Regrouping: A Call for the Profession to Engage in Strategic Leadership in Preparation and Practice

Despite educational milestones gained since the Landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954), African American males matriculating in urban school communities continue to experience educational and structural challenges that undermine their best efforts at success (Taylor et al., 2019). These challenges often manifest as educational disparities, racial stressors, traumatic life experiences such poverty, community violence, and so forth.

The current educational landscape for African American male adolescents matriculating within urban school environments continues to pose both educational and socioemotional challenges.

Although Brown was intended to eliminate barriers (e.g., segregation) to a free appropriate education and usher in a more level playing field, its promises have not fully materialized for African American male students in particular. Rather, their experiences often manifest as academic disparities, mental health difficulties, or as carceral solutions described as discipline that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline (Ford & Moore, 2013). This article explores the challenges Black male students face within urban school contexts. Because far too much attention addresses student deficits, we also enumerate strengths of African American men and boys as a counternarrative.

We maintain that effective school counseling practice involves the counselor's preparedness to broach or discuss how issues of race, gender, class, ability, and so forth, impact Black male students’ academic and social well-being, by helping them feel heard and understood, promoting effective coping, and enhancing resilience within the context of individual and group counseling initiatives. We further note that implementing structural interventions that curtail educational inequality and systemic oppression function as leadership skills that draw on Young and Bryan’s (2015, 2018) leadership model, Day-Vines et al.'s (2007, 2022) broaching framework, and Steen et al.'s (2023) group guidance initiatives.

Our positionality statement includes us as authors who are individuals of African descent, with in-depth school counseling backgrounds and years of research and clinical experience, we recognize the unrelenting stressors that African American adolescent males encounter. In response, we offer the strategies presented in this manuscript as practical tools to support school counseling practitioners in addressing these challenges effectively.

In the current article, we use the terms African American and Black interchangeably to refer to students with African ancestry. Although there is no mutually agreed upon definition of the terms African American and Black, it is generally accepted that African American refers to U.S. descendants of enslaved people and Black refers more broadly to people of African descent - including but not limited to U.S. descendants of enslaved people (Agyemang et al., 2005).

Since passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, an increasing number of African and Caribbean immigrants have entered the United States. As it stands now, the population of foreign-born Blacks comprises 12% of the Black population and an additional 9% of the population consists of second-generation Black immigrants (Tamir & Anderson, 2022). Each of these groups has distinct sociocultural, sociohistorical, and sociopolitical experiences that warrant consideration in counseling contexts (Foner, 2011; Mullan, 2023). Despite growing diversity, much of the extant literature treats African origin students as a monolith (Milner, 2007). Until more scholarship emerges, we use the terms African American and Black interchangeably, aligned with the sources cited within this article to address the needs of Black men and boys.

Urban Schools and Challenges for Black Male Youth

Within school contexts, African American males face enormous challenges that erode their sense of well-being and academic success. Notably, urban schools struggle with persistently low academic student outcomes, especially in districts serving high-poverty and predominantly non-white student populations. Black male students seemingly experience varied levels of academic preparedness, and schools frequently lack instructional coherence or experienced staff to close the learning gaps (Darling-Hammond et al., 2014; Foxx et al., 2020).

Escalating rates of trauma, chronic stress, poverty-related instability, and COVID-induced loss exacerbate mental health concerns for urban youth who have less access to social and emotional support systems (Wiley et al., 2025). Although many individuals presume that we have reached a post-pandemic period, the residual effects of the crisis suggest otherwise. It appears that we are experiencing a post-emergency period as opposed to a post-pandemic phase. For example, following what most experts deem the official end of the pandemic during the spring 2023, approximately 25% of urban k–12 students were chronically absent (McMurdock, 2024). Scholars link absenteeism to emotional or behavioral issues, such that students with frequent absences experience higher rates of anxiety, disengagement, and peer struggles (Finning et al., 2019). Taken together, these challenges underscore the urgent need for culturally responsive supports that address the academic and emotional well-being of urban African American boys.

African American males confront numerous inequities that impede their success, including but not limited to disproportionate rates of referral, suspension, and expulsion, as well as their overrepresentation in special education and their corresponding underrepresentation in gifted education programs (Elisha & Collins, 2022; Gee, 2018; Hines et al., 2022). These challenges contribute to a broader pattern of educational marginalization that limit Black male students’ academic well-being. Ironically, two-thirds of gifted Black students are never identified for gifted services (Sparks, 2022). These decisions are often fueled by low teacher expectations, as well as deficit values and viewpoints (Hines et al., 2021).

