In this episode of College Admissions Decoded, host Eddie Pickett sits down with three NACAC members—Priscilla Grijalva, Candice Mackey, and Stephanie Brazinsky—to explore the critical role of advocacy in education.
In this episode of College Admissions Decoded, host Eddie Pickett sits down with three NACAC members—Priscilla Grijalva, Candice Mackey, and Stephanie Brazinsky—to explore the critical role of advocacy in education. They discuss how counselors can use data-driven strategies to make their impact visible, build meaningful collaborations with administrators and community partners, and advocate for equitable student support at local, state, and national levels. Tune in for practical tools to promote the value of school counseling and insights on shaping the future of education—one student and one policy at a time.
The Power of Advocacy: How School Counselors Can Drive Change in Education
In this episode of College Admissions Decoded, host Eddie Pickett sits down with three NACAC members—Priscilla Grijalva, Candice Mackey, and Stephanie Brazinsky—to explore the critical role of advocacy in education. They discuss how counselors can use data-driven strategies to make their impact visible, build meaningful collaborations with administrators and community partners, and advocate for equitable student support at local, state, and national levels. Tune in for practical tools to promote the value of school counseling and insights on shaping the future of education—one student and one policy at a time.
Guests: Priscilla Grijalva, high school counselor at San Jacinto Leadership Academy, Candice Mackey, College Counselor at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, and Stephanie Brazinsky, High School Counselor at Denver South High School
Moderated by Eddie Pickett, Senior Associate Dean of Admissions and Director of Recruitment at Pomona College.
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Eddie Pickett: Hello and welcome to the College Admissions Decoded podcast, an occasional series from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. NACAC is an association of more than 28, 000 professionals at high schools, colleges, universities, and non-profit organizations, as well as independent counselors who support and advise students and families through the college admission process.
I'm your host, Eddie Pickett, and my pronouns are he, him, his. I'm a longtime NACAC member and former member of the NACAC Board of Directors. In my day job, I'm the Senior Associate Dean of Admissions and Director of Recruitment at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Thanks for joining us. School counselors play a crucial role in shaping academic futures of students, consulting with families, and being change agents in the education system.
In this episode of College Admissions Decoded, we explore how counselors can advocate for their profession and those they serve using data, collaboration, and the ASCA national model. Our guests will share strategies, on how to advocate for the profession at the local, state, and national levels. Listeners will walk away with actionable advice to showcase the vital role the school counselors play in student success and build collaborative relationships with college and postsecondary representatives.
For this episode, we are happy to welcome Priscilla Grijalva, high school counselor at San Jacinto Leadership Academy. Welcome, Priscilla.
Priscilla Grijalva: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on today.
Eddie Pickett: I'm excited to do this with you as well because I've been on the opposite side with Priscilla, so this is going to be fun.
Next, I'd like to introduce Candice Mackey, College Counselor at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, also known as LACES. Welcome, Candice.
Candice Mackey: Hi, everyone. It's great to be here.
Eddie Pickett: And welcome back to the podcast as well, Candice. And finally, we're also joined by Stephanie Brazinsky, High School Counselor at Denver South High School.
Welcome, Stephanie.
Stephanie Brazinsky: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Eddie Pickett: Well, thank you all for joining us today as this is an important conversation around advocacy and education. But thinking that 90 percent of students are educated in public schools and as we continue to see counselor to student ratios rise, the first question I'll throw out is how can counselors communicate the value of their role to school leadership?
Priscilla Grijalva: There's several ways that school counselors can do that, and one of the ways they could do that is having a fall and spring advisory meeting with your community, administrators, your district, and just sharing all the great work you're doing with your students and your community, with your events, and most importantly, sharing your outcome data.
I think that's so important because you want to make sure you align with what you're doing, whatever's going on with your school, and your district because you also can advocate for your job in the same aspect when you do that. Just to give you a quick story, in one of the schools I worked at, we were split, middle school counselors were split, and because of our advocacy, we were able to advocate for more school counselors. And now they have two full time school counselors at every middle school.
You could also share data. You could use Canva or PictureChart, email out data to your staff and administrators to share with your community so they could see all the great work that you're doing.
