E103: School Counselors [IEP Team BONUS Series]
Can School Counselors be on your child's IEP? Yes! But can they serve your child even if they aren't on the IEP? Sure can!
Can School Counselors be on your child’s IEP? Yes! But can they serve your child even if they aren’t on the IEP? Sure can!
In this episode of The IEP Team BONUS Series we cover:
1) Qualifications of a School Counselor using Colorado state’s qualifications as an example
2) What their responsibilities and expertise are
3) Suprising things about their role you may not realize (like who they overlap with professionals and if they would be your district’s 504 coordinators!)
Learn More about the IEP Bootcamp!
E103: School Counselor
[00:00:00] We are talking about school counselors today, and you may end up with some really good questions to ask your team by the end of this episode, as you will find that there’s some overlap between school counselors. And a lot of other professionals inside the school. And sometimes they’re part of the IEP team and some of times they are not. So you may have some really intelligent questions to ask your team so that you can identify if this is a person that needs to be on your child’s IEP team or as part of their support team, but maybe not part of the IEP team.
So stick with me on this week’s episode of the IEP team bonus series. If you have ever been a little bit confused about the role of school counselors and IDPs, we’re going to clear that up today. So stick with me.
You are listening to the parent IEP labs, the podcast that helps you get an effective IEP plan for your child so that you can get them supported and learning in school. I’m Beth LEAs and Feld occupational therapist, who started to notice trends in parents who got effective IEP for their kids. Without having to fight the school. My mission is to help you turn insider [00:01:00] knowledge from the school side into effective parent advocacy for your child, the parent IEP lab focuses on providing you knowledge about your parent role in the IEP.
And taking away the stress of an upcoming IEP meeting through the ultimate IEP prep course, but also on the podcast we highlight commonly miss parent advocacy opportunities between IEP meetings, which is really how you avoid having to fight with the team. So let’s dive in and think about what we can change and tweak to get the right formula for success for your child to learn and grow at school welcome to the lab
Oh, my goodness gracious next week, crept up on me so fast. So next week is the IEP bootcamp. And when I started to sketch out, okay parents are coming. And they’re really overwhelmed about reading the IEP document. How can I help break this down a little bit? And I originally thought, okay, we’re going to do three days. We’re going to focus on the four major components of an IEP. So if you get a draft IEP in and you’re under the gun [00:02:00] to understand what it is and understand what you’re going to need to advocate for in the meeting, that you would be able to do that.
And then I started writing up the slides. For day one. And I was like, oh, actually we need like this little quick win a couple of days before we start and oh, we need this other little quick win so that parents don’t get overwhelmed as they’re coming through this bootcamp. So yes, I say the bootcamp is three days and it is, but also you will be welcomed into the Facebook group a couple of days early, because now we have two really quick wins
for you to work on before we get started on Friday. So, if you want to come live, it’s January 27th to 29th. If you want to upgrade to VIP. That actually gets you an extra hour each day of the bootcamp with me to ask whatever IEP questions you want, more personalized service, of course. And so I’m so excited to dive in there. I’m just really, really excited to get going and it’s next week already.
So if you are overwhelmed by looking at your child’s IEP, if you’re like. I need some hints. I need a [00:03:00] handout on the acronyms. I need links to resources to look up things. I need to just ask somebody what the heck this program name even means. Um, this is the place to do that. So definitely check it out. You can sign up at the IUP lab.com/bootcamp, and it’s only $19 to sign up. And I’m definitely going to over-deliver by giving you five days of things to think about.
And of course, a week of support in the Facebook group after we’re all done as well. So again, the link to register and check out more details is underneath this podcast in your podcast player, but also you can go to the IEP lab.com/bootcamp as well. I really hope to see you there.
All right. Welcome to the IEP team bonus series for this week, we are talking about school counselors. So we are winding down towards the end of this series, but we still have some pretty important players to talk about like principals and other professionals, but this week is like school counselors are kind of on the fence on if they are [00:04:00] part of your IEP team or not. And so we’ll talk about that because a lot of times they serve kids with IEP, but sometimes they’re not officially on the IEP and then sometimes they’re efficiently on the IEP. Um, so we’re definitely going to talk about that as well.