Low teacher expectations reflect implicit biases that lead to fewer academic supports, thus contributing to lower self-efficacy levels and internalized oppression. These barriers significantly impact African American males across educational, social, and economic contexts. Repeated exposure to microaggressions and discriminatory treatment increase race-based traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and feelings of hopelessness. Internalization of these negative tropes and stereotypes further limit self- confidence (Taylor et al., 2019).

The absence of Black male teachers has also been cited as a factor that undermines the well-being and academic success of Black boys in urban school contexts. Recent data indicate that Black males comprise 1.3% of the teaching force, which represents a decline of 5.2% since the 2017–2018 academic year (USA Facts, 2023). These findings are troubling because published reports indicate that Black males who had at least one Black male teacher between third and fifth grade were almost 40% less likely to experience school dropout and more likely to consider postsecondary education (Figlio, 2017; Gershenson et al., 2016).

A disproportionate number of Black male students experience adultification, the tendency to view students as older than they are chronologically, and school personnel assign more blame to their behavior relative to their white peers (Hines et al., 2021). These implicit assumptions about Black males in particular fuel negative attitudes towards them and contribute to over-policing, hyper-surveillance and vigilante monitoring of Black boys in ways that differ dramatically from the treatment white students' experience.

To illustrate, in her book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth (2021), Georgetown law professor and former public defender, Kristin Henning, documented the policing practices and hyper-surveillance tactics used to thwart Black male progress. She recounted the case of a young working class African American male student in Washington, DC, who after watching a tv demonstration about assembling a Molotov cocktail, replicated a nonflammable version of the device in his home. He inadvertently brought the contraption to school, which a security officer confiscated.

The young man, an intellectually curious and academically successful student, was subsequently suspended, arrested, and placed on probation before charges were dropped nine months later. Henning (2021), who served as the young man's public defender at the time of the incident, shared this experience during a conference presentation. In response, a white woman in the audience disclosed that her son had a similar encounter but was not punished. Instead, school officials placed him in a chemistry class to hone his science acumen. Henning concluded that the gratuitous response to a school infraction perpetrated by Black boys is intended to both pathologize and criminalize them in ways that are detrimental to their psyche and which also short circuit future success. Dumas and ross (2016) would describe this and related encounters as forms of anti-Black animus. Such encounters place young African American males at risk of negative mental health outcomes over the course of their schooling experiences.

African American boys encounter hyper-surveillance not only from school officials and police, but also based on vigilante violence from individuals who take the law into their own hands presumably to pre-empt Black crime. This scrutiny is an extension of historically based institutional racism including Jim Crow, the Black codes, lynchings, the prison industrial complex, and so forth. Contemporary forms of anti-Black racialized violence within schools have led to physical dismemberment, such as the case of 13-year-old Montravious Thomas, who was body-slammed so severely by a Georgia school employee that several surgeries could not save his leg, or the case of 11-year-old Raheem Bailey whose finger had to be amputated after he caught his finger in a fence as he attempted to escape school yard bullies (McAdoo et al., 2023).

Anti-Black racialized violence has led to lethal consequences outside of schools on far too many Black males including Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, to name a few (Dumas and ross, 2016; Jackson et al., 2018). Exposure to these crimes often pose deleterious consequences for Black males, such as race-based vicarious trauma which is characterized by the tendency to repeatedly think about an experience, as well as internalized or vicarious trauma that result from hearing about or witnessing acts of violence rather than being the actual target of violence. (Henning, 2021; Neighbors et al., 2022; Sue & Spanierman, 2020). In fact, vicarious exposure to racism and discrimination has been linked to suicidal ideation (Baiden et al., 2022; Carney- Knisely et al., 2024).

Interestingly enough, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) defined racism as a social determinant of health which has a profound impact on the health status of ethnic minority children and adolescents (Trent et al., 2019). According to the AAP, chronic exposure to racialized stress increases cortisol levels, which in turn contributes to autonomic nervous system effects, immune suppression, and heart disease, all of which place children on a trajectory to have poor physical and mental health outcomes.