Eddie Pickett: I think that gets to the why as well. And so like, why is advocacy still so important in this space?
Stephanie Brazinsky: I think advocacy is really important because it impacts our students and their futures. Research shows that students who have direct communication with a counselor and meet with a counselor are more likely to fill out the FAFSA. They're more likely to apply to college. They're more likely to go to college.
So counselor student ratios are important. Very important. The lower the ratios, the better impact that we have on our students. And then more likely it is that we'll be able to impact their ability to apply to college, get into college and afford college.
Eddie Pickett: So we're talking about access. And so, the counselors are often the access spaces to this new knowledge or this information. Would that be correct?
Stephanie Brazinsky: Yes. And I also want to share that in all of our roles are different between the three of us, but in many public schools, like in my case, for example, my role involves social emotional support, academic support, and postsecondary support. Counselors are wearing a lot of hats. We're intervening in crisis. We're doing prevention.
Then we are also advising students about classes and which classes match with what they may want to study. And we're doing postsecondary. And when we have caseloads of over three, four, even 500 students, it's really not possible to do that kind of work with fidelity. So advocating for lower caseloads, not only, I know NACAC we're mostly looking at where college admissions counseling, but everything connects and everything.
So if we are not ensuring that our students are doing well, social, emotionally, and getting those needs met. That makes it more difficult for them to be successful in their classes, more difficult for them to access college. It's all connected.
Eddie Pickett: And Candice, can you jump in and talk about your role and how your role differs from Stephanie's?
Candice Mackey: I am the only college counselor at my school site. We have a population of about 1500 students. We are a title one public magnet school in LAUSD. And so, I exclusively do college counseling. And I feel that it's a privilege to be able to work with an immensely diverse student population, ranging from students that are well resourced to first gen and underserved and under resourced students.
I do have the job and the task of being, again, the only college counselor at my school site. We have about four different other school counselors who do a lot of what, as Stephanie mentioned, where they are doing academic counseling. But also doing the personal, social, and emotional support as well, which is, of course, incredibly important.
As she mentioned, all three of us sort of have similar tasks that we're doing. But of course, the needs at our schools vary and our responsibilities vary. And we know that just within our work advocacy for our role. And the ways that we serve students is incredibly important, no matter what school site that you're at.
Eddie Pickett: And Priscilla, I'll pass that your way as well, because I know you're in a newer school. And so, can you talk about your role, but also how that transitions into this newer school?
Priscilla Grijalva: Yeah. So I'm in a new high school. We have our first graduating class this year. I'm way excited. But our high school students didn't have a full-time high school counselor.
I'm excited. Their freshman sophomore year, they had a school counselor who was split middle and high school. So our kids weren't able to get as much attention as they needed. Yes. I'm the only high school counselor. I have about 380 on my caseload. And if you've ever worked at a new high school. It's a lot to build from the ground up.
You're building traditions, you're building systems, you're building a lot as a school counselor in a new high school. Even think about NCAA. Creating that portal from scratch was over a hundred pages and it took me a long time to do that, but the reason this is so important is because when you have a high school counselor full time, you're able to make an impact.
So just to give you an example, when I came in last year, we looked at data as a team with our administrators and our leadership. And one of the things we noticed was that junior class, who is now seniors, had the highest D grades. They weren't college ready to go to UC or Cal State in the state of California. And what they didn't understand was that if you didn't have a C or higher, you weren't eligible to go to university. They just thought we'll get a D and pass high school. And when we talked with the community, it was the same thing. Their parents are first generation. They didn't know everything they needed to know about college, and the ones that had the highest D’s across the campus were Hispanic and Latino students.
So we wanted to close the gap with those students and we looked at the ASCA national model using the Recognize ASCA model program, which is on the ASCA website if you'd like to check it out. And it shows you how to walk through doing a data summary and closing the gap with your students.
So we created an A through G completion contest. A through G is something you need in California to be eligible for a university. We did individual counseling, I did classroom lessons, small groups, it was a team school wide effect. And we were able to reduce the number of D’s down to almost 10 for this upcoming class.
So most of our kids will be eligible. We still have kids working online to be eligible to go to university. That's just the power of a school counselor in every high school.
