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Today’s school counselors fulfill complex—and sometimes contradictory—roles. More than guiding students toward academic and career success, they’re also frontline responders in identifying and addressing mental health issues. They foster social-emotional development learning programs, and they help prevent potential threats within the school community.
Particularly challenging to their primary function as a safe space for students, they are at times called upon to assist with student discipline.
Managing student wellbeing comes with no small amount of administrative burden. Data entry, progress tracking, internal communication, and case management all take counselors’ time away from their actual role of counseling students.
Thankfully, modern, state-of-the-art technology can help school counselors get back to what matters most: the students.
1. Simplify documentation—while also deepening the data pool
Technology will never replace the human touch in counseling; instead, it augments our ability to care, giving school counselors the ability to do more, intervene earlier, and keep their students safer.
Staff observations of patterns indicating a student needs guidance are often recorded in multiple locations like email, written notes, and hallway conversations—but this means leaving gaps that students may slip through without receiving care.
Instead, it’s important to centralize all these concerns so counselors can have a clear, coherent chronology of a student’s experience. Counselors could intervene much sooner, leveraging their expertise when problems are still manageable. In more serious situations, they could even escalate a concern into an assessment of potential harm to self or others, offering all the relevant information within the same system.
2. Assessing threats of harm to self or others
Integrating behavioral threat assessments—like NTAC or CSTAG—and suicide risk assessments—like Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale or Suicide Assessment 5-step Evaluation/Triage—with the above centralized platform streamlines the assessment process. Reducing the time spent collecting documentation and coordinating the intervention team generates more time for what truly matters: connecting with and supporting their students.
And, critically, by consistently applying assessment methods and simplifying information sharing with approved parties such as school administrators and local agencies, schools can have quicker, more effective responses to threats.
3. Case Management
Once a concern has been identified and assessed, it’s essential to track its resolution effectively. Integrating a case management feature within this platform empowers school counselors with alert automation, saving time as the appropriate personnel are notified when a student needs help staying on a positive path.
With an intuitive case management system, counselors can monitor the progress of interventions over time, ensuring that individuals are receiving the appropriate level of support. Such a tool would reduce the administrative burden on counselors, allowing them to focus more of their time and energy on the students themselves.
Using software that brings together all the systems can help schools recognize, document, support, and manage the wellbeing of individual students could significantly enhance the effectiveness of school counseling.
Data Privacy and Security in School Counseling Technology
Schools collect and store a variety of sensitive information and trust vendors to secure their data and protect their privacy. With breaches and ransomware on the rise, it’s no secret that a platform such as this would need data security.
An important part of software’s role in school counseling is protecting student information. Completing the System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2® Type 1 examination—a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations specifying how organizations should manage customer data—in the privacy and security categories is critical.
Modern tools for modern school counseling
Counselors play such a pivotal role in our students’ lives—supporting them with available technology can only serve to significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of counselors’ work.
For more insight into building a culture of support in schools, read Congressional Medal of Honor Citizen Honors recipient Molly Hudgens’s blog here.
Related Resources
Guide to K-12 Student Wellbeing
Strategies to Recognize, Document, and Support Students in Distress
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