These and related challenges erode student confidence and well-being within urban school communities and have traumatic impacts on African American male adolescents (Singletary, 2020). It is unlikely that these students remain personally unaffected by over-policing (Henning, 2021), the heightened referral, suspension, and expulsion rates for misconduct that is frequently overlooked in their non-Black peers; lower graduation rates relative to their white and Black female counterparts (Morris, 2016); disproportionate over- representation in special education, under-representation in gifted education programs (Ford et al., 2023; Hines et al., 2023); and limited access to Black male teachers due to persistent shortages (Fenwick, 2022, Gershenson et al., 2016; USA Facts, 2023).

Regardless of whether Black boys have structured opportunities to discuss these realities, it stands that they are, nevertheless, impacted in deeply personal ways. The foregoing discussion underscores the reality that exposure to traumatic encounters described above, intensifies emotionally aroused mental states in Black male students that may be misconstrued as disengagement, noncooperation, and school absenteeism.

When under persistent threat, youngsters may respond in particular ways in order to protect themselves from perceived danger. In response to traumatic threats, African American male adolescents may engage in adaptive behaviors. For instance, they may: (a) flee or avoid threatening or dangerous situations, (b) fight to protect themselves, (c) freeze by shutting down or dissociating, or (d) fawn by engaging in people pleasing behaviors towards those individuals who pose a physical or psychological threat. Unrelenting exposure to traumatic threats such as hyper-surveillance, and other structural vulnerabilities described above interfere with logical reasoning, self-regulation, memory, concentration, a sense of safety and security, as well as the ability to profit from the learning experience. Trauma interferes with the learning process.

As such, traumatized students may respond by engaging in behaviors such as noncooperation, aggression, psychological numbing, absenteeism, acting out, somatic complaints, high risk behaviors, and so forth. Without attention to root causes of students’ behavior, school personnel may attribute these responses to blatant disrespect. Singletary (2020) noted that when school personnel lack understanding of how trauma impacts Black male adolescents, these youngsters are doubly victimized because not only do school officials misconstrue Black boys’ behavior, they are also likely to punish students, such that they are doubly victimized.

School counselors have the tools and resources to guide and support Black male students as they help them surmount traumatic challenges. One critical approach to addressing these challenges involves approaching Black males from a strength versus deficit-based frame of reference. In the section that follows, we describe often overlooked and ignored strengths of African American males.

Strengths of African American Males

An inordinate amount of scholarly literature pathologizes African American males by focusing on deficits, to the exclusion of their strengths and sources of resilience (Elisha & Collins, 2022). This negative framing creates a feedback loop that shapes negative assumptions about Black boys and is used as justification for harsh disciplinary practices and anti-Black animus in schools (Lofton et al., 2024). Such negative portrayals can impact students’ efficacy levels and academic engagement. Ironically, a paucity of literature documents the strengths of African American males, despite the fact that Black males exhibit numerous positive attributes (Day-Vines & Hicks, 2026).

Too frequently, structural barriers serve as obstacles to the potential that African Americans males possess, yet once opportunities open up, Black boys often avail themselves of these pathways and excel. Although African Americans males are often known for their athletic prowess, achievement occurs disproportionately in sports such as football and basketball. More recently however, Black male athletes have excelled in nontraditional sports like golf, tennis, and swimming, as they have gained greater access to a variety of sporting opportunities.

Consider Anthony Nesty, the first African American male swimmer to win Olympic gold. Award winning fashion designer and polo player, Miguel Wilson, founded Ride to the Olympics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing awareness and opportunities to inner city youth through equestrian sports such as polo and creative artistry like fashion design. Success and achievement not only result from exposure to uncharted areas of Black athleticism, but academic opportunities also provide pathways for young African American males.

In their critically acclaimed book, The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream, Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt (2003) described their journey to the medical profession. As Black male teenagers from Newark, New Jersey, these young men had an opportunity to participate in a pathway program designed to help ethnic minority students pursue careers in medicine. As an adjudicated delinquent, Hunt was on a collision course with the law. This academic opportunity changed the course of his life.

Although initially reluctant, the three African American male adolescents formed a lasting vow and committed to support each other as they navigated their journey into the medical sciences. In time, they each became successful doctors who have not only excelled in their specialization areas, but have given back generously to their respective communities. As this story suggests, reducing the opportunity gap or the inequitable distribution of resources, creates pathways to success for many Black males (Griffin et al., 2021).

