Blog 5

When I read the chapter for this week out of the Dollarhide and Saginak’s (2012) textbook, I was pleasantly surprised with all of the different kind of delivery models that the ASCA model has in place.  The one thing that really intrigued me about the delivery models is the prescriptive or nonprescriptive categories of them.  Prescriptive pretty much laid out everything a school and school counselor should know and nothing should be changed by it.  On the other side nonprescriptive models look at what the needs are of the school and its students and creates a program off of that.  My question is why would a school use the prescriptive model?  I think we should always cater to the population that the school resides in because all places are different and the people at these places are also different.  We as a human population are designed and must adapt to any climate or place so they we can survive.  This is another reason why there are different people in the world.  Now I am not saying that having an overall national model is bad, because I think it’s a good idea to have some kind of starting point, but I believe that we as school counselors must look at the population of students that we have and find certain ways to help them based off of their needs.  It is important to keep the prescriptive models, but we should still cater for the population.  What I think is that there should not be a prescriptive or nonprescriptive, but should be a mixture of the two.  The world is not seen in black and white, but it is full of different colors.

            When looking over the Schwallie-Giddis, ter Maat, and Pak (2003) article, made me think of the school counselors from the Philly high schools.  I don’t know if they had the ASCA National model in their schools, but if they did then why were they all let go?  The ASCA Model shows what school counselors do and give the counselors the ideas on what to do to show the community how their programs are doing.  My assumption was that the Philly school districts did not have the ASCA model in their school but if they did I think they could still be working at those schools.  Now, I do not know all the details of the decision of why to let go the school counselor but the ASCA model could have helped if they didn’t have it.

Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K.A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs (2^nd Ed.). New York: Pearson

Schwallie-Giddis, P., ter Maat, M., & Pak, M. (2003). Initiating leadership by introducing and implementing the ASCA National Model. Professional School Counseling, 6, 170-173.