Editorials / Opinions

AB 1802 Junior "At risk" Counseling
A Practitioner's Perception
by Bill Welcher
Baldwin Park High School District
January 19, 2007

I am going to try and provide some information regarding our attempt to follow the directive handed down to the high schools as a result of the new legislation known as AB 1802.

I am the lead counselor and chair of the counseling department at Sierra Vista High School in Baldwin Park. There is one other comprehensive high school in the district, Baldwin Park High School and one alternative high school, North Park. Our population is comprised of 2050 students in grades 9-12 with approximately 500 11th grade students divided into four alphabetical groups. There is one additional counselor responsible for a caseload of special education students from all grades. Our four counselors have a caseload of about 480:1 with the fifth counselor having about 160 special education students. We undertook this task in November after all the counselors in the district attended a meeting with administration and everyone got on board with the wording of the bill and understood what needed to be accomplished. We decided that our ‘At Risk” population would be comprised of students that had not passed one or both parts of the CAHSEE or were deficient in the number of credits needed for graduation as an eleventh grade student. We decided if our juniors had accumulated only 105 credits they were “At Risk”.

Each counselor had between 50-60 students with the Special Education counselor having approximately 15. There were a little over 200 students needing face to face conferences in a time frame of 6 weeks. The deadline for all conferences was December 21st.

We attacked the task in the following way. We drafted a letter indicating what the conferences were about and sent the letter home to the parents of the “At Risk” students. The two counseling secretaries began making calls to schedule appointments with the counselors. Each counselor decided what part of the day they would devote to conferences. If a counselor had a conference scheduled for the evening, let’s say at 7:00, they would come in late that day. It was necessary to develop a flexible schedule to accommodate parents who were unable to attend a conference during school hours.

As time moved on some parents were not making their appointments. Some parents did not return calls. Various problems arose that bogged down the system. We developed another letter similar to the first but shorter. We called in those students whose parents were not responding to our efforts. We explained the situation to the students, gave them the letter and told them to have their parents call for an appointment. This helped but we still had some parents not responding. We called in the students again, gave them an appointment time, and filled out an appointment slip indicating when the appointment was. We gave them the slip and told them to give this to their parents. We would expect to see them and their parents at the indicated time. This last method helped finish up the stragglers. We had seen all the parents and students within the time frame. We even had a special circumstance where one counselor held a phone conference with the parent while the student was in the office. The counselor working with the special education students also saw all of her parents within the time frame. The alternative school counselor needed some extra help to complete the conferences. Because the other counselors were busy with their own conferences and not able to offer support the district hired a retired counselor to provide the support that he needed to complete his task.

Results of AB 1802 conferencing

The counselors at my site were pretty stressed out by all of this as we still had many tasks to complete. One of our biggest tasks happens second semester when we have individual conferences with all of our 9th, 10th and 11th grade students to update their 4-year plan. We also are responsible for meeting with all of the incoming 8th grade students to develop their 4-year plan. There are 650 or so junior high school students that we will need to meet with individually.

Two years ago I developed an electronic 4-year plan that enables us to program our junior high schools students for four years worth of classes. At the time I created the program we did not have junior high school counselors so the task of registering these students fell on our shoulders. Well, we did such a great job and the program worked so well that even thought we now have junior high counselors the district wants us to meet with the junior high students. This is a three week process. So in addition to a very important but very time consuming task we still had to complete an additional AB 1802 task, that is to see the "At risk” seniors individually, with their parents, for a conference. Although we will not have as many seniors as we did juniors there is still a lot or work to do prior to and during these conferences. This new AB 1802 task created a time management nightmare and to say the least, stressed us out.

I decided to meet with the associate superintendent and express my concerns. Because she was able to see the monumental tasks created by AB 1802 in addition to our current assignments she agreed to get us some help with the junior high registration which meant that the junior high counselors would work with us as we go about completing the various tasks associated with registering the junior high students. Her actions following our meeting told me that she understood our predicament. She did not let us get out of our task of sitting down with each student and inputting the necessary classes on their individual 4-year plan. However, in the end, I did agree with her that the high school counselors need to complete this task. She also did agree to provide paid time during the month of July to any counselor who wants to meet with their ”At risk” 11th grade students so that task could be taken care of earlier instead of during the month of December. She agreed to extend the contract of the Dept. Chair from an 11 month to a 12 month position so a lot of work could be done during the summer, making the lives of the other counselors easier when they return in August. The actions of the associate superintendent gave me the impression that she was in our corner trying to help us out. This proactive stance also filtered down to the school site administration as the assistant principal in charge of counseling has put in place many additional processes and procedures that will help us as we complete the senior AB 1802 conferences.

Overall reaction to the process and next year’s conferencing

I believe all the counselors in the district saw this task as very necessary as did the parents and students. The counselors believed that parents will be better informed regarding their student’s academic progress and the formality of the process and the filling out of the paperwork and the necessity of the signatures give parents and students a feeling that this is pretty important stuff and that is a good thing. The added stress that it puts on counselors and secretaries that are overworked already is not good, however the legislation allows for extra help in order to complete the conferences. We are going to take advantage of this. There is discussion regarding the hiring of a part-time counselor next year and our administrators are aware of the possible opportunities that AB 1802 can bring to our district. All in all the process was positive but it took a lot of work and a lot of planning to get the task completed. Our associate superintendent and our site administrators and the information services specialists were extremely helpful; undertaking a task like this requires the assistance of a great many people. We are ready to begin seeing our ‘At risk” seniors. The administrators were very happy with our accomplishment of this task and the support it provided to the students and the parents.

Next year we will provide a survey for both students and parents so we can collect some data regarding these conferences.