Ecosystemic Advocacy for Elementary Mental Health

Abstract

Systemic inequity in education compels school counselors to widen their scope of advocacy beyond their local school environment. Fortunately, the tools of evidence-based, data-driven school counseling can be scaled up to influence change in larger systems. We present an advocacy project undertaken by an elementary school counselor who was alarmed by a significant increase in children’s mental health concerns. She initiated a state-wide survey of school counselors that revealed a dire need for mental health support at the elementary level. Using an ecological framework, we report on the data-driven advocacy actions she pursued to raise awareness of the serious concerns of young students across her state.

Keywords

advocacy evidence-based counseling mental health elementary school suicide

The school counselor’s role in addressing student mental health concerns gained emphasis in the past decade due in part to a national rise in mental health rates for children and youth in the United States (Bitsko et al., 2018; Carlson & Kees, 2013; Curtin, 2020; DeKruyf et al., 2013; Mann et al., 2018). The COVID-19 pandemic and the intersecting influence of institutional and systemic racism have further raised the level of concern regarding mental health and well-being (Araújo et al., 2021; Marques de Miranda et al., 2020; O’Sullivan et al., 2021; Savitz-Romer et al., 2021). In a review of published articles on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth, for example, researchers reported increases in anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic symptoms in children across all developmental phases, resulting in an increased need for mental health services and highlighting the role of schools in service provision (Araújo et al., 2021).

School counselors are trained in their graduate programs to recognize and address social/emotional and mental health concerns in their student populations. Through evidence-based school counseling, they gather student needs data in their school environment, investigate contextual factors, and identify and apply research-supported interventions at the appropriate prevention or intervention level (Dimmitt et al., 2007; Goodman-Scott et al., 2019; Zyromski et al., 2021). Through a cycle of continuous evaluation, school counselors can determine the impact of mental health interventions and further refine their approaches to meet the evolving and unique needs in their school ecologies (Dimmitt et al., 2007; McMahon et al., 2014).

In the latest iteration of evidence-based school counseling, school counseling scholars advise that mental health and social/emotional needs require the same data-driven processes that school counselors have in place to meet students’ academic needs (Zyromski et al., 2021). As with other student challenges, when addressing student mental health, school counselors are encouraged to recognize the identities of students who are disproportionately affected and explore the conditions that foster inequity in access to school mental health services (Dimmitt & Zyromski, 2020; Zyromski et al., 2021). When encountering such inequities, school counselors can then apply data-driven approaches to advocate for underrepresented students (Dimmitt, 2018; Zyromski & Mariani, 2016). In this way, data becomes an engine for social justice advocacy and systemic change, allowing a school counselor to give voice to the needs of students whose concerns are overlooked and discounted (Abebe & Biswas, 2021; Ratts & Greenleaf, 2018).

Advocacy is a vital component of comprehensive school counseling programs and a key theme identified in the first and subsequent editions of the ASCA National Model (American School Counselor Association [ASCA], 2003, 2019). Historically, school counselor advocacy efforts were directed at the school-level sphere of influence, answering the call to promote change within their buildings to ensure greater equity for students (Trusty & Brown, 2005). Over the past 2 decades, the scope of school counselor advocacy has expanded to encompass professional advocacy, or “indirectly advocating for students through enhancing school counseling programs” (Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019, p. 2). Recently, school counseling advocacy scholars have highlighted the need to provide school counselors with direction in how to engage in professional advocacy efforts beyond the building level to ignite change in widespread beliefs about the profession and the impact on students served (Cigrand et al., 2015; Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019.)

Given the complexity and severity of the current mental health crisis, school counselors desiring to advocate on behalf of students’ needs for services require a professional advocacy model that targets change in the wider educational and societal systems. Scholars have proposed a theoretical professional advocacy model based on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework, offering recommendations for professional advocacy across the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem (Cigrand et al., 2015). The ecological advocacy model elucidated below is widely cited in the school counselor advocacy literature (Beck & Lane, 2019; Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019; Perry et al., 2020); however, most published articles focus on school counseling work within the micro- and mesosystem levels. Examples of professional school counselor advocacy to ignite change within the exo- and macrosystem levels are less available.