Black male youth possess a host of other attributes. For instance, they have consistently challenged inequities through resistance mechanisms from the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s to Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore following the murder of Freddie Gray at the hands of police, as well as social protest demonstrations conducted by Black college students at the University of Missouri in 2015 (Hartocollis, 2017; Henning, 2021).

More recently, Black boys have embraced Afrofuturism, a cultural movement and philosophical orientation that weaves African diasporic culture, technology, and science fiction as a strategy for gaining personal liberation (Duggins-Clay, 2024). This movement is intended to center the creative imagination of Black male youth through music, dance, literature, play, and so forth, in order to restore peace, joy, and liberation by contesting the anti-Black animus that robs so many young African Americans males of their sense of agency, dignity, and zest for life. Afrofuturism leverages creativity and imagination in ways that are spirit-feeding and that promote and validate a deep and abiding sense of Black humanity (Tynes et al., 2023).

Broaddus (2021) asserted that mischief also functions as a tool that permits African American males to navigate systems that are arrayed against them. In the section that follows, we document counseling skills school counselors can enlist to be culturally responsive leaders. We outline a counseling framework referred to as the continuum of broaching behavior that school counselors can implement in order to help facilitate discussions about the structural vulnerabilities students encounter. Afterwards, we introduce Steen et al.'s (2023) group counseling framework for addressing the socioemotional needs of Black male students, as well as a consultation approach for working with teachers to upend racial bias in the classroom. We close the article with a discussion of Young and Bryan’s (2018) leadership model. Appendix A contains a graphic of this integrated framework.

Continuum of Broaching Behavior

Broaching refers to the school counselor's effort to discuss how issues related to race, ethnicity, and culture (REC) impact students’ educational experiences. Incidentally, culture refers broadly to race and ethnicity, but also encompasses issues of gender, socioeconomic status, religion, disability, national origin, linguistic diversity, gender identity, and so forth, that impact how students experience their social worlds. When school counselors avoid discussing issues of race, power, or systemic injustice with Black boys for whom these matters function as serious concerns, they risk reinforcing harmful norms that make students feel like they are not taken seriously (Young et al., 2025). That is, the culture of silence around highly charged incidents may remain unspoken, albeit fully recognized by Black male students.

To illustrate, Jamal is Black male student in an urban high school where the population is equally divided between African American and Latinx students. Historically, Jamal's school was predominantly Black, but more recently, demographics have shifted as increasing numbers of Latinx students have enrolled in the school. Currently, the Latinx student population exceeds the African American student population and tensions about status and belonging have increased.

Many African American students believe that teachers privilege Latinx students in ways that marginalize African American students. Students have reported that the misbehavior of African American students results in reprimands while teachers tend to ignore similar behavior in Latinx students. African American students contend that Latinx students receive more attention and praise from teachers who reportedly refrain from calling on African American students because they regard Latinx students as more academically engaged.

African American students also report that teachers openly praise the efforts of Latinx students in ways that insinuate Black students are less capable and competent. Students recognize and have expressed frustration with perceived racial inequities. To this end, Jamal scheduled an appointment with his school counselor to discuss this matter. During their meeting he provided detailed examples of classroom encounters that left him feeling dejected and demoralized. The counselor was dismissive of Jamal's complaint and told him to focus his energy on his schoolwork, even though she had heard teachers lodge comparable complaints in the teachers’ lounge.

In her ethnographic study, Gamez (2023) observed similar dynamics among teachers who used racialized narratives to situate Latinx students as good and African American and Afro-Latinx students as problematic, in ways that correspond to prevailing anti-Black narratives.

Teachers perceived Latinx students as more attentive, achievement oriented, hardworking, and deserving compared to Black students whom teachers evaluated using pejorative stereotypes.

Teachers’ negative schemata about Black male students in particular frequently influenced the dispensation of harsher discipline, less attention, and fewer resources. Students and teachers alike were patently aware of racial hierarchies that resulted in preferential treatment accorded Latinx students. Many respondents called attention to unfair treatment and what may be perceived as anti-Black animus.

Day-Vines et al. (2007, 2022) explicated the Continuum of Broaching Behavior, a framework that describes the orientations school counselors may assume as they determine whether or not to discuss the contextual dimensions of REC with students. The continuum contains four primary categories: (a) avoidant, (b) continuing/incongruent, (c) integrated/congruent, and (d) infusing. Avoidant school counselors dismiss or ignore students’ REC concerns. As it pertains to Jamal, avoidant counselors may redirect his attention to his schoolwork in order to evade discussions about his perceived slights and indignities.