But if you are new to the IEP team bonus series, this is really just to give you context about who the heck people may be on your child’s IEP team. And also there might be somebody that we cover that you don’t understand. Oh my gosh, they might provide this service and I didn’t even know about it. And this would be the perfect person
to support my kid in this challenge. Right. And so of course I’m always a huge proponent of advocating for the support need instead of the actual person or profession that’s going to support that need. But this just gives you context, right? If you have a lot of people on your child’s IEP team, a lot of times it can be hard to know, like, okay, they’re having this new challenge. Who do I talk to about it? Because sometimes if you approach [00:05:00] the wrong person,
You might get a blank stare or you might not get some follow-through because you didn’t actually seek out the right person. And how are you supposed to know? Right. That’s what this podcast is about,
’cause I feel like one side of the team has more information than the other. And so I’m trying to bring and fill that gap so that you kind of get, into the fold a little bit and understand who the heck these people are and kind of the complexities behind it as well. So we will go through qualifications.
And what they actually do. Like what a session with them looks like, you know, in this case, we’re talking about like how they overlap with other professionals. And so you might be able to see both of them on IEP team, or you might kind of ask about it, right. Like ask more intelligent questions about it as well.
Um, but yeah, if you haven’t, um, scrolled back, if you’re just new to the podcast and you’re like, oh, okay. Um, you know, what other team members, if you covered, if you scroll back in. In your podcast player. Every Thursday [00:06:00] is the episode of the bonus IEP team series. And then also if you want them in a more organized fashion, you can go to my [email protected] slash podcast.
And on the right hand side of that website, it has little tags and you can see. IEP team bonus areas. You can click on that link and then they’re all on one page for you. So if you’re like trying to find a special education teacher, Or if you’re trying to find deaf and hard of hearing teacher or a speech language pathologist.
You can scroll and find that super easy. And then even if you end up listening in your podcast player, Then you can grab the episode numbers so that you can just pop that into your podcast player and you know what you’re looking for. So just a heads up on that one. Okay. So the first part is qualifications.
So I am in the state of Colorado. So I always use Colorado as just an example. I’m an example person. So we’re going to go through the qualifications that the state of Colorado has for school counselors. Again, you will note that school counseling is different than regular [00:07:00] counseling outside. Okay.
There are two different things. And so you’re going to hear that as we go through qualifications. Okay. Let’s get into it. So the first bullet is a master’s or higher degree in school counseling as defined by accreditation, by the council for accreditation of counseling, for related educational programs. And then it has a little link to see like what the accreditation looks like if you want to. But notice just that that’s related to educational programs.
Like it is an educational school counseling degree. Okay. The next one is minimum of a hundred clock hour practicum. So that means kind of an internship. Um, and then the second. One is, is more internship. It’s minimum of 600 clock hour internship with multiple grade levels of students under the supervision of a licensed school counselor.
And then the last one is passage of the Colorado state board of education, improved content exam. Um, also below it it’s really interesting and like a Tallix below it, it says information for options for individuals who hold a master’s degree [00:08:00] in a clinical counseling domain coming soon. So that’s super interesting. So.
And that means that the state of Colorado, at least. It is two separate licenses that they have for clinical counseling versus school counseling. Okay.
So clinical counseling would be like new going to an outpatient therapy service. Like, you know, being in our health is big around here. So when I went to counseling, I went to banner health and I found a counselor there. And so that person had a clinical counseling degree. Now school counseling is totally different and it’s obviously they cover a lot of the same things, but they are specifically in a school. Okay. So hopefully that helps you a little bit if you’re like, oh, okay.
Now I’m lined up a little bit about what their qualifications are. Like, they are not the same thing. Right. So now let’s get into what they actually do. So the interesting thing about them, and I alluded to this in the beginning, when I talked about, are they on the [00:09:00] IEP? Are they not?
Is that they serve all children in the school. They’re really a lot like nurses. And I had a ton of feedback from the nurses episode, which was last week. Um, because I think people really understood more about their role, same thing with counselors, they serve all children in the school.
