Counselor Heather McAuley hasn’t managed to sit down.
She hovers over her desk as she furiously clicks away on a student dashboard on the computer screen, half standing and half sitting, in her corner office at Desert View High School.
By 9 a.m. on a recent Friday, the veteran of 16 years has already made several trips to the attendance counter, principal’s office and copy machine. Three students, another counselor and a college and career readiness counselor have also visited with her.
“It’s an ever-revolving door,” she says.
On a typical day, McAuley said she sees anywhere from 20 to 25 students individually. Counselors at Desert View each have a caseload of about 300 students. In some Tucson schools that ratio is more than 500-to-1.
It’s hard to give each student enough attention, she says.
As Arizona school districts tighten their belts, they are having to axe more and more counselor jobs, leaving the state with the highest number of students per counselor in the country.
The American School Counselor Association recommends at least one counselor per 250 students. Arizona’s average is 941. The U.S. average is 491.
Our number is high, in part, because the state does not mandate counseling, counselors and experts say. In light of budget cuts, districts have had to cut down on counselors in elementary and middle schools.
Calculating only for grades nine through 12, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Arizona's ratio looks more like 434-1.
A Star analysis of Tucson-area public high schools’ counselor staffing data found that only one — Santa Rita, at 243-1 — meets the recommended national ratio. That school experienced a dramatic decline in enrollment in the past five years.
Other local schools with a ratio under 250 were mostly alternative schools with total enrollment of fewer than 250 students. For example, Tucson Unified School District’s Project More, which is an alternative high school for juniors and seniors, has one half-time counselor, making the ratio 168-1.
COMPARISONS TO ELSEWHERE
More than half of states require counselors, according to the American School Counselor Association. Far fewer have mandates on specific student-to-counselor ratios. Those mandates come from legislative action, administrative code or the states’ boards of education.
Vermont and New Hampshire, which rank No. 2 and No. 3 for lowest ratios, all mandate that schools have counselors. They also require a 300-1 ratio for higher grades. Their averages are 213 and 235, respectively. Only one other state, Wyoming at 211, meets the recommendation.
However, having mandates does not necessarily translate to enforcement when a school is unable to meet the required ratio, said Amanda Fitzgerald, director of public policy for the American School Counselor Association.
Unless specific dollars are tied to counseling, such as special needs students who must have individual education plans, schools or districts cannot be punished for not meeting the mandated ratio.
“I’ve never heard of that kind of thing happening,” she said.
Fitzgerald said she couldn’t say for sure why those three states are able to achieve such low ratios, but added that smaller total student populations and higher spending on n education could be factors.
Generally, reaching the ASCA-recommended ratio, which she said was decided on based on years of research and tweaking as counselors' responsibilities changed, would require all hands on deck.
“It takes an investment by the school system by the school itself, by the school district and by the state to want to be able to provide those services,” she said.
As for bottom states like Arizona, which has a ratio nearly four times higher than the recommendation, and California, the reason for falling behind is often a funding issue, she said. In tight budget situations, school counseling can be seen as a “luxury” rather than something to prioritize in education.
“It really comes down to money,” Fitzgerald said. “When you look at all the education statistics, they are usually at the bottom in terms of funding.”
Arizona’s per-pupil spending was $4,016 in fiscal year 2013, compared with Wyoming’s $9,252, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s public education finance data.
Up until about three to four years ago, Arizona’s average ratio was closer to the 500s, said Kay Schreiber, college and career readiness coordinator at the Arizona Department of Education. And then the state saw steep cuts in education.
Less money meant some people had to go, she said. “School counseling just happened to be one of those areas that they started cutting.” Music, physical education and art teachers were also cut across the state, she added.
When it comes down to districts having to make the tough choice between cutting teachers versus school counselors, administrators and counselors say the obvious choice is counselors.
"I hate it," McAuley of Desert View said. "But I'm also a teacher, so I get it."
PERSONAL/SOCIAL, ACADEMIC AND CAREER
Carolyn, a junior at Desert View High School, clutched a black coffee mug offered to her by her counselor, Heather McAuley. She was the fourth student to visit McAuley’s counseling office on a recent Friday morning.