Eddie Pickett: You just mentioned the ASCA national model. One, what is ASCA and what is the ASCA national model?
Priscilla Grijalva: So ASCA is the American School Counselor Association.
And if you are a school counselor, I highly recommend you become a member of your professional organization. It's amazing because you get great resources to help you advocate for your role and also you get professional development, so it's important. Like, it's just like doctors, like they're members of their, their professional organizations. Your students want to know you're staying on top of your game and you're a member of your professional organization.
I'm also a member of NACAC, so of course I love NACAC, but basically the ASCA National Model helps you align your standards with your program. So they have mindsets and behavior standards on their website. And when you go into the classes and teach the lessons, you’re showing the teachers and the students like, Hey, we have standards too.
We're not just going in there just because we have standards we follow as a profession. Uh, we also have ethics. We also have professional standards of school counselors that we need to use and abide by. That's so important that we're members of our professional organizations.
Eddie Pickett: Agreed. And it's always good to get help.
And help is needed on lots of different levels, and particularly when you're the only person in your building who's doing that work, it's nice to have a network to be able to lean on. Priscilla, you gave actually a really great example of, you know, a successful advocacy effort. So can I pass it on to Stephanie and then to Candice?
Can you share one of your successful advocacy efforts from your experience?
Stephanie Brazinsky: In my experience, one of the things that we are also challenged with at a big public school is sometimes getting face time with students and getting the chance to get into their classes and be able to like roll out our curriculum.
And one of the ways that I was able to advocate for with my administration to get more time was I volunteered to go into, we have the avid program advancement via individual determination, which is a program that supports first generation students who have the goal of going to college. So I worked with those teachers and went in, and I did some lessons, and then I kept my outcome data as Priscilla spoke about before on how those lessons impacted students in terms of what they understood about the college application process, what they understood about financial aid, and their likelihood to apply to college. And I shared that data with my administrator.
So I said, look at the impact that it makes when I go in and work with students. I'm having this opportunity to go in with the AVID groups, but imagine if counselors could also go in, have more time to go in with all of our students. And so that was impactful because my administrator worked to get us more time in classes with teachers and also in our seminar. We have a seminar once a week. That was a positive example for advocacy for us.
Eddie Pickett: That's excellent. I mean, I went to school with 4,000 people, and I couldn't tell you who my counselor was. I was a little salty about that leaving high school and even in college. And now knowing the student to counselor ratio that was actually over 500 in my school, I understand now.
But at that point, I was definitely a little salty. So I'm glad that you're getting that opportunity.
Stephanie Brazinsky: One thing that we've done that's been really effective in our big public school is, if you do happen to have an advisory or a seminar, what we've done is we've divided our advisories and our seminars by counselor.
So in a specific seminar class, every kid in that class would have me as their counselor. So that makes it easier. So during seminar times, we can just kind of run around to the groups that are assigned to us and say hi to our students and make sure they know who they are. So it's just kind of one more strategy to get our face and name in front of our students.
So our kids do know who we are, and they do know how to find us in a big school.
Eddie Pickett: Excellent. Candice, do you have any examples of some successful advocacy efforts on your end?
Candice Mackey: I'm going to use the example of advocating for our role with the adults and advocating from the aspect of us being able to have more access to professional learning and professional development opportunities.
Oftentimes counselors are just mandated to have to remain on campus, pulled in lots of different directions. And in order for us to be able to continue to stay current and up to date and really coordinate with the trends and really be able to support our students, we have to have ongoing and continuous education training.
And really the space to be able to, I would say, build our network, build our professional networks. What we stand for as school and college counselors, it's important, but our collective voices and relationships are even more significant. And so one thing that has happened at my site and within my district is there was a WACAC conference that was taking place.
And you know, that conference is taking place in Long Beach. I work in Los Angeles. My district is LAUSD. And our district leadership had encouraged all of the counselors. “Oh, you all should go to this conference. It's here. It's local. I encourage you all to go. I would encourage you to apply for a scholarship. I understand that it costs money, but apply for a scholarship, and if your site can't, or if you're not able to get the scholarship, I'm sorry, you're going to have to pay out of pocket.”