So some things that I would see them do, and actually we worked. Pretty fairly closely with them. They weren’t part of our IEP team. They didn’t do like our weekly meeting every once in a while they would pop in
if they had concerns about somebody or they needed help to figure out how to support somebody, then they would come into our weekly special education team meetings. But for the most part, we just, we knew each other, we had a working relationship, but we weren’t really on the same team. If that makes sense.
So some examples of what I’ve seen them do. And they do what’s called a lunch bunch. Which I’m sure is a cutesy name for something more complicated than that, but basically in lunch bunch would be, you know, a group of kids [00:10:00] rotating around to make sure that they got some one-on-one time with the counselor. And I do think that the counselor kind of used this as kind of a screening process.
Sometimes it had more of a purpose to it. So sometimes there would be a commonality behind it, like. Um, if there was a group of children in the same grade that were all really struggling with their parents going through a divorce. Sometimes they would pull them together and say, you guys get to have a lunch bunch.
You know, every other week or something with the counselor. And so they might do an activity as part of that lunch bunch. But normally it’s a pretty relaxed, just check in, um, for the counselors to just be an approachable person so that if your child has any social concerns, emotional concerns. If they’re struggling in any way that they know that they can come to the counselor to talk to them about it. And there’s some privacy there as well. So some of this is just kind of them being a face that the kids are familiar with and being a trusted individual inside of [00:11:00] the school walls that is trying to be empathetic and really help support them.
So. Oh, my gosh, I worked with some incredible counselors and then I worked with one in particular who was not so incredible. And he ended up leaving at the end of the school year when I was like, what are you doing? Um, he ended up leaving because it wasn’t his jam. So sometimes that happens as well.
The other thing that I’ve seen them do is they do a skill-based curriculum series in a small group. So this is the part where they overlap a lot with school psychologists. I have been in districts where the school psychologists do all of the testing and they never really see kids one-on-one or they never really teach kids skills because they are the testing team. They are, you know, being on call for risk assessments. Like if somebody is suicidal or there’s a threat on the school, those school psychologist will step in and do that role.
And so [00:12:00] sometimes you’ll say, okay, the school psychologist identified this need for, you know, social skills or emotional regulation or something like that. And sometimes they will defer the actual interventions to somebody like a counselor. So that’s why sometimes you will see counselors on an IEP as a surface provider.
But a lot of times they’re not really considered a special education service necessarily. So I think it depends on the state with how they’re qualified. So in, in my districts, they were never on. They were never on an IEP. Um, even though they would get parent permission for this, but even though some of those kids who were supported by the school psychologist, even if they had one-on-one services with the school psychologist,
They could get parent permission to pull these kids into a small group and say, you know, go through it as a certain curriculum. Now, a lot of those curriculums are coming under fire. Because, um, [00:13:00] things like Superflex and things like, zones of regulation is coming under fire from the autistic community of like, wait a minute, like some emotions are good and some emotions are bad, even though, especially with zones, they aren’t supposed to be bad, but I don’t think I’ve had a single child that I’ve worked with Sones with that.
Didn’t assume that. Right. It’s just like how it’s set up that I’ve even though I try to educate the kids and say no, no, no, it’s totally okay. If you’re in blue, if you’re sad, if you’re tired, like that’s okay. and sometimes, you know, it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be in the red zone. And still, they still understand that like impression of social norms. Anyway, I’m getting off a tangent here, but, um, just to let you know, like sometimes they will do some of those more skill-based curriculum series as well.
And sometimes those groups are kids with IEP is, and kids without IEP. Too. So they’re blended together. It doesn’t really matter. [00:14:00] It’s just based on like, who would benefit from this kind of curriculum series and then, you know, they pull in those, or they know of the kids and they’re like, okay, we really need to do this because this is a big need. And so they’ll pull him in.
So a lot of times it makes more sense than an IEP, to be honest, because they are supposed to really be in tune with that population of the school in general and kind of, uh, we’ve really have a need to cover this. Let’s pull in some small groups and kind of do this for nine weeks or however long.