The junior had earned enough credits to graduate early and already been accepted to the University of Arizona. She was even offered a scholarship to attend college.
But there was a problem. Carolyn’s mother had retired unexpectedly and cashed in her 401k for an emergency, and that amount was reflected as income on the mother’s tax documents, which made Carolyn ineligible for the need-based scholarship.
Carolyn kept calm for a while, but when it became clear that she would not be able to attend college this fall, she burst into tears.
“Everything you worked for is screwed up and that’s beyond your control,” McAuley told Carolyn. “So let’s come up with a game plan.”
As a counselor, McAuley’s duties include looking after a student’s personal and social development, as well as academic and career or college planning, according to the American School Counselor Association’s national model.
At the high school level, counselors say they spend most of their time helping students with planning out their academic schedules, staying on track to graduate and managing attendance. Some of the other duties of counselors include designing, developing and implementing prevention programs, crisis response and giving lessons in classrooms.
The counseling association has for years have encouraged schools to adopt more data-driven counseling programs, said Schreiber of the state education department. Data related to counseling includes anything from dropout rates and college application rates to federal aid application completion rates.
“You need to be able to draw the data and put into programs that would bring about student achievement,” she said.
Data could also help school counselors advocate for themselves, said Katherine Pastor, the 2016 School Counselor of the Year, who works at Flagstaff High School. As education funding gets more scarce, counselors are faced with continually having to defend their jobs.
“Our jobs are never secure,” she said. “We’re not mandated.”
Specific numbers are vital in convincing district and state-level officials of counselors’ work and its importance, she said. “It helps to have data, especially with superintendents.”
TOO MUCH TO DO, TOO LITTLE TIME
Teresa Toro wears many hats.
She’s primarily a senior counselor at Pueblo High Magnet School. But she’s also a sponsor of school clubs, department chair, event organizer, fundraising coordinator, community outreach specialist, test supervisor and mentor.
“If you want a monotonous job, this is not it,” she said. “Everyday is a different day.”
Toro has a caseload of about 330 students because she is only in charge of Pueblo’s seniors, who she says need a dedicated counselor because of graduation and post-secondary planning. Two other counselors split a caseload of about 1,200 students.
On top her counseling duties, Toro said she also volunteers for the swim team, participates on the committee for the school’s recertification and helps out during testing, which include the state standardized test, PSAT, ACT and more.
Toro and several other counselors the Star spoke to all said not having enough time is one of the biggest challenges in school counseling. And not having enough time is often a result of excessive caseloads.
Toro’s contract hours are from 7:50 a.m. to 3:20 p.m. But she said she usually leaves the school around 5 or 5:30 p.m. And on some nights, she has evening school events to attend. Other counselors, including ones from Desert View, Amphitheater and Cholla high schools, said the same.
But Toro said leaders are meant to put in more than what’s required.
“You can’t get it all done within that time frame as a leader,” she said. “So you put in the extra time.”
At Cholla Magnet High School, freshman counselor Alexandra Tsosie scrambled across the campus between second and third periods on a recent Tuesday morning.
She planned to hit three classrooms for brief presentations on summer school. That’s just during the third period – she eventually needs to get the information out to all of her 550 or so students. She’s already gone to two classes earlier in the day. Her total goal for the day is to visit 15 classrooms.
“I go into classrooms a lot,” she said. That way, she can reach more than one student at a time.
The Arizona State Board of Education requires educators to meet with every single student in grades nine through 12 to plan for post-secondary options, whether it’s getting a job or going to college, under the Education and Career Action Plan.
Though the requirement does not specify that counselors must be the ones to do it, it is often the case that counselors end up doing it, counselors and administrators say. Meeting with students in groups also counts, so counselors often interrupt class instruction to give presentations, such as the ones Tsosie gave to rooms full of freshmen.
Tsosie said she has always had a high caseload in the four years that she has been at Cholla, so she said it’s difficult to imagine what it would be like to have to only work with half the number of students.
“We could really tackle a lot of stuff if there was another person,” she said.
SHIFTING DUTIES
In between visiting classes and talking about summer school, Tsosie said she may need to duck out to go help with test planning, which are considered counselors’ duties at Cholla. Most other counselors interviewed for this story said they also help with test planning and proctoring.