So that didn't sit too well with me and some of my other colleagues. And it felt very unfair, and it felt very inequitable. And when we talk about access, when it comes to students, access should also be appropriate for the professionals as well.
And so I am thankful that I was able to have some discussions with our leadership within LAUSD and the individuals who were encouraging us to attend the WACAC conference. And really having discussions around the idea of how can the district better support counselors to allow all counselors to be able to attend this conference, no matter if your school has the budget or not to pay for you. That really shouldn't even be an issue. It should be this is something that is available for all school counselors within our district.
It's local. It's an annual conference. And again being able to really point out all the benefits from that. And so thankfully they listened and lo and behold, all the school counselors were able to go to this conference. We were fully supported by the funding and there was no issues and ever since it hasn't been any issues in that area.
I am going to give props to LAUSD and that leadership for actually listening to what not just myself but other counselors who also spoke up because again, the collective voice is powerful and for them to really be able to understand the value of counselors having the space and prioritizing professional learning and professional development.
Priscilla Grijalva: That's so important. Thanks for sharing that, Candice. I love that.
Eddie Pickett: Well done. To you and to all the other counselors who spoke up for yourselves. That sounds like quite a challenge, but it sounds like you, you know, successfully navigated that. So well done for yourself, but also for your peers who weren't willing or able to speak up at that point too. That sounds like a challenge.
Can Stephanie and Priscilla, can you add some more challenges that counselors see in advocacy space?
Priscilla Grijalva: It really takes a lot of advocacy and informing the community and people at your school and your district, about your role. And also making sure you get the term right. So I'm very fortunate I work in a school district where they call us school counselors.
But one of the things I also do, and also depends on your state, for California it's a little bit easier, but working with our assembly member and congressman and getting to know your senator even is so important. I was able to share data with them on the role of the school counselor, and all that, and when they would go and speak at assembly hearings and stuff, they were actually saying school counselor.
And one year during Women's History Month, for the first time from what I understand, a school counselor was actually recognized on the Assembly for California Women of the Year. That has never happened, and they actually used the term school counselor. When you advocate for your role and let them know, like, hey, this is what we do, here's our data, people are aware. It's not just about your school, it's about everybody on the outside.
Stephanie Brazinsky: I would say also some challenges that come up because not everybody understands our roles is that sometimes a lot of duties and responsibilities are thrown our way that don't really fall under the umbrella of what we do. And that's where the American School Counselor Association comes in and is really helpful. Because on their website, they talk about what are the appropriate duties for a counselor and what is best practice.
And so a lot of times, like my administrator doesn't have a school counseling background. We need to educate our administrator about what is the role of a school counselor. What are the appropriate duties and what are not? And so that, so the model really comes in handy when we face the challenge of being asked to do something like proctoring many hours of AP exams and things of that sort, coming up with solutions.
So instead of just saying to the administrator, it's a problem that I've been asked to proctor this many hours. I might say, it's a problem that I've been asked to do this. And one idea might be to see if any PTSA parents are willing to volunteer and looking at ways that we can also have some solutions as well.
Priscilla Grijalva: And to tie in real quick, Eddie, to tie into what Stephanie said with data, that's so important. I worked in one high school in another district and their FAFSA going rates and California dream act was about 42 percent of the time as before it was a completion requirement. And what I found was a lot of our kids were going to community college, so they were doing their financial aid later.
When AP exams and all that was happening, right? And so school counselors were asked to proctor. We were mandated, but like, they were all doing it. So I went to my administrator with the data and I said, Hey, this is going on. If you keep me back, I'll help kids with FAFSA and California Dream Act and college applications and all that.
If the data goes up will you remove me and others from proctoring? And he said, yes. The data jumped to almost 90 percent that year for FAFSA completion. When you advocate for your role, show them the data. Come up with a solution, as Stephanie says. It's possible. It can happen.
Eddie Pickett: What data points should counselors be tracking to demonstrate their impact, and how can they use this data to demonstrate their impact on student success?
Stephanie Brazinsky: Something that's really important in my district is data that's related to equity and data that's related to closing the gap. And what we do is at the beginning of the year, we set goals. For example, I will set a goal, closing the gap goal, to make sure that my students of color fill out a college application and all of them have their financial aid forms filled out as well.
