School Counselor Cuts Questioned

A statewide professional association is calling into question a claim that New Haven schools will have enough school counselors after the latest wave of layoffs.

Superintendent Carol Birks said the number of counselors in New Haven’s schools will still meet national benchmarks, despite her plan to lay off 20 of them, as part of her efforts to close a $19.4 million budget deficit.

In a letter sent on Monday, the Connecticut School Counselor Association (CSCA) disputed that math and asked the Board of Education to reject Birks’s layoff plan. Virginia DeLong, the chairman of CSCA’s board of directors, argued that eliminating counselors would be a ​“disservice to students and families” across New Haven.

The school board is scheduled to vote to approve the layoffs of 33 full-time employees, about half of whom are school counselors, at next week’s regular meeting on Monday night at Celentano School.

Initially, the district had budgeted slots for 61 school counselors next year. Traditionally, guidance counselors sent off recommendation letters and transcripts to college, but nationwide, the role has expanded in recent years, especially in urban areas. School counselors are now expected to focus on students’ mental health, social-emotional development, home life, academic course load and career plans.

Every elementary school got one counselor, and middle schools got two. High schools had a wider range, anywhere from one at a small school like New Haven Academy to eight at a big school like Wilbur Cross. A pair roamed the district, while two more staffed Central Office.

All together, the 61 counselors’ salaries were projected to cost $4.19 million. Depending on experience, the pay ranged from $51,000 to $93,000.

The cuts that Birks has proposed will slash the counseling department down by almost one-third. Seventeen counselors were sent lay-off notices two weeks ago, and three were reassigned to teaching roles.

Caseloads Too Big?

Birks argued that the district would still meet staffing ratios set by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). ASCA states that each counselor should have a caseload of no more than 250 students. Birks reached that total by removing all K‑5 students from the calculation.

But DeLong argued that that math misconstrues what the national organization intended. The staffing ratio is supposed to be applied at all levels, she said, and any calculation that excludes elementary schools is skewed.

“This is laudable but misleading,” DeLong wrote. ​“This means that there is the potential for elementary and/or middle school counselors to have ratios of 500+:1. With ratios this high, school counselors surely will not have the time or resources to implement comprehensive school counseling programs, leaving students without equitable access to a school counselor.”

When all students are included in the total, New Haven will have less than half the number of counselors that the organization recommends. There will be only one counselor for every 525 students, based on last year’s enrollment figures.

DeLong said that means New Haven’s counselors will be ​“stretched thin,” especially as they’re asked to take on extra responsibilities in schools that are already being pared down.

“In districts across the state, we have seen counselors have to take on the bulk of standardized testing duties, substituting in classrooms, and increased clerical tasks,” DeLong wrote. ​“Such non-counseling related activities greatly impede the direct services that school counselors are trained and prepared to provide, and careful consideration needs to be given to reassign non-counseling/indirect service tasks so they can focus on the prevention needs of all students and responsive needs of many.”

DeLong added that New Haven’s staffing ratio looks particularly slim for an urban school district, where counselors are responding to serious mental health issues, on top of looking over students’ course-loads, standardized test results and college applications.

Because a counselor’s interventions could stop bullying, outbursts or other disruptions to the learning environment, DeLong argued, it is ​“short-sighted” to consider counselors as removed from the classroom.

Even at higher staffing levels in recent years, higher-schoolers had already complained that a rotating, overextended staff of counselors struggled to connect with students amid long wait times for appointments.

Given the budgetary realities, Birks responded, she’ll try her best to meet the organization’s recommended staffing level at the high schools, while relying on other support services for the lower grades.

“We have to right-size and realign,” Birks said. ​“I respect the work of counselors. Counselors helped me on to college and throughout my career. But we have to make some pretty tough decisions to focus on the instructional core as well as our overall district improvement efforts. It’s hard, it’s very difficult and it’s sad.”

Birks also pointed out that very few districts across the country are able to meet ASCA’s bar. ​‘When you look around the state, around the country, we are aligned with — and still have a lot more — than some areas,” she said. ASCA reported that only three states (Vermont, New Hampshire and Wyoming) have adequate staffing. Connecticut’s ratio was roughly 465-to‑1 a few years ago, ASCA found.

Will Clark, the district’s chief operating officer, has also argued that several departments across the district are understaffed, from ​“special education to [English-language learning] to [information technology] to security to social work to speech to nurses and to other areas.”

While counselors are being laid off, each school will now have at least full-time social worker, which many schools did not have before, to pick up the slack, Birks said. Birks argued that her reorganization gives schools the minimum staffing necessary to meet state mandates, then allows principals to fit any additional hires to their student body’s unique needs.

“We’re looking at equity and concentration of need,” Birks said. ​“We’re trying to make sure we’re aligning our resources in a way which schools have requested. In some schools, we asked, ​‘Did you want a full-time school counselor or a library media specialist?’ They decided. It varies by school.”

One counselor, who asked to remain anonymous, argued people don’t understood ​“the magnitude” of the cuts and just how ​“devastating” the impact could be.

“It is no surprise that the district is in financial constraints. However, what came as a surprise was the fact that 20 school counselors — in a district that has begged for more counselors — could lose their jobs,” the school counselor said. ​“We’re the ones who are held responsible if students are not successful in the classroom or don’t have post-high school plans. In a district with over 20,000 students who all need support; this is an injustice to them.”

Budget Too Small?

In addition to CSCA, other groups have also called for the reinstatement of school counselors. They say there’s money to keep them on the payroll by redistributing federal grants or by holding off an expansion of Central Office.

DeLong proposed using grants, including the federal Title I and Title IV‑A money and the state Alliance funding, to cover some of the costs of the counseling program.

Birks said that most of those funds were tied up in other programs that could not be cut, like English-language tutors, special education experts, instructional coaches and other support roles.

“We have to look at the system at large,” she said. ​“It’s easy to say on the sidelines, but we need a comprehensive view.” She added that three Massachusetts-based consultants from The Management Solution will be reviewing ​“every funding streams to make sure we’re best utilizing what the grants were intended for and how those dollars are touching students.”

Others felt that the money should be pulled from a planned expansion of Central Office, after Meadow Street emptied out during Reggie Mayo’s return as interim superintendent.

A joint statement by NHPS Advocates and the New Haven Teacher’s Collective said that cutting counselors meant ​“one less person … supporting their academic, social and emotional well-being.” The groups said short-staffing the guidance department could create long wait-times and added stress for upperclassmen trying to plan out their college and career options.

The groups didn’t propose an alternative funding mechanism, but Sarah Miller, a parent at Columbus Family Academy and a member of NHPS Advocates, said any extra money should go towards keeping teachers and counselors, rather than hiring administrators.

“It’s kind of jarring to see new executive positions being filled at the same time that teachers are being laid off,” she said. ​“We need to prioritize the people who serve kids, not a bureaucracy.”

Birks has scaled back her plans, cutting a chief of staff, general counsel and labor relations director from the draft of her organizational chart. And she still might not fill some of the roles that the board approved, relying for example on the consultants and a part-time budget director, in place of a full-time chief financial officer.

But even without those roles, Birks said she needs some support, arguing that she can’t manage the district by herself. ​“We have a very lean Central Office,” she said. ​“We need to run the system.”