TPC _Journal-Vol6_Issue_3-MTSS-Full_Issue

The Professional Counselor /Volume 6, Issue 3 282 The school district was awarded the ESSCP grant in 2012. The grant team, comprised of school district leadership, Unique Potential Consulting (UPC), the Ronald H. Fredrickson Center for School Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation (CSCORE), and Sebastian Management oversaw the grant project’s objectives. UPC served as coordinator of the day-to-day operations of the grant project and provided coaching and professional development to the district’s superintendent, elementary school principals and four grant school counselors. By allocating grant resources to this coordinator position, the project had an advocate for transformed school counseling practices who kept grant priorities in focus amidst other district initiatives. As evaluator of the grant, CSCORE collected quantitative and qualitative data to measure project outcomes and provided training in evidence- based practice to school counselors and district administrators. Improving School Counselor-to-Student Ratios The ASCA (2012) National Standards recommend a ratio of one school counselor to every 250 students, though the national average is actually well above these recommendations at nearly 1:500 (Carey & Dimmitt, 2012). Ample research suggests that school counselors have a positive impact on students’ academic, social-emotional and behavioral outcomes (Lapan, Gysbers, & Petroski, 2001; Lapan, Gysbers, & Sun, 1997; Sink & Stroh, 2003; Webb, Brigman, & Campbell, 2005), with further research suggesting that these ratios matter a great deal in a school counseling program’s overall effectiveness (Carrell & Carrell, 2006; Lapan, Whitcomb, & Aleman, 2012). Improving these ratios is especially impactful in high-poverty school districts (Lapan, Gysbers, Stanley, & Pierce, 2012). Prior to the ESSCP grant, the district’s elementary school staff did not include school counselors at all, resulting in very high mental health provider-to-student ratios. Hiring four school counselors at the beginning of the grant period brought the counselor caseload ratios down to 1:369. Because the district experienced economies of hiring, the grant team added a half-time school counselor in the 2013–2014 school year, further reducing the ratio of school counselor to student to 1:340 despite an increase in enrollment. Grant monies continued to fund each of the 4.5 school counseling positions in the subsequent two school years, strengthening the district’s capacity to provide a broad range of services to students and maintain ratios more closely aligned with ASCA recommendations. Office Discipline Referral Data Office discipline referrals (ODR) offer a measure of both individual student behavior and school climate (Clonan, McDougal, Clark, & Davison, 2007; McIntosh, Frank, & Spaulding, 2010) and convey valuable information about students’ social-emotional competencies. A primary requirement of the ESSCP grant was to reduce the number of disciplinary infractions in the district and to demonstrate this improvement through ODR data. The process of determining baseline discipline data revealed great variability in how these incidents were both defined and recorded across different schools. Collecting and using valid discipline data is essential for creating safe schools conducive to teaching and learning (USDOE, 2015), and systematic data collection offers useful information for “understanding and ameliorating individual student and school-wide disruptive behavior problems” (Rusby, Taylor, & Foster, 2007, p. 333). The grant team therefore established new protocols for collecting discipline data in the district’s elementary schools, including creating a standardized ODR form that provided detailed information about the nature and frequency of disciplinary infractions. In addition, the district moved from a paper to an electronic system of recording these data. The revised ODR form included a comprehensive list of disciplinary infractions that teachers considered high incidence behaviors in the elementary schools. The form was divided into three tiers to delineate progressive levels of severity. Level 1 infractions, such as “failure to obey classroom rules/procedures,” were regarded as problematic behaviors to be managed within the classroom.