Testimony of UFT Vice President for Middle Schools Richard Mantell before the New York City Council Committee on Education

Good afternoon, Chairman Dromm and the members of the Education Committee. My name is Richard Mantell, and I am the vice president for middle schools for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). On behalf of our union’s more than 200,000 members, I want to thank you for this opportunity to offer testimony on deepening our collective understanding about the essential role played by guidance counselors in our schools and the importance of expanding and delivering comprehensive college and career programs in our public schools. 

First, we would like to acknowledge the New York City Council for being one of the most powerful voices in articulating the critical contribution that guidance counselors make in ensuring our high school students graduate ready for college and careers. Our students benefit from your oversight over the agencies responsible for their education and well-being.

Our Children Deserve the Full Complement of Guidance Services

As we’ve stressed in our testimony before this body on issues ranging from school safety to the alarming increase in our student population without permanent shelter, we need more guidance counselors in our public schools.  Over the course of the last decade, we’ve witnessed the ranks of our counselor members grow smaller while their caseloads and the scope of their accountability have expanded. As documented in former City Comptroller John Liu’s 2012 analysis of the state of guidance in our high schools, “More than 50 percent of students have a student-to-counselor ratio greater than 250:1.”¹ Included in that statistic are schools where there is only one guidance counselor serving a student population numbering 600, 800 or even 1,000 students. Our children deserve better than that.

We commend the new administration and especially Chancellor Carmen Fariña for her leadership and for the educator’s perspective that she has brought to the Department of Education.  Her decision to hire 250 new counselors before the start of the current school year is certainly a step in the right direction. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t urge the City Council to press for the hiring of even more guidance counselors, as well as social workers and school psychologists, so we can serve the needs of every student.

Guidance counselors, in particular, have become the one-man-bands in our city’s schools. They’re charged with ministering to the social-emotional and academic needs of our students in addition to advising them about college and increasingly handling disciplinary issues. Prior to the many years of education budget cuts, there were dedicated counselors for college advising while deans and administrators handled the disciplinary process. Deans and administrators would, then, turn to guidance counselors to delve deeper into the root causes underlying the problem behavior and offer coping skills for students. The replacement of many large high schools with smaller co-located schools in the same building also contributed to counselors being stretched thin.

High school guidance counselors and other school-based support team members need manageable caseloads so that they can ensure that students are accumulating the credits needed to graduate. Guidance counselors play a pivotal role in helping students select the proper courses and stay on track to graduate with all the requisite credits. They also need manageable caseloads so that they may help prepare students for post-secondary studies. Counselors need to dedicate real time to determining whether students are connecting with the colleges, technical schools, apprenticeships or entry-level work opportunities that align with their career goals. Whether it’s helping their students to secure and complete college applications or choose the appropriate work-based learning opportunity, counselors need more time to provide in-depth advising.

Guidance counselors also face physical constraints in doing their work when several schools are co-located in the same building or when schools pack in more students than their building capacity. Because of these space limitations, many counselors don’t have the proper space to provide private counseling, have confidential conversations with students or meet privately with groups of students.

Another obstacle is the lack of appropriate technology in schools. As our guidance chapter leader, Rosemarie Thompson, has observed, everything is now online. But schools frequently don’t have the computers, Internet bandwidth, printers or programs that would allow counselors to help students complete their online college applications from a school computer.

We Support Int. 403

We thank Councilmember Reynoso and the other bill sponsors for proposing Int. 403. We support its passage into law. It is both prudent and fosters transparency to require the DOE to give a regular and thorough account of which schools have full-time assigned counselors, the number of cases and the nature and scope of issues that counselors are handling together with recruitment data and the utilization of counselors in the Absent Teacher Reserve. While we understand the City Council’s delineation of grades seven through 12 as its reporting universe, we strongly believe that all elementary schools also need a full complement of guidance counselors, social workers and school psychologists.

Today’s focus on reporting gives us the opportunity to bring greater scrutiny to the complex web of reporting mechanisms that our counselors currently engage in. State education law requires that counselors report suspected or confirmed child abuse, bullying behaviors, suicidal ideations and anything that a parent may reveal that would have consequences for the child’s learning in the school. Counselors make entries in a number of electronic systems that capture their interactions with students and their issues. For instance, there are the Special Education Student Information System (SESIS) and the Online Occurrence Reporting System (OORS). Then there are the Automate the Schools (ATS) system, which houses personal information on all students including attendance,and a separate Intervention Log (iLOG)used to log student interventions.