The purpose of this article is to describe the actions of one elementary school counselor who successfully used state-wide data to advocate across all four levels of the ecological systems model (Cigrand et al., 2015) to raise awareness of the mental health needs of young students. In the following sections, we share the advocacy steps she followed, from project development and data collection to the dissemination of results to state legislators, school counselor association members, media outlets, and national professional forums. We conclude with considerations for school counselor advocacy training based on the outcomes of her efforts.

Literature Review

Professional Advocacy

Professional advocacy has been defined as “school counselors’ efforts to promote awareness and support for the professional role” (Cigrand et al., 2015, p. 10). In recent years, professional advocacy has been promoted as a strategy to contend with various barriers to delivering comprehensive school counseling services (Lambie et al., 2019; Oehrtman & Dollarhide, 2021; Wilder, 2019). Professional advocacy is suggested as a necessary practice for school counselors to protect and promote school counseling positions (Cigrand et al., 2015) and to advocate for delivering services aligned with their scope of training and expertise (Lambie et al., 2019; Milsom et al., 2020). Although the actions involved in professional advocacy may differ from approaches used to advocate directly on behalf of a student or a group of students, the aim of the advocacy efforts to support and promote student well-being are the same and may impact students beyond the school counselor’s caseload (Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019). Professional advocacy efforts have largely been directed at promoting wider knowledge of the role of the school counselor and can take place at many levels and involve a variety of constituents (Cigrand et al., 2015; Havlik, Malott et al., 2019).

One model, based on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, was proposed by Cigrand and colleagues (2015) as a blueprint for practitioners to engage in professional advocacy efforts. Within this model, microsystem advocacy is directed to stakeholders within a school counselor’s immediate school setting, such as students, teachers, and families. The next level, mesosystem advocacy, reflects how the school counselor advocates for their role by connecting across microsystems, such as working with school, district, and community partners to increase awareness of school counseling services and develop coordinated programs. Exosystem advocacy, at the next level, is directed at stakeholders beyond school counselors’ school buildings or districts who have a greater influence on policies and practice guidelines. Finally, macrosystem advocacy involves educating a wider body of stakeholders (e.g., policy makers and the public) about student needs and the role of school counselors.

Within the school counseling advocacy literature, several examples exist of successful advocacy at the micro- and mesosystem levels. For example, school counselors have advocated with principals to promote their role, resulting in more time spent in direct service to students (Milsom et al., 2020; Wilder, 2019). Further, school counselors have advocated at the district level for job security for current school counseling positions (Cigrand et al., 2015; Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019). Unfortunately, when asked about advocacy efforts, school counselors report fewer examples of engagement at the exo- and macrosystem levels (Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019; Perry et al., 2020).

The lack of engagement with advocacy at these levels may be related to several factors. First, fewer reports about advocacy outcomes at the exo- and macrosystem levels may be attributed to the lack of methods available to assess school counselors’ engagement at these levels. For example, one of the only published school counselor advocacy scales, the School Counselor Self Advocacy Questionnaire (SCSAQ; Clemens et al., 2011) focuses solely on microsystem advocacy and is designed to provide insights regarding advocacy behaviors within a school counselor’s building. Second, engagement in advocacy behaviors may be affected by school counselor-specific factors including self-efficacy regarding advocacy behaviors (Perry et al., 2020), training in advocacy behaviors (Havlik, Malott et al., 2019), and fear or apprehension about the risks involved in advocating both within and outside their school settings (Beck & Lane, 2019; Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019).

Even with existing barriers, the high needs of students may motivate school counselors to press forward with advocacy in wider ecosystems. For example, in a qualitative investigation of the ASCA School Counselor of the Year award winners, participants described a responsibility to embrace advocacy to operate as a social change agent (Beck & Lane, 2019). One school counselor of the year shared, “Advocacy . . . is not something you choose to do, but I feel like it’s something I have to do, as a person who has access and privilege in our society.” Similarly, another participant expressed that advocacy means “being a voice for those who don’t have one, don’t know how to have one, have whatever factors going on that prevent them from speaking up” (Beck & Lane, 2019, p. 182).

