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I plan to become a Guidance Counselor at the secondary level after I have completed my degree. I currently have a B.S. in Microbiology from The University of Texas at Austin and will obtain my M.Ed. in Guidance and Counseling from Angelo State University at the conclusion of the Spring semester.

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Exploration Option 2 - American School Counselor Association  

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Exploration Option 2 - American School Counselor Association  

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The Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Act

The Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Act was proposed in September of 2018 to grant funding to all 50 states. This funding would help hire more school counselors, psychologists, and social workers. By doing so, this would help school districts fund these important positions to help students with multiple needs, whether they be social emotional or college and career readiness.
American School Counselor Association. (n.d.). Elementary and secondary school counseling act. Retrieved from https://www.schoolcounselor.org/school-counselors-members/legislative-affairs

Confidentiality and Limitations

Bringing confidentiality awareness to students and the limitations it brings is important to introduce in the beginning of a relationship. The student-counselor relationship is confidential; however, there are actions or words that can be said that requires counselors to seek extra help for students.
American School Counselor Association. (n.d.). Ethical tips for school counselors. Retrieved from https://www.schoolcounselor.org/school-counselors-members/legal-ethical/ethical-tips-for-school-counselors

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Exploration Option 2 - National Education Association (NEA)

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Exploration Option 2 - National Education Association (NEA)

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Dream Act of 2017

The Dream Act of 2017 was created to help combat the ending of the previous Dream Act called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The Dream Act and DACA allows for students to become citizens and receive an education, job, or join the military in the United States. The anti-immigrant measures that were taken in ending DACA hurt chances students can have at making a better life for themselves.
National Education Association. (n.d.). Dream act. Retrieved from http://edadvocacy.nea.org/dreamact

Gun Violence Prevention

Betsy DeVos is attempting to pass bills that would allow school funding to pay for arming educators in school and pay for their training. Most members of NEA do not agree with this, and also want universal background checks for all purchases of firearms. NEA members believe funding that schools receive should be focused on the students and their should not be allotment for arming educators.
National Education Association. (n.d.). Gun violence prevention. Retrieved from http://edadvocacy.nea.org/gunviolence?5

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Exploration Option 3 - Inside Higher Education 

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Exploration Option 3 - Inside Higher Education 

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Trump offers three years of funding from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to help build the wall.

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President Trump on Saturday proposed temporarily extending protections against deportation for certain young immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion funding for a wall along the southern border.

Trump, who has not budged from his position that any deal to reopen the federal government must include funding for the wall, proposed in exchange for wall funding a three-year extension of protections for beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a program established by President Obama that provides protections against deportation and temporary work permits to more than 700,000 young immigrants, many of them current or former college students, who were brought to the U.S. without documentation as children.

Trump, who described his plan to end the partial government shutdown as "a commonsense compromise both parties should embrace," also proposed a three-year extension of protections for immigrants who have an immigration classification known as temporary protected status due to armed conflict or an environmental disaster in their home countries.

Democrats, who have maintained that Trump must reopen the government before they will negotiate on border security, seemed unreceptive to his proposal. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi described his plan as a "non-starter."

"It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter," Pelosi said in a statement issued in advance of the president's address. "For one thing, this proposal does not include the permanent solution for the Dreamers [as DACA participants are known] and TPS recipients that our country needs and supports."

Trump moved to end the DACA program in September 2017, holding that the program represented an unconstitutional overreach by Obama of his executive authority. Multiple courts have blocked the Trump administration from ending the program as planned, and protections remain in place for current DACA holders.

The Associated Press reported that the Supreme Court took no action Friday on the Trump administration's appeal that it rule this spring on the lawfulness of its decision to end DACA, raising the prospect that the court will not hear the case this term and the program will be kept in place for at least another year. The National Immigration Law Center cautioned, however, that it is too early to know whether the court will take up the DACA case this term and that if the court did make any decisions on Friday it expects to learn of the outcome Tuesday morning.

Many college leaders and higher education groups have lobbied for a permanent solution for DACA recipients, saying that the students with DACA status contribute to their communities and economies and that this cohort of American-educated students provides a critical source of talent for the U.S.

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Trump offers three years of DACA in exchange for wall funding

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President Trump on Saturday proposed temporarily extending protections against deportation for certain young immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion funding for a wall along the southern border.

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Exploration Option 3 - Inside Higher Education 

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Exploration Option 3 - Inside Higher Education 

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The struggle homeless college students have during winter break.

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As many college and university dormitories shut down for the winter break, which often lasts for a month or more, some students have nowhere to go.

They might be estranged from their parents and unable to live at home. They might be newly out of the foster system. Sometimes they have children of their own. Often they're unable to pay the bills, including groceries.

Historically, many colleges have barred students from dormitories during this time, even if they signed up to use a room the entire academic year.

It's an issue that housing and student affairs professionals have become acutely aware of over the last several years.

Programs to help students pay for housing during the winter months (and to feed them) have become much more common. Residence halls sometimes do remain open, but sometimes at a cost to their occupants. And administrators still struggle to identify students who are homeless. Students often need to seek out the campus resources, leaving a portion of them to flounder if they are unaware of these programs or embarrassed about a perceived stigma around homelessness.

"It is becoming more evident that our students have become more self-aware of those things and are willing to have conversations around them," said Von Stange, president-elect of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International and assistant vice president for student life and senior director of housing and dining at the University of Iowa.

"It's the same thing if you have a mental health issue no one knew about. Today's students are more willing to talk about it, see a counselor. I think the culture allows for more openness to help care for more of these students."

While the campaigns on each campus are going to vary widely, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) has identified two models on homelessness that it has urged institutions to consider, said Steven Neier, chairman of its higher education committee.

