The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 2 72 Redefining school counselors’ role in terms of mental health would require them to receive more clinical supervision (Lambie et al., 2019). In comparison to counselors in clinical settings, school counselors receive little to no supervision for their clinical efforts, which affects their clinical identity and weakens their counseling skills over time (Lancaster & Reiner, 2022). To address this gap, symbiotic partnerships could be formed with counselor education programs, particularly those that offer doctoral degrees in counselor education and supervision, to provide clinical supervision to local school counselors. Progress in this area may be forthcoming in the state, as institutions of higher education that operate school counseling, school psychology, and school social work programs have been invited to apply for grants funded through COVID-19 relief funding to support student internships in high-need schools. In addition, funds are available to support clinical supervision experiences that extend beyond students’ graduate training programs (Tennessee DOE, 2023). MTSS programs also offer a promising prevention and intervention framework for meeting students’ comprehensive needs, including mental health, and align to both state and national school counseling models (Goodman-Scott et al., 2019). Further, the Tennessee DOE (2018) has developed a resource guide based on a tiered model for supporting students’ differential mental health needs, which school counselors could efficiently implement within their existing MTSS programs. Of note, within the Tennessee model, Tier 1 mental health practices build a foundation for mental wellness for all students. Advanced supports at Tiers 2 and 3 provide students who are at risk because of behavioral and/or mental health concerns with access to small groups and mental health interventions. One dimension of the state’s tiered mental health model is universal screening to identify students with internalizing behavioral disorders. Although few counselors in this study utilized universal screening, we recommend school counselors and their supervisors leverage the preexisting Tennessee DOE guidelines to petition their districts to adopt universal mental health screening. Although the state mandated reduced counselor ratios in 2017 (Policy 5.103.), the funding formula allowed for uneven adoption of this policy (Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury, n.d.), and target ratios fell short of national recommendations (ASCA, 2019). Thus, a function of this research was to utilize results in policy contexts to advocate for ratio realignments. In partnership with the state school counselor association, we produced a one-page results summary, written in simple language, to disseminate to state politicians to illuminate the acuity of mental health issues faced by K–12 students and proposed a solution through increased school counselor access. An advocacy effort led by the state association resulted in proposed legislation TN HB0364/SB0348, which would require one licensed fulltime professional school counselor position for every 250 students and is currently advancing through the state Senate and House committees. A significant takeaway from this study is the importance and potency of coordinated partnerships between researchers, state counseling associations, and school counselors—an alliance that could be replicated in other states by school counselor stakeholders to advocate for the profession. Limitations The generalizability of these findings is limited because of the use of a state-level sample and a non-standardized, self-report survey. First, self-report surveys are sensitive to respondents’ tendency to rate themselves more favorably. Thus, it would be reasonable to conjecture that school counselors overestimated their adherence to the state guideline to spend 80% of their time in service to students and underreported their non-counseling duties. Second, although the items were informed by previous research on the psychological issues faced by children and adolescents during COVID-19 (Ellis et al., 2020; Karaman et al., 2021; Magson et al., 2021) and those factors that affect school counselors’ ability to
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