And so looking at things that relate to equity and closing the gap goals, I think those are high priority ones.
Priscilla Grijalva: Definitely. Also the National Student Clearinghouse Tracker, if you can look at that, you can see where certain groups of students are going, like you can track your athletes and see if they're going on for more education or training, English learners, students with disabilities, students of color, you can track all that on there.
You can also look at the race to submit on the California website to track your financial aid data. And also the federal website for your state data. There's a FAFSA tracker that Bill created from NCAN. He's amazing. If you don't know him, you can Google FAFSA tracker that tracks your state. I also like to look at the data in our student data system through ARIES, which is what we have to look at the DF rate.
And then we have Panorama where we can look at the social emotional to see what's going on with kids. If it's coping skills, whatever they need, we try to go in and do lessons on that. But also maybe doing a survey, like what are the kids need just asking them like, I know the kids love to have fun and we do as staff too, but you have to calendar in that fun.
Candice Mackey: And I would hop in and say also that I think Priscilla, you, you touched on a really good point. Definitely checking in with students and finding out what are their interests and what are their needs. I think students should always be involved in the conversation around data or their voices at least.
But also at my school site, I serve as also the AP coordinator. So there's a wealth of data there where we're really looking at and extrapolating data and seeing how the different student groups are performing, who is being placed and taking AP courses, who successfully passing the courses and as well as the AP exams.
And really this data allows for us to also be able to have further conversations with our school community. As much as we are having conversations within our department with other counselors and our administrators. It's equally important to also have conversations and collaboration with our teachers as well because we're all working towards the same thing to support students.
We're all part of the village here. And so those AP data conversations that we have at the beginning of the school year, and really they're kind of like ongoing. Those have been helpful with seeing who's being missed, who's being served, where are we doing good, and where we need to grow.
Eddie Pickett: I recently heard that, you know, if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an army to educate one. And I liked that point. And so you talk about partnerships and collaboration. What are some effective ways that counselors can collaborate with students, teachers, administrators, and or community partners?
Priscilla Grijalva: Well, there's several ways, like, if you can get on your staff meetings, and even if you just spoke two minutes and shared updates about school counseling, that's one great way.
Also, when you write recommendation letters, if you could do a PD on that with your staff, or even diversity, equity, inclusion with your staff. because a lot of times, like, people want that, they just need someone to help them with it. Just to give you an example, I just learned that at NACAC in this great session on recommendation letters, there's a gender bias calculator where you could put your recommendation letter in it and see, like, if you or anyone on your staff tends to be biased or towards a certain area. You can work on that with your staff.
But I think also making sure that, like Candice was saying, that we get that qualitative data, right? We're talking to our students, our families, our teachers, because they know what's going on in the community. We see stuff, but they also have a different lens.
Stephanie Brazinsky: We also work, collaborate very closely with our administrators and our teachers when we work in our, what's called on track to graduate team and our multi layered, multi-layer of support team, which is basically when we are tracking students and making sure that they're on track to graduate.
And if they are not, we're figuring out what to do. What's going wrong? What interventions do we need and how are we going to support them? If an issue is attendance, then we're working with the administrator who oversees attendance and counselors are also working with school sites and social workers. We are also in collaboration with teachers because when we're making plans for how to do that.
Students can improve. We bring those teachers into that plan so that we can work together and always saying to teachers, okay, this is what I'm doing as a counselor. These are the conversations I'm having with the student. What conversations are you going to have? And what support do you need from me? I think that the collaboration is always ongoing.
And then I also think there is collaboration with parents, like our PTSA, we usually do a presentation for them about what counselors do. And it's amazing because when I give a presentation to the PTSA about what counselors do, the parents are like, “Oh my gosh, you guys have so much on your plate. How can we help?”
And just yesterday we had our college fair and the PTSA brought over food and everything for our college reps, but they want the best for students. So they're also really eager to collaborate, especially if there's parents who have the time to do that.
Eddie Pickett: Yeah, and I work at Pomona College and, you know, we're doing some stuff with our local school districts as well on PD days around recommendations and just helping counselors to be able to write, help counselors teach teachers how to write the recommendations as well.
