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Upon completion of a Master of Education in School Counseling, I wish to be employed as a school counselor in a suburban public high school .

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Exploration Option 2- American Counseling Association (ACA) Legal and Ethical Issues

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Exploration Option 2- American Counseling Association (ACA) Legal and Ethical Issues

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The American Counseling Association (ACA) is dedicated to all types of counselors, from agency counselors to those who have a private practice. The government affairs section of this site contains a multitude of articles and legislation that affects the entire counseling community. One article, written by The Washington Post, discusses President Trump's decision to eliminate funding for the Student Support and Academic Enrichments (SSAE) grant program, which covers school based mental health initiatives, school counseling programs, and drug and violence prevention (ACA, 2018).

Another article discusses the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which makes up for the short comings of No Child Left Behind. This act is a victory for school counselors because it supports all students in having the opportunity to receive a quality education. It forces states to work diligently in closing the achievement gaps of overlooked students by tailoring education to fit the needs of the students (ACA, 2018).

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Exploration Option 2- American School Counselor Association (ASCA) Legal and Ethical Issues

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Exploration Option 2- American School Counselor Association (ASCA) Legal and Ethical Issues

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As I reviewed the legislative affairs section of the ASCA website, I was immediately informed of the newest educational law (Perkins V) going into effect on July 1st, 2019. This law will require needs assessments, professional development, career exploration opportunities, and student skill building and implementation to strengthen the Career and Technical Education programs in middle, secondary and post-secondary institutions. Although this law pertains to education in general, the ASCA website highlighted important implications necessary for school counselors to know (ASCA, 2018).

Furthermore, the ASCA provided information for future legislation, such as A Framework for Safe and Successful Schools, that calls on the government to execute school safety policies to help protect the mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being of students, thus optimizing learning and achievement (ASCA, 2018).

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Legislative Affairs | American School Counselor Association (ASCA)

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This article delves into existing sexual assault policies at colleges and universities across the nation. It debates a call for change in legal proceedings that will allow the accused to question the accuser in sexual assault trials. Supporters of this change say that it will allow for the accuser's right to due process, protesters opine that universities could face expensive lawsuits if this new policy fails to result in a fair trial (Black, 2018).

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Dive Brief:

A federal judge instructed the University of Michigan to ignore its policies for investigating sexual assault and instead hold a live hearing so that a student accused of rape can question his accuser, Inside Higher Ed reports. The outcome of the hearing could have national implications on an emerging pattern of case law suggesting that those accused of sexual violence have the right to question the evidence against them.

The Michigan male student accused of sexual assault sued the university in June, alleging that its sexual assault policies deprived him of his right to due process. The student was accused of rape in April after a sexual encounter the previous November he claims was consensual. It has not been determined whether or not he committed an assault.

The ruling does not mean that the accused student will directly ask his accuser questions; rather, the accused will be given the opportunity to challenge the accuser's claims.

Dive Insight:

Colleges and universities may have to change how they handle campus sexual assault hearings in light of the federal judge's instructions to the University of Michigan to hold a live hearing so that a student accused of rape can question his accuser. A common practice at some institutions is to hire a single official, either someone who works at the university or someone from the outside, who interviews the accused and accuser to decide if a sexual assault occurred. The challenge with this model is that sometimes neither person can question the other. David A. Russcol, a lawyer who specializes in Title IX, warns that institutions lose control when using live hearings because the outcome of the case is determined by a panel of students or staff members, rather than an investigator they chose.

In 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was committed to replacing what she called a failed system of campus sexual assault enforcement in an effort to ensure fairness for the victim and the accused. DeVos wants to rescind previous Obama administration guidance around using Title IX as a way to deny the right to due process to those accused of rape.

Sexual harassment cases can be costly with institutions to settle. Twenty two universities and university systems paid $10.5 million to settle sexual harassment claims in 59 cases in 2016 and 2017. The settlements involving students, staff and faculty members came about when institutions failed to respond to allegations in a proper manner, or they did not punish the accused appropriately.

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Should those accused of sexual harassment be allowed to question their accusers?

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A federal judge instructed the University of Michigan to ignore its policies for investigating sexual assault and instead hold a live hearing so that a student accused of rape can question his accuser, Inside Higher Ed reports.