Advocacy on Behalf of Elementary Students

The drive toward advocacy on behalf of those without access and power echoes the expanded focus of evidence-based school counseling to bring attention to equity issues and seek change for students experiencing marginalization (Dimmitt, 2018). Elementary school counselors work with the youngest age band of students. Due to their age, developmental level, and institutional constraints, elementary students have less autonomy and agency to voice their concerns to relevant constituencies and advocate on their own behalf in larger public spheres. Notably, they are not included in many prominent state and national youth surveys on mental health, substance use, school climate, and bullying. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (2020), for example, only collects data on suicidal thoughts for middle and high school students. Likewise, state-administered youth surveys on health and safety are not designed for or distributed to students below sixth grade (e.g., Illinois Youth Survey, 2021; Virginia Department of Health, 2021; Washington State Department of Health, 2021).

In addition to the lack of agency of children they represent and the limited prevalence of data, elementary school counselors face numerous professional and societal barriers in their efforts to provide mental health support to K–6 students, First, elementary school counselors report significant professional challenges to delivering mental health services within a school counseling program due to high caseloads. The average student-to-school counselor ratio was 424:1 for the 2019–2020 school year (U.S. Department of Education, 2020), with some elementary counselors reporting ratios as high as 1500:1 (Ernst et al., 2017). A second professional barrier to direct service delivery involves contending with the many duties placed on school counselors outside of the ASCA-recommended scope of their professional practice (ASCA, 2019). These duties take valuable time away from the provision of mental health prevention and intervention services affecting all students and are especially detrimental to students who lack the ability to access mental health services outside of the school setting (Miller, 2018).

Another major hurdle to service provision is the lack of awareness within the larger society about the mental health needs of young children. When data is collected on the prevalence of mental health concerns, it is typically aggregated across a wide age band; thus, the experiences of children under 12 can be lost in the dominant narrative of crisis among teenagers and young adults (Holbrook et al., 2017; Miller, 2018). In the absence of clear evidence, the reports that children bring forward to adults about their concerns may be met with disbelief. As an example, in a qualitative study conducted by Gallo et al. (2021), elementary school counselors reported that the biggest challenges with providing support for suicidal children involved societal stigma about mental health and parents’ and teachers’ lack of comfort with the topic.

Taken together, the numerous challenges of identifying and addressing the mental health of elementary students calls for advocacy that stretches far beyond the walls of the school building. In this case, micro- and meso-level advocacy efforts will inevitably stall without advocacy at the macro- and exosystem levels (Cigrand et al., 2015; Havlik, Malott et al., 2019). For society, the stakes are high; research has shown that children with unsupported mental health needs struggle more, impacting school performance and increasing risks for later school drop-out and substance use (Child Mind Institute, 2015; Swick & Powers, 2018). Thus, school counselors in the younger grades must have the capacity to work with students in distress before they experience a cascade of other negative consequences (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010).

Case Study in Elementary Advocacy

In this section, we describe the advocacy project the first author undertook to raise greater awareness about the significant concerns and challenges faced by elementary students. The action steps involved in the project and the outcomes of her endeavors are detailed, organized across the ecosystemic levels. As a data-driven school counselor practitioner, she adhered to recommended steps involved in practitioner action research, which “brings together action and reflection, as well as theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern” (Bradbury, 2015, p.1). We begin with a description of how her data-driven practices positioned her to uncover a need, develop a guiding question, construct a survey to answer the question, analyze survey findings, develop an advocacy plan to report findings to stakeholders, and reflect on what was learned (Bradbury et al., 2019).

Evidence-Based Elementary School Counselor

The first author was a school counselor for Grades 4–6 with 18 years of experience in the same district. Over the years, she had intentionally established an evidence-based school counseling program grounded in an ecological model (Dimmitt & Zyromski, 2020; McMahon et al., 2014). She worked collaboratively across all levels of the interlocking systems—centering children while drawing from educators, leaders, families, and community members—to recognize and appreciate the values, yearnings, inequities, and strengths in her school.

To develop a nuanced understanding of student needs, she gathered data from both formal (e.g., needs assessments, standardized tests, youth health surveys) and informal (e.g., individual sessions, observations, and caregiver and teacher consultations) sources (Zyromski & Mariani, 2016). From this understanding, she created tiered services to meet student needs and engaged in a cycle of evaluation to assess and continuously adjust her interventions (Goodman-Scott et al., 2019). Taken together, these efforts ensured that her school counseling program flexibly served the students in her unique setting and allowed her to advocate directly for and with underrepresented students within their environments.