The other thing that I’ve seen them do is they teach like a special they’re in the specials, rotation and specials. If you don’t know that that term is something that is used for like music, physical education, art, and sometimes if there’s a foreign language, then those would be considered a special as well. And so sometimes they’ll have like a fifth one. Sometimes tech is in there too. But sometimes they will push in and do that special where they’re on a rotation. Again, so that they are [00:15:00] familiar face and that they are in front of the kids and getting to know them and really kind of speaking about what they’re specialists in, but also to address things like life skills, as far as like emotions, handling stress, handling relationships, um, it can be something as easy as like, how does say notice somebody without hurting their feelings or how to phrase things. So they’ll do little lessons.
Typically it’s a curriculum that they’re using so that they push into the classroom and they do a specials where they’re teaching about emotions or stress or relationships. And then at least in the districts that I was in the surprising part of their role, that I was totally shocked that they had on their plate.
Was that they were our 5 0 4 coordinators. And so this was really interesting because school counselors aren’t necessarily educated in disabilities as like, you know, an OT would like, I feel like an OT would be a great 5 0 4 coordinator. I feel like a nurse would be a great [00:16:00] 5 0 4
coordinator, um, because we have that breadth of knowledge of like, who does, what and what kind of accommodations are for what disabilities. Like if we see, a disability, we can. Kind of ask really good questions about what kind of support needs they need. Right. But school counselors don’t necessarily have that background.
And so we went through this as a district. This was a big project that they covered and I think they’re still working on it, to be honest. Really educating those school counselors to be capable of being the 5 0 4 coordinators. So a lot of times what they would do is, you know, most of the time they would get the hang of it or the parents would have a good idea of what accommodations they needed or the teachers would have a good idea of what they’re already doing as far as the combinations and what needed to go in.
Um, but sometimes I would get pulled in as the OT, or sometimes they would pull in the school psych or sometimes they would pull in the speech language pathologist because they’re like, [00:17:00] okay, I don’t really know this diagnosis. I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what to suggest. As far as the 5 0 4 plan goes. And so they would have to work really closely with us to kind of bring in our expertise and, and have us be at that 5 0 4 meeting. So.
That was really interesting. That was very, very interesting that it was on their plate. Um, again, if the school counselors were amazing, then it was a no brainer. Like it was totally fine. They were on top of it. You know, they knew the parents. Well, they scheduled an update every year. Um, and they pulled in the professionals that they needed them. But then again, like sometimes when the school counselors were like, I wasn’t taught how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. I feel uncomfortable then. Of course, those 5 0 4 is weren’t
very solid. So that was really surprising. So again, I really hope that that helps direct your questions, especially if you have a 5 0 4 right now, and you’re looking at getting an IEP or maybe you had a five before in the past, or maybe they’re suggesting to [00:18:00] go from an IEP to a 5 0 4. You can ask those questions about like, who is the coordinator? What is their role in the school? Do they know about this particular disability? You know, those kinds of things. Like if that makes you feel comfortable, now you have some context for asking those,
And then hopefully that helps you as well. Know what they do and what they can do. Um, and you can pull them in for support, you know, whether there’s an IEP or not. And you can certainly ask your district that as well. So hopefully that gives you a lot of context. About school counselors and who they overlap with and what they do. Um, that is really the point of doing this IEP team bonus series is to give you some background just really quick about the qualifications and what people actually do.
Inside of the team. So I hope that that was helpful. So, Just a quick reminder before I sign up for today, don’t forget to register for the AP bootcamp. Next week, if you want any help understanding your child’s IEP again, it’s $19. Recordings are [00:19:00] automatically provided. So if you’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t do that over a weekend. I don’t have coverage for my kid. That kind of thing. It’s totally okay. There’s a Facebook group to ask questions.
You will get the recordings as soon as I can upload them after we’re done presenting them live. So that is there for you as well. And then seven more days of support inside that Facebook group afterwards as well. So it’s going to be a lot of fun and I hope you’ll consider joining us. It’s really going to be a great time.
So that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for tuning in, and if you haven’t rated and reviewed the podcast yet, please, please go ahead and do that. That helps me get the podcast in front of more parents that might benefit from this information, as I hope that you have found it helpful as well.
So thank you so much for tuning in this week and I will see you. Same time, same place next week. Thanks so much.