Blog 11

Of the three ethical dilemmas that I had the biggest problems with, the first came from Romley’s quiz (2012). The second ethical dilemma, in which an elementary school counselor was declining the subpoena to share their records regarding the child, was confusing and scary to me. If we had not discussed this in class last night, I could envision myself in the same situation refusing to share my notes because I wanted to protect confidentiality. However, I now know that this counselor was acting unethically for their position within the school and the child’s life because they must share their records about the child that outline the sessions without going into too much personal detail (that information is kept in your private records, which you don’t have to show).

            The second ethical dilemma I had an issue with was the very next situation in Romley’s (2012) quiz. My first problem is that I know I am confident enough in my decisions, both professional and personal, to not got along with the crowd when my gut instinct is telling me to do something. In that same vein, it seems to me that in our discussions on ethics it is generally taught that, while legal issues should be considered, a gut instinct on how to treat a student in an ethically questionable case should be even more strongly considered. So in this situation, I would hope that I, as the counselor, would feel comfortable asking my colleagues for assistance but still take the safety precautions to have this student’s best interest in mind.

            The third ethical dilemma that I spent some extra time considering came from Froeschle and Crews’s (2010) ethics challenge. The very first scenario really rubbed me the wrong way because of all the time we have spent in class discussing the relationship between the counselor and the principal in a given school setting. It is scary to me that a principal would even dream of not letting a counselor out of a meeting in order to help a student in potentially life-threatening crisis. In every interview or shadowing experience I have had the counselor tells me that her day consists of a number of scheduled things, but they always include the caveat that when a student is in crisis, they drop everything in order to attend to that student because it becomes the most important issue in the school at that moment.

            These ethics quizzes relate to Dollarhide and Saginak’s (2012) vignette at the beginning of chapter three because I believe if Jason had put himself into these situations during his graduate career, he may not be so caught off guard when his daily schedule gets uprooted by a student wanting to talk to him about something serious.

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

Froeschle & Crews, (2010). An ethics challenge for school counselors, p. 1-25.

Romley (2012). An ethics quiz for school counselors.