To bolster the human rights of younger students who are often left out of conversations, she invited students to be co-investigators by making data review a regular part of her classroom curriculum visits. In this way, the students were invited to make meaning of the school data and discuss solutions to student problems like exclusion, name calling, and social anxiety. She felt a strong responsibility to center the voices of children, and, through these methods, students practiced problem solving, empathy, and self-advocacy.

Advocacy on the Micro- and Mesosystem Levels

Advocacy within the microsystem and mesosystem became a natural extension of the data-driven processes the first author established in her program. Within her school, she worked collaboratively with her principal and other educators to examine academic and socioemotional learning gaps and advocate for evidence-based interventions at the Tier 1 and Tier 2 levels. At the district level, she advocated for the regular administration of the state Healthy Youth Survey (Washington State Department of Health, 2021) to sixth graders to secure data on substance use, safety, and other health indicators for use in coordinated interventions with community agencies. Further, she led a district effort to gather data on the needs of elementary students and presented findings to the superintendent and school board directors, resulting in the hiring of additional certificated staff to support student needs at the elementary level.

As an active member of the state school counseling association (SSCA), she presented at meetings and developed a network of evidence-based school counseling colleagues to support her practices. Through these relationships, she was asked to run for a board position to represent elementary school counselors. The platform upon which she ran for office was to be a voice for young children who have limited power to express their needs to larger audiences. At that time, the state-level funding ratio for elementary school counselors in her state was 1:811, nowhere near the ASCA recommendation of 1:250.

Once elected, she began to center her leadership and advocacy efforts on the mental health and well-being of elementary-age students. She had recognized an escalation of disclosures in her own school regarding suicidal ideation, mental health concerns, and identity-based harassment, intimidation, and bullying (HIB; e.g., sizeism, ableism, racism, sexism, and transphobia) and questions about sexuality and gender identity. She wondered if the rising concerns she was seeing were reflected across the state and across the full band of K–6. One day, after placing the 15th phone call of the school year to inform a parent of a child’s thoughts about suicide, she began to scale up her advocacy efforts, as described below.

Development of a Guiding Question and Clarifying Project Goals

As a first step, she attempted to find state and national prevalence rates on suicide, mental health, and identity-based bullying for K–6 students. She knew her school ecology and was tracking data in the fourth through sixth grades, but she needed comprehensive data to fuel her advocacy. Unfortunately, she had difficulty finding data that reflected the experience of children under age 12. Stymied by the lack of state or national data to back up her experience, she decided to initiate a survey of her professional peers to learn more about the student needs they were encountering in their buildings. She was guided by the following question: To what extent are children in K–6 grappling with serious mental health concerns, identity questions, and HIB typically attributed to their older peers? Although the initial goal was to collect data and fill an evidence gap, as her advocacy efforts expanded, she also was able to share the data with counseling association members, education policy leaders, state legislators, researchers, and the wider public to raise awareness of the important role of elementary school counseling in addressing student needs.

Gathering Facts and Information

Survey development and Data collection plan

Initial questions were generated based on practitioner experience and then pilot-tested with volunteers on a national school counselor email discussion list. The first author then sought consultation from a counseling researcher on survey design (e.g., item consistency, wording, and length). Feedback from SSCA leaders and education policy leaders was used to refine the questions and prepare the survey for data collection.

She prepared an anonymous, 30-item survey in Google Forms for ease of use and distribution, and to take advantage of the embedded data analysis tools. The first 10 items of the survey focused on participant and school setting demographics and the next 20 items focused on the elementary school (K–6) counselor’s experience with student needs related to: (a) mental health; (b) suicidal ideation; (c) gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation; and (d) identity-based bullying and harassment; and on the school counselor’s level of preparation to address student concerns. To support the data collection process, she leveraged relationships with influential leaders at the state board of education and SSCA board members to gain permission and assistance to launch a state-wide survey of elementary school counselors.

Data Collection

The survey was launched during an elementary forum at the state school counseling conference, yielding a small number of responses (N = 26). The first author then initiated direct contact with school counselors via email to increase participation and encourage members to share the invitation with elementary counselors who had not yet responded. As a final push to recruit a cross-section of school counselors across the state, she emailed a survey invitation to every district superintendent with a request to forward the survey link to their elementary school counselors. This recruitment approach garnered an additional 171 survey responses. After 5 weeks of active recruitment, the survey was closed with 329 completed responses.