What are ways that colleges or higher ed can be partnering with school counselors to collaborate and to advocate as well?
Stephanie Brazinsky: I'm glad you asked this question because this is something that I think about a lot and I think that a lot of times like public school counselors and big public schools like us, we don't have always the same opportunity to communicate with admissions directors and people who work in admissions as smaller private schools do or higher socioeconomic schools do.
And I think that I would like admissions directors to think about the admissions process differently. And how it impacts not only big public schools, all public schools that are under resourced. If a school is saying, we want two teacher recommendations plus a counselor recommendation, it's like, okay, do you need all of that?
Or is some of that information redundant? Also thinking about, since I've also worked in an international school with a small population and now a big public school, thinking about the equity of the school counselor recommendation. Because in one school, you have a counselor who has 30 kids that they're only advising for college.
And in another school, you have a counselor advising 400 kids on social, emotional, academic, and postsecondary. One person has opportunity to write this beautiful letter, and another person can barely do it. So, is this an equitable piece of the admissions process? Or should we just say, we only need a statement from the counselor if there's been some kind of extenuating circumstance. Because what I could say very honestly, being a counselor that has a big caseload is if there's a student who's had an extenuating circumstance, I know it and I know it inside out.
But sometimes for my, really high achieving students who float through, I may not know them as well. And when I was younger in my career, I used to kind of beat myself up for that and go to these presentations saying, you should write this beautiful letter. And I would feel like, gosh, I can't do that. There must be something wrong with me.
But now, as a more seasoned counselor, I realized, no, there's not something wrong with me. I'm just a human with over 300 students and a lot of needs to meet. But I still feel like I want my students to have the same opportunity in the admissions process as the counselor down the road who only has thirty.
And so like, I think if on the admission side, somebody would really take the time, talk to public school counselors, and find out how is this process burdening teachers who are overburdened, counselors who are overburdened, and how can we make it so it's a more equitable process. Like, we don't want the process to take away from a teacher's time with a student.
Priscilla Grijalva: That's so true, Stephanie, because it's like, it's a lot. And I think about, like, I try to build all my relationships with the college admission reps and the military reps. And I was just thinking, I was at NACAC, and I go, and I say hi to everyone I know, and then there's new people, you get their cards.
One of the things that's very helpful for me is I've built the relationships over the years with different college reps. If I get their direct number or email at the NACAC college fair or local college fair, I can advocate for a kid. So just to give you an example, there was one college who was requesting a 1300 or something on a SAT score, which we don't even require in California.
But an out of state school was requiring that, and the average score at my school was 1000. And the kid wasn't going to get the scholarship at the school she wanted to go to, but what they didn't understand was my community. So I picked up the phone and I called that college rep, and I explained the situation.
I was like, you can't do this to this kid. But I think that, the relationships are so important. Inviting those college reps to your school, getting to know them, showing appreciation, but they also need to like reach out to us. I just had Cal State Dominguez Hills, Grand Canyon University show up and introduce themselves.
That was so nice, but if they can't come just an email and I know they have a lot of people, it means the world to us.
Eddie Pickett: Yeah, I think that's also when it comes to us as admissions officers to understand that context. Context is key to almost everything we do in our roles on the high school side and on the college side.
I don't believe it's two sides of the desk. I believe we're all at the same table, but we all need to be better partners. I can just give you a quick thing. The best counselor rec I read this year was one paragraph, and it was one bullet point. And here's what you need to know about this kid's life at home.
And it was maybe five sentences. But it gave us the context of what the kid couldn't put in the application. And for those of you who are not writing recs, that is completely fine too. Again, I went to huge public school. Most of us, I can't say all, but our jobs as admissions directors is to be able to teach our staff that K-12 is not equitable.
And if we don't realize that, then you need to actually read a book, do something. So thank you for that point, because I absolutely agree with you, Stephanie. We need to do better on our side, too.
Stephanie Brazinsky: And can I make one other point? One other idea that I had is there's a lot of universities that send like many of their admission staff to either like their local affiliate ACAC conference or to NACAC.