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Exploration Option 3- Inside Higher Education

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Exploration Option 3- Inside Higher Education

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A new NCAA rule, going into effect next year, is requiring Division I colleges and universities, under specific conditions, to pay for former basketball players' degrees upon returning to the same institutions they left. Costs and figures have yet to be calculated, but this rule is considered to be a positive movement in efforts to provide athletes an opportunity to finish their degrees, when, in reality, it would be impossible without this funding (Bauer-Wolf, 2018).

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The National Collegiate Athletic Association has made a new promise to Division I basketball players: under certain conditions, if a player leaves and returns to the same university, the institution must pay for the player's degree and other expenses.

Though this appears to be a positive shift in the package of reforms that the NCAA announced last week in the wake of an alleged kickback scheme in men's basketball, the association could not immediately confirm how many athletes might take advantage of the new rule -- or how much it will cost institutions. A few prominent programs and athletic conferences have already started complying, even though it doesn't take effect until next year.

"To some extent it constitutes an acknowledgment that the previous system was deficient" in assuring players an education, said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist and professor at Smith College. He said the move was "a good step."

Under the new rule, effective August 2019, Division I colleges and universities must pay for tuition, fees and books for basketball players, both men and women, who leave an institution and come back within a decade. Players must have been on scholarship and enrolled at the institution for at least two years and must have "exhausted all other funding options" to be eligible, the NCAA said. They must also meet all NCAA academic requirements.

An NCAA spokeswoman, Meghan Durham, said the association doesn't know how many athletes might use the program, but in the past 14 years more than 1,300 Division I men's basketball players have come back to finish their degrees.

The NCAA will establish a fund for "limited resource" institutions to help pay the new expenses. "Limited resource" status is based on funding in an athletics department, other institutional expenditures and Pell Grant aid. Durham also didn't immediately respond to a question about how much money the NCAA would dedicate to the new fund.

Many of the policy changes the NCAA approved elicited scorn for being too small to be of any significance, and this one was no exception: Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College and a sports law specialist, said that while the association can tout the new rule as major, in reality it will rarely be invoked. While the NCAA's announcement said the change does not specifically apply to players who turn professional, Edelman said most athletes who do turn professional before finishing their degrees are unlikely to ever return to college.

"The NCAA is doing the absolute minimum possible to spin public relations in a positive light," Edelman said. "And this means coming up with measures that still do not allow athletes financial freedom or more sincerely allow them to balance their time."

Over the years, several institutions and athletics conferences have announced that they would honor "lifetime" scholarships for athletes. The University of Maryland College Park was the first do so, shortly after joining the prominent Big Ten Conference in 2014. Previously, Maryland athletes were offered a single-year scholarship subject to renewal every year -- the "lifetime" scholarship also covered books and fees in addition to tuition for any athlete who left in good academic standing. At the time, former athletics director Kevin Anderson said the program wouldn't "cost in the millions of dollars."

Both the University of South Carolina and Indiana University offer similar "lifetime" deals.

"I think all schools should find a way to provide this opportunity for student athletes in all sports," said Kenneth Shropshire, chief executive of the Global Sport Institute at Arizona State University.

Dave Ridpath, president of the ethics watchdog organization the Drake Group, agreed. He believes that all athletes' scholarships should last a lifetime so they can come back and complete their degree anytime.

"I have always said we should not care when they get an education, just that they have an opportunity for a viable one," Ridpath said. "A lifetime scholarship is a much better way to ensure access to a real education ... It is fine that an athlete wants to focus on athletic utility when it can be maximized. However, that ends, and these kids who were used for institutional advancement, marketing, enrollment management, etc., should be given that opportunity without restrictions."

The NCAA also offers some help for Division I athletes who can't complete their degrees within five years -- called, aptly, the Degree Completion Award Program. Since 1989, the program has given out more than $30 million, according to the NCAA. Athletes must be within 30 semester hours of graduating to be eligible.

This new program and fund from the NCAA will especially benefit those institutions with fewer resources, said Josephine R. Potuto, former member of the NCAA Division I infractions committee and Richard H. Larson Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Any fund that applies to NCAA institutions across the board is in essence a subsidy to those less wealthy institutions, Potuto said. This is because most NCAA revenue comes from the men's basketball championship, which is generally dominated by institutions in the Football Bowl Subdivision and the Power 5 Conferences, she said.

"I think the new NCAA rule is more an acknowledgment ... that some student athletes are in school primarily as a way to get a pro career, whether that goal is realistic or not, and a statement that schools owe them an opportunity for a degree if the pro career falls through," Potuto said.

