Some of you wanted more info on setting up a school counselor advisory committee… so here are the nuts and bolts. Creating an advisory council initially seemed like a daunting task, but this year is looking better than last. Honesty time… we created our first formal advisory council last year. Prior to that we would do a presentation at our School Council meeting and count that as our advisory council. We have since been advised to create a committee specifically as it is intended in the ASCA National Model. 🙂 And so we did, and have grown professionally in doing so.
PPT to Guide the First Meeting
For our advisory meetings last year, we only had a very small committee (2 parents showed up… but it worked!). It was a great way to ease in to having an advisory team. Here is the PPT we used for our first meeting which was tweaked from Exploringschoolcounseling.blogspot
Getting Members:
This year, we are planning on using our School Counselor Advisory Team to improve some of our school wide programs. (I am playing around with calling it our SCAT Committee). We asked our administrator to send out an email message to all of our families with a link to the survey below. We have gotten 22 (you read that right) volunteers in sending one message!
Here is a link to a template of the survey form that you can duplicate, tweak and send to your own parent population:
We are excited to expand our Advisory this year and to have them help us with our programs like No Place for Hate Week and our College/Career Week. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes! If you have specific questions or want the agendas and PPT we use at our upcoming meeting, I’ll happily share. Just comment below or contact me.
Hope this is helpful! ~Lisa