DIGEST - Volume 9, Issue 2

7 TPC Digest A ccording to the American School Counseling Association (ASCA), professional school counselors are expected to develop and evaluate a comprehensive developmental school counseling program that addresses the academic, social, emotional, and career needs of students they serve. As such, counselor educators prepare school counseling students for activities consistent with ASCA’s National Model. However, many school administrators assigning their day-to-day activities do not understand the appropriate school counseling role. As a result, administrators may assign school counselors non-counseling duties like overseeing mandated testing, substitute teaching, developing a master schedule, and providing discipline for students with behavioral problems. In fact, many school counselors not only experience conflicts between their perception of their role and that of the building administrator, but also conflicting demands from teachers, parents, and students who also do not understand what a school counselor’s role is. Therefore, school counselors may believe they cannot conduct needs-based programming due to little control over how their time is spent and low levels of supervisory or colleague support for conducting appropriate duties. Several studies indicate these non-counseling duties may contribute to school counselor’s developing job stress and burnout. When school counselors have high levels of chronic job stress and burnout, those experiences can result in negative effects on the students and schools they serve. Therefore, identifying those variables most likely to contribute to school counselor burnout (SCBO) is crucial for counselor educators’ and supervisors’ development of prevention, monitoring, and early intervention protocols. With this end in mind, our study is the next in a series of research projects we are pursuing to systematically evaluate variables potentially related to SCBO in order to develop a model of SCBO in the future. These variables include role ambiguity, role conflict, assignment of non-counseling duties, coworker and supervisor support, and level of control over time and task. We measured these variables with the Demand Control Support Questionnaire (DCSQ). We used a correlation matrix to examine the subscales of the DCSQ against the subscales of the Counselor Burnout Inventory (CBI) and found that when school counselors experience high external demands, such as assignment of non-counseling duties, perception of the school as a negative place to work, and low levels of support from colleagues and supervisors, they have higher levels of exhaustion and burnout. Although this is a solid step toward a better understanding of this phenomenon, these variables need further exploration using a hierarchical multiple regression to analyze the amount of variance they contribute to SCBO. The article includes a discussion of ethical concerns, future research, and practice implications for school counselor educators, supervisors, educational administrators, and school counselors. Leigh Falls Holman is an assistant professor at the University of Memphis. Judith Nelson is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University. Richard Watts is a Distinguished Professor of Counseling at Sam Houston State University. Correspondence can be addressed to Leigh Falls Holman, CEPR, 100 Ball Hall Walker Ave., Memphis, TN 38152, lfalls@memphis.edu. Organizational Variables Contributing to School Counselor Burnout Leigh Falls Holman, Judith Nelson, Richard Watts An Opportunity for Leadership, Advocacy, Collaboration, and Systemic Change |