ACA's Future School Counselor Award is open to any Masters or PhD (Student ACA members) counseling student who is pursuing a career in school counseling at the elementary, middle or high school level. This is one of four doctoral competitions organized annually by the ACA. This competition was created to recognize student counseling students with exceptional insight and understanding of the school counseling profession and the work of professional school counselors who interact with elementary, middle, or senior high school students. This award is sponsored by the Roland and Dorothy Ross Trust and the American Counseling Association Foundation.
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Future school council: Big prize essay 2021
By Margaret (Maggie) Latta-Milord of North Carolina State University
When students learn from home, educators learn and relearn how they see each student as a whole child. The illusion of simply imagining a student for who they are within the walls of a classroom, their test scores, attendance rates, discipline records, or credentials, disappears. Now that students' home and community experiences are revealed, educators need to consider the networking of learning and wellbeing at home and in school. With the school closure we have had an opportunity to settle accounts, an opportunity to interact with our students in their wholeness, their humanity and always to recognize the effects of community and the environment – eyes open to injustice. When schools reopen, we can and must do so with a focus on justice and human dignity to make schools safer and more welcoming for all students. We can counter this moment by holistically redefining success and placing survival, liberation, resilience and healing above nebulous benchmarks or test results.
We live history. In a sense, we share an experience of trauma and loss with the pandemic: loss of life, absence of familiar connections, missed celebrations and everyday moments, and, for our students, a childhood joy disruption. We lived this together, and each experience is unique. As school counselors, we have a responsibility to think about, mourn and resist the simultaneous pandemic of racism in our country and the way in which experiences of trauma and violence are not evenly distributed. We did not experience these realities together, which were influenced unequally by the weight of racist violence and racist systems.
We know that racism is not limited to an institution or environment. We have seen it play the role of historical foundation and insurgent in our nation's Capitol. Heard it echo as gunfire in sanctuaries. Watched drive ruthlessly and determinedly into a crowd. Much longer than 8 minutes and 46 seconds, his knee was witness to human dignity …
Our students too.
It is imperative that we sit with discomfort and honestly acknowledge the violence of racism in our schools and our educational system. If we believe that school is a great balance, if we adhere to the principles of social justice that we claim in our profession, we must be ready to recognize the history and current realities of inequality and racism and actively fight against racial injustice proceeding and violence.
It looks to me like having conversations with young students about races that were avoided in my own childhood. There are too many avenues into these conversations to choose silence: restorative practices and circles, bibliotherapy and various books, community events and conversations, racial justice training for staff and community, and anti-racist changes in school culture. As a school counselor, I have a responsibility to help students develop social and emotional resilience skills; I also have the mandate to work against racism and its trauma – for a world that does not require this level of resistance from my students.
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Photo by Margaret Latta-Milford of North Carolina State University
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Maggie Latta-Milord of North Carolina State University
Maggie Latta-Milord is an alumni of UNC Chapel Hill and a PhD student at NC State University who is currently having clinical experience in school counseling at Winston Salem / Forsyth County Schools. Her professional background combines public health, community development and gardening education. Her vision as a school counselor is to support young students in building social emotional skills from an early age and to shape school cultures in such a way that they are more conducive to the emotional and learning needs of students with trauma and negative childhood experiences.
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