Additively, the counselor may deny or question Jamal's complaints, in ways that make him feel that he has misconstrued events, leading him to doubt the legitimacy of his own experiences and feelings, and question whether he has perhaps exaggerated these incidents, or they function as a figment of his imagination. Johnson et al. (2021) characterized these forms of manipulation as gaslighting, a specific type of microaggression that invalidates the target's experience.

Continuing/incongruent school counselors engage in broaching discussions but do so awkwardly and mechanically. Despite the fact that their intentions may be noble, continuing/incongruent counselors are at a loss for generating facilitative responses that acknowledge Jamal's sense of woundedness. Consequently, these counselors may inadvertently say something biased, inappropriate or offensive to Jamal, such as “African American boys should emulate the behaviors of the Latino boys,” or “African American boys get into more trouble than Latinx boys.” The first two categories along the continuum reflect less effective broaching approaches, whereas the final two categories reflect more effective broaching styles.

Integrated/congruent counselors address students’ concerns in ways that help them feel heard and understood and acknowledge their REC dilemmas. School counselors within urban environments use broaching skills to openly acknowledge the realities of racism, structural inequality, and other sociopolitical concerns (e.g., gender, class, ability, national origin, and linguistic origin), by initiating and responding to conversations about students’ lived experiences.

Scott and House (2005) studied a sample of African American high school students and concluded that high levels of discrimination distress were associated with avoidant coping styles; whereas, seeking social support and discussing racial injustices helped students gain a sense of mastery and control over their circumstances. A study examining ethnic minority adolescents’ perceptions of their individual and small group counseling experiences indicated that most participants appreciated their counselor's acknowledgement of how issues related to REC shaped their mental health challenges (Lei et al., 2024). Respondents described counselors’ consideration of their REC concerns as validating and reassuring. They reported feeling less invisible when counselors normalized REC discussions as opposed to treating such discussions as taboo.

In the case of Jamal, rather than avoiding his concerns, integrated/congruent school counselors would openly acknowledge his sense of grievance by saying something like, “Jamal, thank you for sharing a deeply personal concern with me regarding race, fairness, and your observations that Latinx students receive preferential treatment compared to African American students. These incidents feel upsetting to you and affect your motivation to learn.” This statement is concise, validates Jamal's affective experience, directly addresses his perception about the academic impact of racial inequity, and conveys that the counselor is not averse to engaging in REC discussions. Such discussions foster trust and by engaging in them increases the possibility that some level of problem-solving may occur. Incidentally, broaching can occur in the context of individual and/or group counseling.

Infusing counselors are oriented towards advocacy, social justice, and systemic change with the intention of eliminating barriers, promoting resilience, and maximizing educational success. Recognizing that racialized inequities serve as a pervasive problem within the school, infusing counselors might work with Black students, their teachers, administrators, families, communities, and so forth, to gather information about the magnitude of racial inequities in the school and devise group-based interventions that might help address fairness, the school climate, and by extension, academic success.

Counselors operating from an infusing stance would assess structural vulnerabilities that impact the lives and educational contexts of Black males as it pertains to: (a) food access, (b) risk associated with exposure to violence, (c) housing and residential placements, (d) legal barriers to healthcare, (e) educational opportunities, (f) financial security, (g) social networks, and (h) discrimination or stigma (Chan & Westcott, 2025). Jamal's specific concern appears related to his perception of discrimination.

School-family-community partnerships have also been identified as promising approaches that promote educational resilience in urban schools because once stakeholders identify structural vulnerabilities, they can begin to implement strategies and interventions that mitigate harm to Black males (Bryan et al., 2020). Next, we enumerate the broaching construct and its utility with school age Black male students and explore group counseling strategies.

Group Counseling and Consultation Services

Whereas the school counselor meets with a single student during individual counseling, group counseling involves the counselor's effort to work with three or more students to support their academic, career, and social/emotional development. Groups can operate dynamically to mitigate tensions associated with the current socio-political climate (e.g., hypervigilant policing for Black and brown communities, fear of deportation for students or family members, and racial inequality within school environments) and the structural vulnerabilities that disrupt the lives of African American males.