Data Analysis and Findings

Because this was a practitioner-based research project designed to be used for state-level advocacy in presentations and reports, statistical analyses were not undertaken. Instead, descriptive statistics were compiled suitable for presentations to stakeholders. Given the exploratory nature of this report, we caution readers not to generalize based on these results. We address limitations regarding this approach in the discussion section. For this report, we highlight select findings used for advocacy purposes.

Participant and School-Level Data

In total, 329 elementary school counselors participated in the survey. Geographical settings included suburban (149; 45.28%), rural (92; 27.96%), urban (80; 24.01%), tribal (7; 0.02%), and other (1; 0.003%). As a measure of socioeconomic status (SES), school counselors reported the percentages of students in their schools qualifying for free or reduced-price meals: less than 20% = 73 (22.18%), 20%–40% = 58 (17.62%), 40%–60% = 71 (21.58%), 60%–80% = 62 (18.84%), 80%–100% = 65 (19.75%).

Participants worked in settings with caseloads ranging from 43 to 971 students (M = 445.4). Participants reported their working experience as an elementary counselor as less than 2 years (100; 30.39%), 3–5 years (82; 24.92%), 6–10 years (41; 12.46%), 11–15 years (37; 11.42%), 16–20 years (41; 12.46%), and 20+ years (28; 8.51%).

Selected Findings Used to Advocate

To elicit information about changes in mental health disclosures in their student populations, respondents were asked, “Have you observed any change in the severity of mental health concerns in your elementary-age students in the past few years?” A total of 109 survey respondents (33.13%) noted a “huge increase in severity” while 174 (52.8%) said they had seen a “moderate increase” and the remaining 46 (14%) reported “no change.”

In the section on experiences with suicide, elementary school counselors were asked, “How many students this year have talked with you about suicide or ‘not wanting to be here anymore’?” Only 3.3% of respondents (n = 7) selected zero students. The rest selected the following: 1–2 students (72; 21.9%), 3–4 students (92; 28%), 5–6 students (70; 21.3%), 7–9 students (35; 10.6%), and 10 or more students (49; 14.9%). A second question on suicide focused on the youngest age at which students were coming forward with suicidal thoughts. Nearly one third of the school counselors reporting their youngest disclosures came from a kindergarten or first-grade student; participants reported the following as the earliest grade a student had spoken to them regarding suicidal ideation: kindergarten = 36 (10.4%), first grade = 60 (18.24%), second grade = 54 (16.41%), third grade = 49 (14.89%), fourth grade = 36 (10.94%), fifth grade = 34 (10.33%), and sixth grade = 60 (18.24%).

To learn about the incidence of elementary students talking about sexual orientation, school counselors were asked, “This school year, have you had a student/students ‘come out’ to you or a teacher defining their sexual orientation as ‘gay,’ ‘bi,’ ‘lesbian,’ or questioning?” Of the responding K–6 school counselors, 161 (48.9%) indicated that they had talked with students who presented with LGBQ experiences. To learn about the incidence of students discussing gender identity, school counselors responded to the following question: “This school year, have you had a student/students share with you that they are questioning their gender identity? (the student ‘feels different’ than the ‘sex’ assigned them at birth).” Forty-one percent of K–6 school counselors (n = 135) indicated that they had a student or students present questions about their gender.

Advocacy Plan to Disseminate Findings

Data collected from elementary school counselors in the state survey corroborated the first author’s observations regarding increases in mental health and other serious concerns among K–6 students. The findings reinforced the critical role of elementary school counselors in meeting the needs of young students, providing additional support for professional advocacy efforts to hire and train strong professionals at this level of schooling. Below, we describe how these results were used to advocate at both the exosystem and macrosystem levels (Cigrand et al., 2015).

Exosystemic Advocacy

In this project, exosystemic advocacy involved sharing the survey results with people who influence the work of elementary school counselors, including SSCA members, elected officials in state government, educational policy leaders, and school counselor educators. As highlighted above, the first author’s leadership involvement in her state association propelled this work. She used her platform to share the findings with the leadership board and spur discussions with counseling colleagues at association conference sessions.

