School-wide Responsive Services and the Value of Collaboration:

From the myriad best practice alternatives, professional school counselors must apply efficacious activities in response to emerging or existing student challenges. Although the term "responsive services" is widely invoked across helping professions, the notion discussed here is used within the context of delivering a comprehensive school counseling program (e.g., American School Counselor Association's [ASCA] National Model, 2005; Burnham & Jackson, 2000; Studer & Diambra, 2010). By convention, responsive services involve those activities designed and performed by school counselors to meet the immediate needs and concerns of students. As initially conceived, these services include counseling, consultation, referral, and peer facilitation/mediation or information. The assistance and support of the entire school faculty and staff are essential for successful implementation (ASCA, 2005). In some cases, school counselors come to largely associate this component of a comprehensive program to crisis management, consultation, and referral activities. The research literature, however, has yet to confirm the efficacy of these three services in K-12 school counseling programs (Whiston & Quinby, 2009). Studies do indicate that individual and group counseling are modestly effective over the short term with at least students from the majority ethnicity (Gerrity & DeLucia-Waack, 2007; Whiston & Quinby). The value of any of these services for students of color and minority ethnicities and those with special learning or behavior needs remains equivocal at best. Furthermore, the current approach to delivering responsive services fails to adequately address the needs of the "invisible" mass of students. These learners maintain at least decent grades, move through the system with relative ease, graduate high school, and, as a rule, avoid chronic misbehavior that would provoke a formal disciplinary action from an administrator. They are often perceived by the staff as requiring minimal support and are "doing just fine." To support this contention, a recent national study of 614 young adults who had involvement with some postsecondary schooling found that about 50% of the respondents "felt like 'just another face in the crowd' in dealing with their guidance counselor" (Johnson, Rochkind, Ott, & DuPont, 2010, p. 7). Despite the fact that these students exhibit normal developmental challenges and significant personal and family concerns, and would clearly benefit from high-quality responsive services, they may receive low priority from the school's counseling program. A variety of legitimate reasons for this exist (e.g., Johnson, Rochkind, O national average for 2008-2009 data is 457to-l) and the mounting paperwork allow mainly for triage counseling services, with the neediest students receiving the most attention. Even when counselors want to address students' chronic problems, they lack the time to fully implement targeted interventions and activities beyond a few months. Fourth, anecdotal evidence suggests that the classroom teacher-to-counselor referral and collaboration process is inadequate to effectively address all students' major concerns and their need for even limited counseling services. Finally, meaningful student intervention plans typically require ongoing teacher cooperation, support, and follow-up, and perhaps assistance from a school administrator, nurse, librarian, or psychologist. …