As discussed in the previous section of this article, the school counselor worked individually with Jamal regarding his concerns about racial inequities within the school environment. Because Jamal's concerns appear more pervasive and impact a significant number of Black boys within the school, more systemic approaches are warranted.

School counselors can work with Black male students in small groups to better understand their shared concerns and help them develop tools for navigating school dynamics skillfully.

Steen et al.'s (2023) Achieving Success Everyday (ASE) group counseling model is a powerful tool for addressing racial identity, academic achievement, and systemic inequities for Black male students in school settings. Promoting positive identity development (e.g., racial, academic, and social) is central to improving outcomes for Black male students like Jamal. This framework offers school counselors a strategy to collaboratively develop programmatic initiatives that are culturally responsive, strength-based, and data-informed. Within this group counseling model, collaboration among schools, families, and communities is essential.

Few interventions exist specifically for Black boys in school settings, and those that are available lack rigorous research designs and/or fail to center Black males’ experiential knowledge. Steen et al.'s ASE group counseling model emphasizes Afrocentrism/Blackness as a strength-based approach (Steen, 2009; Steen et al., 2023). Most notably, it centers identity development across racial, academic and social domains and can also foster postsecondary college/career readiness within a group counseling environment (Hines et al., 2020) and has been found to support mathematical identity develop as well (Steen & Bethea, 2023).

The ASE group counseling model involves collaboration with school stakeholders (e.g., parents/guardians, school staff and students) during the development and implementation phases (Steen et al., 2014). The model contains six components that offer a structured framework and includes: (a) assessment, (b) review, (c) acquaintance, (d) challenge, (e) empowerment, and (f) support elements that make it accessible for school counselors to implement with Black males in schools. The ASE group counseling model's body of research has been found to build strong racial, academic, and social identities, thus increasing Black male students’ agency and long-term academic success.

Although school counselors conduct group counseling interventions with students, we contend that group counseling approaches can also facilitate meaningful family, school, community, as well as other collaborative initiatives that enhance the schooling experiences of Black male youth (Sink, 2023). Building on Jamal's case, school counselors may provide consultation services with teachers to address some Black boys’ perceptions about school-based racial inequality.

As an example, Williams and Cholewa (2025) provided strategies that school counselors can implement with teachers to broach racial bias that emerges in classrooms using culturally responsive consultation strategies aligned with the broaching framework. They maintain that addressing issues of racial bias is both an ethical and professional responsibility. Williams and Cholewa encourage school counselors to broach Black male students’ concerns around racial inequality directly with teachers. More importantly, they provide a set of guidelines and sample broaching statements counselors can use as part of the consultation process when initiating conversations about how racial dynamics emerge within classrooms. They encourage school counselors to focus conversations and communicate directly and emphatically about race-based conflict within classrooms and the concomitant impact on students.

Additionally, they recommend that school counselors help teachers: (a) identify their own attitudes, biases, and assumptions, (b) cultivate critical consciousness, (c) develop an understanding of their own racial identity journey, (d) reflect on Black boys’ perceptions of teacher bias within the school, (e) manage resistance, and so forth. These strategies help school counselors support teachers in recognizing and addressing implicit bias and racial inequities in ways that contribute to more equitable and inclusive learning environments for all students. Given Jamal's presenting concerns about blatant bias directed towards African American students, counselors can use this consultation approach to help stem disrupt the pattern of disrespect in classrooms.

Essentially, reimagining group counseling to extend beyond group interventions with Black boys means using group facilitation skills across a myriad of contexts including but not limited to running productive school faculty and staff meetings, parent/family workshops, and/or sponsoring student government sessions. Expanding outreach maximizes the impact of these group facilitation skills to strategically address systemic issues inclusive of students, staff and families. In the next section we explore school counseling leadership behaviors and propose that broaching in individual and group contexts with Black boys as the main focal point demonstrates a requisite leadership skill.

Broaching Black Boys’ Individual and Group Needs as a Critical Leadership Skill

Much has been written about the importance of leadership in school counseling contexts, which is intended to effect change and maximize student outcomes (Mason et al., 2023; Young et al., 2025). Although a school counselor may serve in the capacity of a leader who is responsible for a certain domain of functioning, school counseling leadership involves a distinctive skillset that exceeds one's title or collection of responsibilities. Leadership represents the counselor's ability to serve as a culturally responsive change agent who integrates instructional principles and evidence-based practices by challenging inequities, employing visionary thinking, and modeling excellence.