Some additional reports must go to outside agencies such as the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and the New York State Education Department. Plus, conversations with the principal, a student’s teacher and other colleagues must also be entered into the student file. Given the high caseloads we mentioned earlier, all this data entry is daunting and often duplicative. We’ve made progress in our conversations with the DOE on the paperwork issue and have managed to introduce a number of reductions intended to free up counselors’ time to focus on serving children.

In that context, it is essential that any future implementation of Int. 403 be managed from the central DOE, which currently receives all of the data called for in the legislation. We cannot allow a situation to develop where the central DOE delegates this new mandated reporting to counselors and burdens them with yet moredata and paperwork demands.

Comprehensive College Preparedness is Overdue – But We Must Include Career-Ready

Comprehensive college preparation does not and cannot commence when students enter high school. As educators of our earliest learners through elementary and secondary schools, we firmly believe in creating the vision for college and career success early.While most counselors wish they could put more attention on academics and college-readiness, in reality, due to caseloads and more immediate needs, many counselors spend the bulk of their time addressing the social-emotional and disciplinary needs of their students. Smaller caseloads and more counselors would help. In addition, with the exception ofcareer and technical education programs, many schools sponsor only a one-shot career day each year. But what comes after career day to help kids open their minds?

We fully support recommendations to expand access to college counseling and college-prep programs geared toward increasing college enrollment, especially for first-generation black and Latino students. We likewise would welcome the opportunity to inform the public about available school supports for high school students, a move that would result in greater transparency.

To be truly college-ready, students must acquire the skills and fundamental knowledge to properly tackle college-level work, including problem-solving and critical thinking. Students should be able to research a topic, synthesize the material, weigh facts, draw their own conclusions and document how they did the work. But again, the groundwork to teach those skills must be laid before the high school grades.

Our union wholeheartedly supports the Carpe Diem program and the Teacher Leadership Quality Program, both run by CUNY’s Office of Collaborative Precollege Programs. Carpe Diem helps students at some of our career and technical education high schools discover and pursue career pathways in booming business sectors. The Teacher Leadership Quality Program helps educators improve their skills and provide students with real-world environments right in their classrooms.

The UFT has lobbied for College Now, a collaborative program run by CUNY that served over 20,000 students in 390 high schools in 2012, the latest figures available. The program is free for students, who enroll in basic skills courses and college credit classes either before school, after school or on weekends. Over 50 percent of the participating College Now students who graduated high school in 2010 and went on to college attended CUNY. What’s more, research has shown that College Now participants accumulate more credits in their first year at CUNY and have better retention rates.

We continually emphasize the importance of public/private partnerships that bring outside resources into our school buildings and expose students to new technologies and careers. It’s at the core of our advocacy for Community Learning Schools, where partnerships are leveraged to serve the holistic needs of the entire school community – students, families and the surrounding community. We urge the expansion of all the above-mentioned programs.

Through Collaboration, Our Guidance Goals Are Eminently Achievable

Despite the challenges, we remain optimistic. Several moves by the new administration demonstrate a real understanding of what it will take to ensure well-rounded college- and career-ready graduates who are poised for lifetime success. To her credit, Chancellor Fariña reestablished the Division of Teaching and Learning and has established a new DOE Office of Guidance and School Counseling. The de Blasio administration has spearheaded important initiatives to fund and expand full-day universal pre-K and community schools. Since it took office, the new administration has worked closely with the UFT and our members to move our school system forward.

If we continue to operate in an environment of mutual respect where our members have a real voice, we believe that we will be able to take the steps necessary to ensure that our students’ counseling needs and college and career-readiness goals are met.

I would like to conclude with First Lady Michelle Obama’s remarks to counselors at the American School Counselor Association’s national conference this past summer:

You’re the ones planting the seeds about college as early as elementary school and middle school, making it clear that higher education is the expectation, not the exception. You’re the ones grabbing kids in the hallway to tell them to sign up for that right college prep program, to check out that website for professional training opportunities, to convince them that they belong in that AP class and then to call the teacher to make sure it happens. And when push comes to shove, you’re the ones helping our students meet those deadlines, and write those essays, and untangle those financial aid forms.²

Thank you for your time and consideration.

¹The Power of Guidance:Giving High School Students the College Counseling They Need, 2012, Office of the New York City Comptroller, John Liu.

²Remarks before the American School Counselor Association Annual Conference on July 1, 2014 in Orlando, Florida, Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States.