Thankfully, she said the counselors at Cholla have an effective system to help with anything from alphabetizing tests to sharpening pencils.
“It’s like a factory down there,” she said.
At the Tucson Unified School District, that really depends on the staffing level at each school, said Holly Colonna, the district’s director of guidance and counseling.
“We want our counselors spending time with kids doing counseling,” she said. “But if there is no one else, that has to happen.”
School counselors’ duties and responsibilities have shifted a lot over the years, said NJ Utter, director of college readiness at the Sunnyside Unified School District.
As more and more support staff disappear from Arizona’s schools, the people who are left, including counselors, are expected to pick up their duties, she said. That means counselors sometimes have to be cafeteria or playground duty. On top of that, a shortage of teachers has also lead to some counselors teaching as substitutes in classrooms, she said.
With fewer people to go around, counseling has become less waiting for students to come see the counselor and more proactive behavior lessons and classroom visits, Utter said. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
But increasing caseloads and broadly targeted counseling would inevitably mean the quality could suffer, Schreiber of the state education department said.
“We’re not seeing the depth of counseling that we used to see,” she said.
The American School Counselor Association’s position is that counselors should not be taking on duties such as coordinating standardized tests. However, Fitzgerald of the association said there is an argument to be made for counselors to take on a fair share of school duties that teachers also have to take on when it comes to things like cafeteria supervision.
“We’re not saying they should never do it,” she said. “But they shouldn’t be the only people assigned to do them all the time.”
However, Tsosie and other counselors are of the mind that they would do anything to help their schools.
“Here, we’re ready to pitch in,” Tsosie said.
“That’s above and beyond our duty, but we help,” Toro of Pueblo said.
OUTLOOK
Counselors and school administrators that the Star interviewed for the story mostly did not think of the ASCA-recommended 250-1 ratio as realistic.
“Budgetarily, it’s not feasible,” Toro said. “But if the state of Arizona begins to fund education better, then that becomes more of a probability.”
The recommendation should be an attainable goal, but the reality is that education’s finances in the state do not make it attainable, Utter of Sunnyside said. With Sunnyside’s failed attempt at a maintenance and operations override last November, the district has to cut one counselor from each of its two high schools.
“Teachers have to come first,” she said. “So we can’t take money away from teachers to fund counselors.”
For now, Arizona does not appear to have any concerted efforts to place mandates on school counselors or student-to-counselor ratios, Schreiber of the department of education said. But more important than ratios are that schools are building comprehensive counseling programs, she added.
Nevertheless, Schreiber said she believed Arizona’s student-to-counselor ratio will be on a downward trend in coming years.
“Districts are starting to see that counselors and what they bring to the schools are very, very important,” she said.
School counselors are “integral to student achievement,” she said. They can provide professional and contextual information to developing viable future plans for Arizona’s students.
“We need our legislators and our government officials, our parents and our communities to realize that we really truly need professional counselors in every school,” Schreiber said.
Federally, the American School Counselor Association is pushing to increase the amount of grant money as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind, that would be distributed to student support programs, some of which could fund counseling programs.
The U.S. Congress has authorized $1.65 billion to be appropriated through the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants to eligible school districts, though only $500 million of that has been confirmed to be appropriated thus far.
“Right now, we’re working very hard on getting that program appropriated at the highest possible amount,” Fitzgerald said.
As it stands now, Tucson-area high schools do not have plans to increase the number of counselors to ease the caseload of their counselors. But the counselors’ passion to help students won’t stop.
They say school counseling is a labor of love.
“You have to have the passion,” Jessica Dale, a counselor at Amphitheater High said. “If you’re just coming and going, then you can’t connect with the students.”
For Toro of Pueblo Magnet, seeing students who struggled through school make it to graduation is what keeps her going.
“To see them through years of high school and transition to what’s going to be the next chapter of their lives, seeing the students bloom – that’s the payoff,” she said.
McAuley of Desert View said the students have taught her so much more than what she could ever offer the,
“I can’t imagine doing a job where I’m not making a difference in the world,” she said.
