. Implications for practice and future research to assist rural Georgia school counselors are discussed. College and Career Counseling in Rural Schools: A Review of the Literature Across rural communities, diverse people, challenges, and opportunities can be found (see Flora, Flora, & Gasteyer, 2015). This is no less true in our southeastern state of Georgia. Year after year, more schools are opened to serve our students in rural areas. School counselors work with students at all levels of K-12 education and their work is often shaped by policy. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has created special opportunities for rural schools. For example, rural schools are now able to transfer funds between Title II and IV, as well as from Title II/IV to Title I through a Rural Consolidated Plan (Battelle for Kids, 2016). Under the Title V, the recent Part B Rural Education Initiative there are 105 local education agencies (LEAs) in the state that are eligible for federaland state-funded resources (GA DOE, 2015). Given that over almost one-third of public school students in Georgia live in rural areas (NCES, 2014-2015) and one-third of these students are minorities (Johnson, Showalter, Klein, & Lester, 2014), this initiative is an acknowledgement that rural schools lack the personnel and resources needed to meet student needs. Given this focus on rural education matters, the role of school counselor within rural schools is of interest more than ever. The climate of rural communities uniquely positions school counselors, especially as primary college and career educators. Many of the specific aims of the initiative, including increasing parental support, teacher professional development, and improving opportunities for disadvantaged students, overlap with the direct and indirect student services that school counselors provide per the American School Counselor Association (ASCA, 2012) model. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Americans living in rural areas across the United States are becoming college educated more than ever before, especially women (USDA, 2017). However, the education gap between urban and rural America is growing with a smaller proportion of rural residents completing a college degree compared to their urban counterparts (USDA, 2017). Furthermore, a racial and ethnic disparity exists as only half of minorities from rural areas of the United States are likely to obtain a college degree as compared to their white counterparts from similar rural areas (USDA, 2017). Given that farming and agriculture are major industries of the rural U.S., including Georgia, school counselors must understand the cultural influences that shape how students and their families value postsecondary education (Brickman & Wimberly, 2014). It has been well documented that school counselors play many roles within schools and the community (Bardhoshi & Duncan, 2009; Monteiro-Leitner, Asner-Self, Milde, Leitner &, Skelton, 2006; Vann-Morrison, 2011). Within the rural context school counselors have also been described as social justice advocates (Grimes, Haskins, & Paisley, 2013-2014), giving voices to students that do not fit the status quo of their particular town (Wimberly & Brickman, 2014). According to ASCA (2014), college and career counseling entail the support of both Mindsets and Behaviors. These include not just having a positive outlook, but also deploying learning strategies, effectively managing time, and cultivating social skills. This paper summarizes the current research on strategies utilized by school counselors working in rural areas. To put the role of school counselors in context, we first describe rural Georgia in comparison to urban parts of the state. Rural Georgia Even though only about 17% of the state’s population reside in rural areas (USDA, 2016), stark disparities exist across the settings of urban and rural Georgia. These socio-economic differences may affect the role and resources for school counselors practicing in rural Georgia. For example, the average per-capita income for rural Georgia residents in 2015 was $30,870 compared to $ 42,290 for urban residents (USDA, 2016). While poverty rates in urban parts of Georgia are reported to be as high as 15.9%, the poverty rate in rural Georgia is 22.9% (USDA, 2016). The unemployment rate in rural Georgia is 6.0%, while in urban Georgia it is 5.3% (USDA, 2016). In addition to these economic markers, educational attainment over the past few years is lower in rural Georgia with 20.7% of the rural population not possessing a high school degree compared to 13.3% of urban Georgia (USDA, 2016). Even though a higher proportion of the population has a college degree than ever before, only 15% of rural residents have obtained a college degree compared to 31% of urban residents in Georgia (USDA, 2016). Need for Comprehensive Models Continued development and adherence to national models such as ASCA’s (2014) Mindsets and Behaviors is an important framework for school counselor best practice, and was highlighted as a need in past research focused on school counselors’ experiences in the State of Nebraska (Barnes, Scofield, Hof, & Vrbka, 2005). Nebraska is a state noted to have an abundance of rural school systems (Barnes, et al., 2005, p.25). Given Nebraska school counselors’ experience in rural areas, a Nebraska Department