And if a university has it in their budget, like things are going well, and maybe you could think about, okay, is there a title one public school in my region or a public school in my region where the counselor may not ever be able to get funding to go. And maybe it's possible to pay for one more person and reach out to the schools in your area, the public schools around you, because I think it is. I have had the opportunity to, because I served on the board for RMACAC, I have had the opportunity to go, but there's not a lot of opportunities for counselors in public school districts.
Candice talked about before, and I think that if a college or university does happen to have that budget and can support a counselor, that would be like a really great way to collaborate.
Eddie Pickett: And for those of you college folks who don't know where to start, the NACAC conference has a local counselor experience and you can donate towards that and they will now pay for local counselors to actually attend the conference. So if you don't know where to start, that's a place to start as well.
Candice Mackey: One thing that I wanted to point out was I know oftentimes college admissions, counselors and directors, they may do like evening events or a weekend event. And sometimes it's held at a hotel. Sometimes it's hosted by a private school. Sometimes it's hosted by public schools as well. But I think if there was a way where there were more opportunities where these sort of events could be hosted by public schools, where you're reaching more students within that community.
I think that is something that could also be helpful, and I'm going to give you kudos, Eddie, or at least Pomona, because this is something that actually happened at my school site this past spring. It was a collection of five universities, including Pomona being one of them, and they intentionally wanted to reach more kind of public school counselors and public school students.
And so there was an event that was just for school counselors during the day, an informational event. And I was happy to be able to host it at my school site, and it really allowed for some of our counselors within LAUSD to come to this informational session and counselors within the LA area. But I must say, there were other counselors who were also very appreciative.
That it was being hosted at another public school that oftentimes does not happen. Oftentimes these events are happening at hotels or private school and it's nothing wrong with that but it really felt like you all were meeting us rather than us having to come to you. Or you meeting at times what feels to be some of the other students families and counselors who are just in a little a more well-resourced place than what we are. So I appreciate that that took place last year and I would like to see more of that. And I would like to see more of that happening at title one schools as well.
Eddie Pickett: Thank you for the shout out. I appreciate it. And we'll definitely be coming back. So keep an eye out for that. All of our events, we try to host them at public and charter schools.
That's always our goal. And in access spaces that have accessibilities by public transportation. We are also in a pretty privileged space as a college, so we can do that. So I hope more of our peers continue to do that too. Thinking about timing, I know we're needing to wrap up in the near future, but I got two other questions because we haven't really got to the state and where to begin.
And so I'm going to pass this on to Stephanie first. How can new school counselors begin building their advocacy skills and their careers and prepare for conversations with policymakers in the local, to the state, to the national level?
Stephanie Brazinsky: One of the best ways is getting involved with your local affiliate government relations group. I want to first say that I am not at all an expert at this. I was the chair of the government relations committee for RMACAC, but it kind of happened organically. As a counselor, I started to realize that you can know a lot about counseling and put all your best effort into counseling, but if what's happening on the outside is blocking our students, then it's not going to be effective.
And if you run into the roadblock outside that's created by society, it doesn't matter what your skills are as a counselor. And so I got involved with government relations. And I think when you get involved with your local affiliate with government relations, your group will have different initiatives that they're working on.
Then you could start looking. First of all, what is the higher education legislation that's being looked at by my state's legislature? And is there something that I feel like I should advocate for. For example, in Colorado, when I first got into the committee, one of the things they were looking for was for all of the Colorado colleges to become test optional.
And so I joined in and advocated very heavily for that as part of RMACAC. And then I, we also got the members of RMACAC involved to send letters to their representatives. We also had a bill passed to cover the cost of education for students coming through the foster system. There's been many different initiatives. So I think finding out, you can just go online and look at your state's legislative bills and see what legislation is coming. And if you get involved with your local affiliate, that gives you the chance to take action.
The other thing too, is that if there's not any legislation coming up that you particularly want to advocate for, or in some cases against, but there are some issues that you're continuously running into, you can write a letter, email to your state representative or your state senator, because as school counselors, we are the experts about what our students need and what's going on in schools and say, “This is an issue that we're constantly running into. I'd like to talk to you more about this. I'd like to talk about the possibility of legislation being written to address this issue.”