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Under new NCAA rule, basketball players will have expenses covered if they leave, return to college

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The National Collegiate Athletic Association has made a new promise to Division I basketball players: under certain conditions, if a player leaves and returns to the same university, the institution must pay for the player's degree and other expenses.

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The Legal and Ethical Issue Most Important to Me

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The Legal and Ethical Issue Most Important to Me

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After reviewing a lot of current legal and ethical issues in education, I am most interested in the call for change of sexual assault policies at the university level.
I am a proponent of an individual's right to due process and a fair trial, but I do not want to see victims suffer more defeat and loss because a live hearing with a panel of students or faculty members, instead of a chosen investigator, and the right of the accused to question the evidence against him or her, render an unfair trial and justice is not served.

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Researching Sexual Assault Policy Changes in Higher Education

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Researching Sexual Assault Policy Changes in Higher Education

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When researching the current government administration's proposed changes to sexual assault policies at colleges and universities, the article entitled "Colleges Should Change How They Handle Sexual Assault," published in The Washington Post, outlined the specific alterations and reasoning behind the call for change.

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Lara Bazelon is an associate professor and director of the criminal-justice clinics at the University of San Francisco School of Law. John Villasenor is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor of public policy and engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, and a visiting professor at the UCLA School of Law.

This month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos signaled that her department will likely revise an Obama administration policy on how colleges and universities handle campus sexual assaults.

DeVos, who observed that "a system without due process ultimately serves no one in the end," is right to address this topic. And she has her work cut out for her. The rhetoric that dominates the debate often obscures the notion of ensuring fundamental fairness - to both sides - when adjudicating a sexual assault accusation.

The Obama administration's Title IX policy, established in 2011 through a letter issued by the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, came on the heels of reports that colleges and universities were giving sexual assault accusations insufficient attention - or ignoring them altogether. The policy requires all colleges and universities that receive federal funding to convene investigative proceedings to adjudicate allegations of sexual violence and sexual harassment made by students.

It is vitally important to provide justice to sexual assault survivors, but in pursuing that goal, the Obama administration's policy has created extraordinary risks for the subset of accused students who are innocent. Under the 2011 policy, accusations must be evaluated not under the "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof used in criminal courts, but instead under the much lower "preponderance of the evidence" standard, which requires a finding against the accused if the probability of guilt is more than 50 percent. This means that, even if the tribunal reviewing the evidence concludes there is a 49 percent chance that accused students - the overwhelming majority of whom are male - did not engage in the alleged conduct, the accused will nonetheless be found responsible and, in some cases, expelled.

In addition to the low standard of proof, the 2011 policy contains fundamental flaws of due process. It recommends, but does not require, the availability of an appeals process, and it imposes no requirement that appeals be heard by an independent entity. As a result, many campuses manage appeals through the same office that oversaw the initial proceeding, creating a bias in favor of affirming the original finding.

The current approach also fails to guarantee the accused access to a hearing, a right to review evidence against him or the right to ask questions through a lawyer or other appropriately qualified representative. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to the kinds of sham proceedings that have attracted national headlines in recent years.

Actions at the federal level alone may not be enough to address the flaws in this policy. Supporters of the current framework are already devising plans at the state level to compensate for a potential federal rollback. In California, for example, state legislators have drafted legislation that would, in effect, turn the 2011 federal policy into a state law.

This would be a mistake. If accusations of sexual violence are indeed to continue to be adjudicated by on-campus tribunals - and we note that the criminal courts are in many ways much better equipped than campus administrators to manage trials regarding acts that constitute violent felonies - then the 2011 policy requires a major overhaul.

Probability models show that low standards of proof risk unacceptable results: If the "preponderance of the evidence" standard were used in the regular criminal-justice system, innocent defendants would face a chance of false conviction as high as 33 percent. There is no reason to believe the error rate is less in an on-campus proceeding; indeed, given that an accused student has far fewer protections than a criminal defendant, it is likely to be higher.

A higher burden of proof is necessary, and so are more robust procedures to ensure that proceedings are fair, balanced and transparent. Using a standard of "clear and convincing evidence" - a standard less stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt" but more stringent than "preponderance of the evidence" - would help reduce (though certainly not eliminate) risk to wrongly accused students.

Due process must be the core component of any campus adjudicatory system. Otherwise, on-campus sexual assault proceedings will continue to be rightly challenged as lacking in fairness and legitimacy.

