The School Counselor and School-Family-Community Partnerships

ASCA Position

School counselors have an essential and unique role in promoting, facilitating and advocating for collaboration with parents/guardians and community stakeholders. These collaborations are an important aspect of implementing school counseling programs that promote all students’ successful academic, career and social/emotional development. 

The Rationale

The ASCA National Model (ASCA, 2019a) and the ASCA School Counselor Professional Standards & Competencies (ASCA, 2019b) endorse school counselors’ roles in facilitating school-family-community partnerships. School counselors are trained in counseling, human relations and collaboration skills (e.g., group dynamics, consultation skills), which makes them well-suited to engage families and community stakeholders, and they enhance the collaboration of school-family-community stakeholders by being the catalyst through which these collaborations occur (Bryan et al., 2017). Family involvement benefits both the student and the school, as it increases student achievement and attendance, promotes career development, enhances school climate and fosters student resilience (Castillo, 2022). 

The School Counselor's Role

In establishing school and community partnerships, school counselors work with students, their families, school staff and community members. In fostering partnerships, school counselors:

• Actively pursue collaboration with family members and community stakeholders
• Promote student academic, career and social/emotional development 
• Encompass existing school, family and community strengths, resources and assets (Bryan et al., 2020) 
• Inform the school community about relevant community resources
• Foster resilience through equity-based school-family-community partnerships and parent-family-school agreements based on empowerment, democracy, collaboration, social justice and strength-based principles (Bryan et al., 2020).
• Work to end racism/bias by collaborating with families, educators, businesses and community organizations focused on anti-racism/bias (ASCA, 2021)

 Focusing on family and community partnerships in schools is an important aspect to culturally responsive education (Castillo, 2022). School counselors serve as leaders, advocates, collaborators, facilitators, initiators and evaluators to create, enrich and assess the effect of these partnerships on student success within the school counseling program.  

Summary

School counselors work to improve student outcomes through the facilitation of school-family-community partnerships. School-family-community partnerships have increased students’ successful academic, career and social/emotional development. School counselors are called on to create, lead, facilitate and assess these partnerships and work to remove barriers to these helpful collaborative relationships.