So that's another thing that can be done. Also, if there is a day at the capitol being hosted by either your local ASCA affiliate or your NACAC affiliate, attend. Go. It's really rewarding and empowering to go and talk to your legislators in person.
Every spring, there is a legislation event that happens on the federal level, on the national level, where counselors go down to Washington, D. C., and we also set up meetings with our legislators and our legislative aides. That's an opportunity for us to advocate for the NACAC legislative priorities. One of the most important things among them is doubling the Pell Grant.
Eddie Pickett: Well done. So my last question is, how do you see the future of school counseling and the importance of ongoing advocacy in the field? And there's so many different ways to get involved. And I always say a closed mouth doesn't get fed. That curiosity is also like, hey, I don't know what I don't know.
Candice Mackey: We know that school counseling and just the needs of our students, they're ever changing.
And so I think just in our position, in our role as both school and college counselors, I think it's really important that we recognize our small achievements because that can really pave the way for significant successes. And of course ultimately prioritizing just our validation and visibility, and vocalizing our value can really help ensure that the influence and impact of our work as both school and college counselors extends well beyond the school environment and our school campuses.
Stephanie Brazinsky: I want to be super optimistic about this. One of the things that I think is really important in terms of advocacy is always saying and naming what we need for students, even if the whole world is telling us that's impossible and it's never going to happen, because I think we put it out there like, you know. ASCA says 250 to one for counselor student ratios. I say 150 to one, and I'm just going to put it out there because that's what I think our students need.
And somebody might tell me, oh, that's never going to happen. But think of all of the things that have happened in this world that we never thought would happen. Think about voting rights. Think about LGBTQ marriage rights. There was a time where people thought that those things would never happen. And so change is slow, but I think that we name what our students need. And then we work every day towards that goal and like, not what we think is possible, but what we know is necessary.
Eddie Pickett: I like that. So not what's possible, what's necessary. I'm going to write that one down. That's going on the quote wall.
Priscilla Grijalva: Yes. I think with the future of school counseling, like with equity, like making sure that all of our students, regardless of their background, diversity, making sure they have the mental health resources, college, career. I'm going to write everything that they need with social, emotional, mental health is so important.
With diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, I think, you know, consistently as school counselors being trained in cultural proficiency, that is where the school counselor future is, because we constantly have to check our biases and make sure we're trained on that so that we can help our students.
And the inclusion language as well, like we're, you know, that's constantly changing, making sure that we learn about that, not just at professional development, but also I always teach my students tacos. Always be thankful. A is advocate for you, your profession, and obviously the community. C is celebrate.
Celebrate the small wins for your team and your students. Always be open hearted. S is be sincere. Always be you. Be genuine. I teach my students that because I want them to know with the future of school counseling. They are the next generation. So we have to make sure that we're teaching them how to advocate, but that we're living it.
But I also want to make sure that we work with our administrators because a lot of times when we collaborate with them and they understand the role of the school counselor, we can move forward in our job as far as helping kids. So when we are able to be grateful and make sure we're collaborating with our administrators as well, they are one of the big reasons that we're able to do our job, right. So I have to give a shout out to my administrators at my school. I work at the greatest school in the world. They let me be a school counselor. So thank you to them.
Eddie Pickett: Excellent. And unfortunately, that's all the time that we have today. First, I want to thank Priscilla, Candice, and Stephanie for being here for this excellent conversation.
But most importantly, I want to thank you for the work that you're doing. You are doing life changing work, being a part of the student’s village, and sometimes you're the only person advocating for that student. And so thank you all for the work that you're doing. I wish you well in your roles, and continue to kick butt.
And thanks to you, our audience and friends, for joining for another great episode. College Admissions Decoded is a podcast of NACAC, the National Association for College Admission Counseling. It is produced by Resonate Recordings. If you'd like to learn more about NACAC's mission and the college admissions process, visit our website at www.nacacnet. org. That's N A C A C N E T dot O R G.
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CITATION: National Association for College Admission Counseling. “The Power of Advocacy: How School Counselors Can Drive Change in Education” NACAC College Admissions Decoded, National Association for College Admissions Counseling, October 25, 2024.