Read more:

The Post's View: Myths about sexual assault on campus from the Department of Education

Mili Mitra: What Betsy DeVos doesn't understand about Title IX and campus sexual assault

Cleta Mitchell and Trent Lott: Rethinking how we deal with campus sexual assault

The Post's View: A college's willful blindness to a sexual assault scandal

George F. Will: Due process is still being kicked off campus

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Opinion | Colleges should change how they handle sexual assault

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Lara Bazelon is an associate professor and director of the criminal-justice clinics at the University of San Francisco School of Law. John Villasenor is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor of public policy and engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, and a visiting professor at the UCLA School of Law.

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American Counseling Association. (2018). Government affairs: Recent updates. Retrieved from https://www.counseling.org/government-affairs/recent-updates

American School Counselor    Association. (2018). Legislative affairs. Retrieved from https://www.schoolcounselor.org/school-counselors-members/legislative-affairs

Bauer-Wolf, J. (2018). Having their backs once they return. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www. insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/16/ under-new-ncaa-rule-basketball-players-will-have-expenses-covered-if-they-leave

Bazelon, L., & Villasenor, J. (2017). Colleges should change how they handle sexual assault. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/colleges-should-change-how-they-handle-sexual-assault/2017/07/27/8fbf9fde-721d-11e7-9eac-d56bd5568db8_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.24cfea856035

Black, H. (2018). Should those accused of sexual harassment be allowed to question their accusers? Education Dive. Retrieved from https://www.   educationdive.com/news/should-those-accused-of-sexual-harassment-be-allowed-to-question-their-accuser/529576

Holland, K., & Cortina, L. (2017). 'It happens to girls all the time:' Examining sexual assault survivors' reasons for not using campus supports. American Journal of Community Psychology, 59(1/2), p. 50-64. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12126

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What I Learned About Sexual Assault in Higher Education

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What I Learned About Sexual Assault in Higher Education

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Around 20-25% of women experience sexual assault in college, which has led to the creation of institutional and federal policies and supports to address this issue. Sexual Assault Centers (SACs), The Title IX Office, and Resident Assistants (RAs) are available and responsible for sexual assault victims. Although these on campus support systems exist, very few students utilize them, due to various reasons (Holland & Cortina, 2017).

"'It Happens to Girls All the Time:' Examining Sexual Assault Survivors' Reasons for Not Using Campus Supports" details six reasons why female victims of sexual assault refuse to utilize campus supports. These arguments include: availability, affordability, accessibility, acceptability, appropriateness, and alternative coping. Most sexual assault survivors fail to report these crimes due to feelings of shame and embarrassment, negative ideas that no one will believe them or do anything about it, the fear of something bad happening to them by the accused, and/or the belief that the assault was not bad enough to press criminal charges or pursue a trial (Holland & Cortina, 2017).

Although only 5.3% of female sexual assault survivors file form grievances through their universities, the current institutional policies seem to be lacking in fairness to both parties. Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, is pushing for higher learning institutions to change the basis for conviction from "preponderance of the evidence" to proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." Currently, university policies do not require the availability of an appeals process nor guarantee the accused access to a hearing, right to review the evidence against him (or her), or ask questions through a lawyer (Bazelon & Villasenor, 2017). As this limits (or prohibits) due process, changes must be made to ensure both the accused and accusers' constitutional rights.

As a school counselor, I would need to be aware of the current school policies on sexual assault in order to help survivors in every possible way. I need to be knowledgeable of the support resources available to students and the legal procedures required to press criminal charges and go to trial. As a counselor, I would also need to communicate the current sexual assault policies, policy changes, and legal procedures to school faculty, in the event that a student reports a sexual crime to a member of the staff.

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Researching Sexual Assault in Higher Education

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Researching Sexual Assault in Higher Education

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Before researching sexual assault policy changes on college and university campuses, I thought it would be beneficial to research the statistics related to sexual assault and how many students actually utilize campus resources to press charges against their attackers. This academic journal article entitled "'It happens to girls all the time:' Examining sexual assault survivors' reasons for not using campus supports,"  reports sexual assault statistics and explores the reasoning behind why many female college students do not report these crimes.

Holland, K., & Cortina, L. (2017). 'It happens to girls all the time:' Examining sexual assault survivors' reasons for not using campus supports. American Journal of Community Psychology, 59(1/2), p. 50-64. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12126