Abstract:
The publication of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) National Model (2003, 2005, 2012) revolutionized school counseling by offering a foundational blueprint for unification and national support affirming a new vision for school counseling. The ASCA National Model is a developmental, comprehensive, data-driven plan that links school counselors and standards-based education reform to deliver a comprehensive school counseling program. This study utilized a stratified random sample of 159 subjects (53 in each school level) selected to proportionally represent the free-reduced lunch quartiles of Alabama public schools. The research examined the extent of implementation of the ASCA National Model in Alabama public schools across all grade levels - elementary (PreK- Grade 5), middle (Grades 6-8), and high -school (Grades 9-12), as well as data use. Qualtrics software sent electronic surveys, reminders, and analyzed responses of a stratified random sample of Alabama public school counselors. This study was the first in Alabama to use the School Counseling Program Implementation Survey (SCPIS; Elsner & Carey, 2005; Clemens, Carey, & Harrington, 2010) which is endorsed by the Center for School Counseling Research and Evaluation (CSCORE, 2013) of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the National Panel for Evidence-Based School Counseling. This research potentially offered timely evidence to facilitate the ongoing Alabama State Board initiative, Plan 2020, created to prepare all students to be successful in college and/or career upon graduation from high school. Results revealed informative demographic and related information as well as interesting comparisons with ASCA National Standard guidelines. However, the ANOVA procedures and the Kruskal-Wallis nonparametic test did not indicate statistically significant differences in the implementation of the ASCA National Model or data use by the levels of Alabama public school counselors using the three factor SCPIS analysis.