Through her connections with the association, she was invited to share her results and testify at a hearing organized by the state senate education committee. The topic that day was a proposed bill requiring school districts to develop and implement plans for comprehensive school counseling programs. Included in the bill was a provision to align school counseling services with the recommended ASCA National Model (ASCA, 2019) percentages, thereby focusing delivery on direct services with students rather than non-counseling duties. The bill was passed by the state senate less than a week later and enacted into law the following year.

Through her contacts at the state education office, the first author was also invited to speak at a meeting of the state suicide prevention work group. Of the panelists invited to speak that day, she was the only one to highlight data on young children. Participants in the meeting were surprised to learn about the rising concern among school counselors about suicidal ideation in students in grades K–6. Her presence at the meeting added depth to the conversations that leaders were having about suicide prevention practice and policy.

Another way the first author engaged in advocacy efforts at the exosystem level was to collaborate with school counselor educators to conduct a thorough review of the research literature. The aim of this practitioner–researcher partnership was to identify best practices for working with elementary students and school staff on mental health concerns, suicide prevention, and bias reduction. This relationship provided access to journals and evidence-based repositories and resulted in a compilation of resources to implement at the first author’s own school and share with practitioners and preservice school counseling students. Through this partnership, evidence-based guidelines and interventions were identified on topics ranging from developmentally appropriate suicide screening and curriculum to best practices in crisis response, mental health prevention, and staff training. All these resources were compiled and became a central feature of numerous professional and informal presentations. For examples of the resources compiled, such as those for suicide, see American Academy of Pediatrics (2021), Granello and Zyromski (2018), Heise and Thatcher (2016), Schiro (2020), Sheftall et al. (2016), and Singer et al. (2019).

Macrosystemic Advocacy

The first author’s macrosystemic advocacy involved increasing public awareness of the value of comprehensive school counseling programs and the reality of rising mental health needs of youth across the state. Examples of advocacy at this level included submitting newspaper editorials, using media outlets to share information about the survey results, and presenting the action research steps and findings at a national research conference. In terms of media exposure, one day after testifying with the state senate, she was contacted by a journalist from the newspaper with the largest circulation in the state (readership of over 566,000). During the interview for the article, she shared how elementary school counselors are often used to fulfill non-counseling-related duties (e.g., monitoring recess, lunch duty). The journalist also interviewed the SSCA advocacy chair about the bill moving through the legislature. The resulting article included details about the training school counselors receive to prepare them to address the mental concerns of elementary-age students.

Another way the first author sought to advocate on a macrosystemic level was by submitting a presentation proposal to a national conference on school counseling research. A driving motivation was to share the important story of children’s mental health needs with a wider audience of leaders, researchers, and counselor educators. She also sought to share her methods of data collection, survey tools, and evidence-based resources with attendees to make it possible for them to replicate her advocacy practices in other regions of the country. The proposal was accepted, and participation in the conference afforded her the opportunity to prepare this article for sharing in a national professional journal.

Discussion and Implications

In this article, we illustrate how a school counselor can use practitioner-driven research to advocate for the needs of students across several different ecosystems. In the case presented, the driving focus of advocacy efforts was the mental health needs of K–6 students, but the evidence-based methods demonstrated here can be applied to raise awareness of and effect change on a wide range of systemic problems and inequities.

Several key factors likely contributed to the success of the school counselor who committed herself to ecosystemic advocacy on behalf of elementary-age students. As a 2-decade veteran in her district, she had established a strong skill set related to evidence-based practices. The data-driven mindset she had cultivated gave her the confidence and skills to leverage up her advocacy to wider ecological levels. Her long-standing relationships with district, community, and school counseling leaders provided links to legislative contacts, university researchers, and other key stakeholders. This social capital (Hatch, 2008) increased her opportunities to present her practitioner research findings in legislative hearings, journalist interviews, and national research forums.