Broadly speaking, school counselor leadership not only encompasses but also necessitates movement beyond individual and small group support for Black males in ways that challenge inequitable policies and practices. School counselors who operate in a leadership capacity take initiative to create transformative programs that are inclusive (Dollarhide, 2025; Fajriani et al., 2023; Shell, 2021; Young & Dollarhide, 2017).

School counselor leadership is equity-driven, systems focused, and requires school counselors to develop and sustain collaborative relationships with stakeholders. We contend that school counselors can maximize their leadership capacity to support Black male youth by integrating broaching strategies (e.g., individual, small group, and consultation services) in order to develop targeted interventions that benefit students. Aligning broaching skills with school counseling leadership dimensions permits counselors to develop targeted customized supports that are culturally responsive and address the specific and unique needs of African American males (Young et al., 2025).

Young and Bryan (2015, 2018) enumerated five specific school counseling leadership dimensions: (a) resourceful problem-solving, (b) systemic collaboration, (c) social justice advocacy, (d) interpersonal influence and (e) professional efficacy. These dimensions strengthen school counselors’ cultural humility and build trust with Black male students. School counselors who enlist their repertoire of leadership skills engage in courageous conversations and influence others to recognize cultural identity as a vital part of Black boys’ growth. In such cases, they literally function as transformative leaders.

As resourceful problem solvers, school counselors ensure that interventions align with Black male students’ academic, career, and socioemotional needs. In the case of Jamal, a counselor would not only implement individual and small group counseling interventions that validate and affirm his experience, but also address the challenges many of his peers encounter. In instances where racial inequities appear endemic, school counselors may initiate more broad- based mentoring programs with community partners who can develop meaningful relationships with Black boys and impart knowledge and wisdom about life's difficulties in order to reduce structural vulnerabilities.

Black males have learned to thrive in a multitude of challenging ecosystems that necessitate systemic collaboration with teachers, families and administrators. As described above, school counselors may conduct consultation services around documented inequities within the school to address systemic bias that undermines educational success (Williams & Cholewa, 2025). Social justice advocacy leadership requires confronting deficit stereotypes through the use of data and presenting it to constituent groups such as teachers, administrators, community members, and policy makers while advocating for restorative justice practices. Such actions demonstrate their interpersonal influence and empower school counselors to build relationships across constituent groups. Finally, professional efficacy requires that school counselors remain grounded in cultural competence best practices to serve Black males through reciprocal learning and growth.

Implications for Integrating Broaching, Group Counseling, and Leadership Skills

In light of the foregoing discussion, we propose several recommendations that include counseling practice, research, and policy. First, in terms of practice, school counselors must commit to adopting strength-based approaches that conceptualize the needs and affirm the humanity of African American males, using systemic leadership approaches that address the often-insidious manner in which issues of race and representation impinge on the lives and educational experiences of Black boys. School counselors can draw on Young and Bryan’s (2015, 2018) leadership model, Day-Vines et al.'s (2007, 2022) broaching framework, and Steen et al.'s (2023) group counseling model that help create psychological safety for Black boys and pave the way for their academic and socioemotional well-being.

The models described within this article are appropriate to consider, however, we caution the reader from generalizing any framework to Black male students and encourage practitioners, educators, scholars, and policy makers to refrain from viewing Black boys as a monolith and move beyond seeing “Black boys and men in urban education as being perpetual projects of potential” (Thomas et al., 2025, p. 38), but rather worthy of distinction that warrants a focus on them as vast and unique beings.

Second, we argue concomitantly that researchers in concert with school counselor education preparation programs must have a vision to expand the school counseling and counselor educator trainee pipeline to fill the needs within the school counseling profession. We call on school counselor education scholars to be intentional about examining the recruitment practices and studying the retention efforts of school counselor preparation programs to more effectively prepare trainees who identify as African American males within doctoral programs that in turn could increase the number of Black males pursuing master's degrees in the school counseling profession (Lopez-Perry et al., 2021).

Finally, developing evidence-based blueprints for increasing the number of Black male school counselor trainees and school counselor educators is one strategy that could be used to urge educational policy makers and relevant stakeholders to invest in the expansion of a school counseling workforce that more appropriately aligns with the specific needs of Black male students, their families and communities in urban school environments.

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