State Leads Find Ways to Help School Counselors, Despite Limited Authority

A couple of years ago, Senior Lecturer Mandy Savitz-Romer and Tara Nicola, Ed.M.’20, Ph.D.’23, worked together on a paper about school counselors and concluded that the work counselors do in schools is dependent on a “nested” system of influences that affects the ability to do their jobs well.

One of those influences — the support they receive from state education agency leads (SCAs) — became the basis of their newest paper, “Boundary Spanning in State Education Agencies: How State Officials Support School Counseling.”

Nicola, a visiting scholar at the Ed School, says part of the reason she and Savitz-Romer started digging into the role state leads play in the daily lives of school counselors is because the work is incredibly important yet rarely studied.

“There are plenty of studies looking at counselors in a particular school or in a district, and then there’s work looking at state policies,” she says, “but there’s not work that is looking at those actors situated at the state level who are directly impacting the day-to-day work of the school counselors at the school and district level.” We really thought this was a very big gap in the literature and felt that this was a level within that counseling ecosystem that was important to examine because it can have such a big impact on the practices of counselors every day and the lives of the students that they’re working with.” School counselors are increasingly responsible for a huge range of student needs — academic, social-emotional, and post-secondary.

What do leads at state education agencies actually do for school counselors? Broadly, they are tasked with helping to implement statewide counseling policies such as overseeing counseling licensure and evaluation systems. Unfortunately, as Savitz-Romer and Nicola point out in their paper, despite the importance of this work, the leads have limited authority. “This is because many states defer to districts to administer and regulate education at the local level,” they write, “leaving state actors with limited power.” 

For example, Nicola says, “if the state is saying, you need to enact this specific counseling policy at your school, but the principals and superintendents of the districts aren't supporting the counselors in doing that, the counselors then look to the state for support. But the SCAs don’t have that power to force principals or superintendents to enact a policy in many of these areas.”

The leads are also a small group. In most states, there is only one assigned to oversee an entire state of school counselors, or, in some states, no one is in that position at all. In rare cases, there are two. Some of the positions are also tied to limited grant funding. 

Given these limitations, Savitz-Romer and Nicola wondered how state leads were able to actually help school counselors. After interviewing 34 leads from 30 states, they found that leads became “boundary spanners” — a term from the business world that, applied to counseling leads, means they “act as bridges between their state department of education and districts, schools, other state leaders, and external organizations, strengthening school counseling within their state in the process.”

As boundary spanners, they disseminated counseling-related information and served as a resource for school counselors, provided technical assistance and let schools know about professional development opportunities, and, with what power they did have, advocated for counselors at the state level. To do this, says Savitz-Romer, they often acted as interpreters between the “practical world” of school counselors and the “political world” of state policymakers.

“They would often say to us that most people don’t understand what counselors are supposed to be doing so I spend a lot of time at the state level trying to educate people,” she says. “The counselors look at them as ‘state people’ and ask, ‘Can’t you fix this? Can’t you tell my principal that I shouldn't have a caseload of 900?’” In response, leads would clarify their roles to counselors. They would explain complex policies, offer advice, and help counselors slog through time consuming, state-mandated paperwork.

They also helped policymakers at the state and local levels better understand the role of a school counselor and educated them on the responsibilities that counselors should and should not oversee. For example, one rep they wrote about in their paper corrected the education commissioner who constantly used the outdated term “guidance counselor” instead of “school counselor.” 

One surprise from doing the study for Savitz-Romer is that because state-level leads are often an office of one, they craved connection to people doing the same job in other states.

“They don’t have peers, and they kept asking us if we would be connecting them to their counterparts in other states,” she says. “There's no professional organization for state leads of school counseling the way there are professional organizations for principals or superintendents. And so, they were operating in their own kind of vacuum and really wanted more of a professional community. It struck me that they were so hungry to know, what are you hearing? They want to know, am I the only one having trouble like this? That was a bit of a surprise for me and clearly an opportunity for their profession.”

Nicola says she was surprised about the lack of variability across states.

“We interviewed folks from Republican, heavily red states, blue states, and states that invest very heavily in education and tend to invest a bit more in counseling infrastructure and resources, but still,” she says, “hearing these same themes regardless of the state they were situated in” was surprising.

Moving forward, Savitz-Romer and Nicola say they hope more research is done in this area, including looking at how school counselors view the role of state counseling leads and whether state leads could be given more authority. 

“We want states to understand that these are potentially very influential people, if they’re positioned to be influential,” says Savitz-Romer. “And that means hiring them and putting them in positions to make change for counselors.” Without that change, she says, “if we continue to ignore their needs, that’s going to have a trickle-down effect on school counselors."