Correspondingly, the degree of self-efficacy (Perry et al., 2020) that resulted from engaging in previous micro- and meso-level advocacy experiences strengthened the first author’s communication, collaboration, and presentation skills (Cigrand et al., 2015; Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019; Wilder, 2019). Finally, from a power and privilege perspective, her age and years of service likely contributed to the agency she felt in using her voice, something that might be intimidating to a novice school counselor (Beck & Lane, 2019). The factors underlying successful advocacy are important to assess as we consider how to develop advocacy skills in preservice and early career school counselors. It is notable that, in terms of career duration, the largest percentage (30.39%) of respondents who completed the state-wide survey had worked as a school counselor for less than 2 years. School counselors report more comfort with implementing relational advocacy behaviors (Havlik, DeRosato, et al., 2019); however, relationships and their resulting social capital take time to cultivate. The data-driven advocacy outlined here may be a route for novice school counselors who are not able to immediately leverage long-standing stakeholder connections.

Training and Professional Development Implications

The case study presented in this article illustrates how evidence-based school counseling practices are essential for successful advocacy, especially when one encounters a major gap in the research. In the absence of state-level and national prevalence data on behavioral and mental health experiences of young students, for example, it was incumbent upon the school counselor to fill the gap by implementing a state-wide survey. Practitioner-based research is well within the purview of school counselors, as it follows data-driven practices outlined in the ASCA National Model (ASCA, 2019). Unfortunately, school counselors are usually more practiced with outcome data related to achievement, attendance, and discipline and potentially less familiar with examining the effectiveness of school counseling interventions on mental health and wellness outcomes (Mason et al., 2017; Zyromski et al., 2021). Gaining practice with collecting outcome data related to school safety, climate, and social/emotional learning indicators at the school level is an important step in joining the larger conversation about wellness and health indicators.

To directly support the development of advocacy skills, school counselor educators should expose students to professional advocacy topics throughout their course of study. In field courses, instructors could require practicum or internship student attendance at a school board meeting to understand how micropolitics operate at the district level (Oehrtman & Dollarhide, 2021). In a research course, students could gain exposure to inquiry-based and action research methods and their alignment with data-driven and evidence-based practice. Within school counseling specialty courses, instructors can encourage students to follow notable school counselor leaders on social media platforms, learning how they engage in macro-level professional advocacy efforts with local and national media and also within state and national associations.

Throughout the school counseling graduate program, encouraging student membership in the SSCA and creating a program culture of conference attendance would help connect students to the benefits of professional organizations and build networks. The school counselor featured in the present article built on her membership in the SSCA to move up through leadership positions in the organization. School counselor educators may consider partnerships with the SSCA to create pathways for equitable access to the state conference. For example, the third author was involved in coordinating a graduate research poster session at the SSCA conference. Graduate students presented data-driven and evidence-based projects, gaining necessary communication and presentation skills while also honing their data skills. As a result of presenting, each received a free conference registration.

Limitations and Future Research

The findings from the advocacy project should be understood in relation to the limitations of practitioner action research. The aim of practitioner research is not typically generalizability of results or statistical significance; rather, it is about the potential impact the results may have on the intended population (Bradbury et al., 2019; Kaffenberger, 2012). The survey in this study had several limitations. First, participants were recruited in one state through direct recruitment snowball sampling; therefore, this was a convenience sample and not randomly selected. This limits our ability to generalize the findings to other states or regions. Second, this was a practitioner-driven research study, and the lead author wrote authentic questions to obtain information based on her own experience in schools. Although the items were reviewed and modified based on feedback from educational professionals, the survey did not undergo a review by a panel of experts in the field prior to implementation. To strengthen the survey, the items should undergo a rigorous review, pilot testing, and statistical analysis to establish reliability and validity.

Conclusion

In this article, we highlighted the work of one elementary school counselor who noticed a disturbing trend in her student population regarding suicidal ideation and other mental health issues. Like other evidence-based school counselors, she collected informal and formal data, researched interventions to address the needs of her students, and advocated for local systemic change. Unlike others, she engaged in a quest to discover if her experience was part of a wider trend and advocated for student needs in numerous ways at district, state, and national levels. Given the complex challenges facing school counselors and the students they serve in the midst of the COVID-19 and racial injustice pandemics, school counselors must widen their scope of advocacy beyond their local school environment. We hope this article serves to inspire other school counselors to apply ecosystemic advocacy to meet these challenges.

Footnotes

Author Biographies

Regina N. Brown is a school counselor at Washington Elementary School in Centralia, WA.

Diana H. Gruman, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. Email: grumand@wwu.edu.

Lucy L. Purgason, PhD, is an assistant professor in the counseling department at Oregon State University–Cascades in Bend, OR.

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