One is the cohort model, used notably at Florida State University, where its Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement picks out low-income, first-generation or homeless students sometimes even before they arrive on campus and then continually monitors them through their time there. The institution will work with local school districts to identify these students, as more often in a K-12 setting the administrators will know if a student is homeless, Neier said. When a student would need housing for a winter break, the university would already be able to identify who needed it.

The other model is called a "service" model. West Chester University, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, sponsors the Promise Program, which pays for homeless students' housing not only in the winter, but year-round. One student who had grown up bouncing around among friends and relatives told NPR that when after she took advantage of the service, it was the first time she never had to worry about feeling unsafe because someone might "rape or hurt her."

Neier also said that Kennesaw State University, in Georgia, has created a particularly robust program.

The dormitories stay open year-round at Kennesaw except for two or so weeks in the summer right before the fall semester starts, when they close for cleaning, said Carrie Olsen, program coordinator for the university's Campus Awareness, Resource and Empowerment, or CARE, services, the center for students who are homeless or struggling to pay for food.

When Kennesaw students pay for housing, the cost of staying over winter break is built in, and they can remain there except for those two weeks in the summer, which do present a problem, Olsen said. If students do need housing over winter break in a pinch, though, the institution has four "emergency" apartments set up. Two are located on its Kennesaw campus, and the other two are at its Marietta location.

The bigger issue comes when dining halls close for the winter, Olsen said. Students who are homeless often depend on their meal plans, she said. CARE offers a large food pantry where students can come once a month (or more frequently if approved by a case manager) to shop in a style similar to a traditional grocery store, Olsen said. They can pick out one jar of peanut butter or a jar of jelly, or select which soups they like, a rarity given that most students don't get much choice when they're homeless or "food insecure," as many industry experts call it, Olsen said.

She noted that the university apartments, and those off-campus, can run from $800 to $900 monthly, which Olsen said is expensive even for working professionals. In fiscal year 2018, CARE's budget was nearly $59,000 to subsidize housing, as well as for certain scholarships and to fund the pantry. The program is almost entirely funded by donations, except for Olsen's salary and her director's, Olsen said.

Financial aid doesn't cover even close to all the students' expenses, she said.

"I think my generation and older generations think that's what financial aid is for," Olsen said. "They don't realize there's such a gap now between what is offered. I go back to when you just paid for your room and board at the beginning of the semester and that was it, but that's not how things function anymore."

At Iowa, Stange's institution, the dormitories also are open during winter, but students generally have to pay $300 or so for the several weeks of break if they plan to be there, he said. The university will waive the fee for low-income students, Stange said.

Iowa is relatively lucky, though. The state's flagship campus can afford to let certain students not pay. University housing is an auxiliary service with its own budget separate from the general university operating budget, and its dollars come entirely from students paying for housing and the summer conferences the institution hosts, Stange said.

At other, smaller institutions, the decision to remain open could be more difficult, especially if housing is tied to a general operating budget, Stange said.

California State University, Los Angeles, for instance, which serves a high population of Latinx and impoverished students, decided this academic year for the first time to charge students for living on campus during the winter break. The university had alerted students to the new charges, $1,115 for the entire break, in December 2017, but some said they had missed emails and other public notices, said spokesman Robert Lopez. After a student rally against the cost, the university decided to do away with it this winter to allow more time for students to prepare, Lopez said. He said no decision has been made on whether fees will be charged next year. A survey of students in the entire California State University system found that one in 10 experienced homelessness at least once in the previous year. Fewer than 200 people stayed on the Cal State L.A. campus in the winter, Lopez said.

Finding housing can work in more informal ways, too. NAEHCY has encouraged campaigns at colleges and universities for other students to advertise -- largely just by word of mouth -- when they have a free room or bed over winter break, Neier said.

Institutions have also used surveys to identify homeless students, Neier said, and NAEHCY has advocated for them to use the definition of homelessness in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which is slightly broader than what most students would consider homeless, he said.

McKinney-Vento states that a student can also be deemed homeless if he or she doesn't have a regular sleeping arrangement, so couch surfing would also count. For university administrators, using the McKinney-Vento definition is helpful because students are often unsure if they fit a definition of homeless, Neier said.

Ideally, campuses would also designate a single person to handle the homeless student population -- if colleges delegated these duties to one official, they could form networks and be more effective statewide, he said. This would be similar to how the McKinney-Vento act requires local K-12 school districts to have a liaison for homeless students. California passed a bill in 2016 that forces most state institutions to designate such a liaison for colleges.

"If higher education were to push for this single-point-of-contact model, this would help raise awareness," Neier said. "They could be champions of their cause on their campuses."

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Homeless college students struggle to find lodging, food over winter break

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As many college and university dormitories shut down for the winter break, which often lasts for a month or more, some students have nowhere to go. They might be estranged from their parents and unable to live at home. They might be newly out of the foster system.

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Dream Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

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Dream Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

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This is an important topic for educators because it brings awareness to these students that we can potentially have. Students that are in the United States due to the DACA or Dream Act could have potential anxiety/stress due to what has been in the news. For example, President Trump is wanted to cut funding for three years to help fund the building of the wall he wants to build. Funding for this should not be a cause for losing as student's education. It is a legal and an ethical issue that needs to be strongly considered.

I currently live in Texas and work in a school district with a very diverse school population that does have students who are gaining their education thanks to the Dream Act or DACA. I do not have any students currently; however, I did last year and they were very worried as to what would happen to them and their ability to gain a college education due to the talk of DACA being defunded. As a future counselor, it is important to stay up to date on new legal and ethical issues that could have an effect on students to help inform them of the facts and help students understand what is going on in their lives.

Resources

Hsin, A., & Ortega, F. (2018). The effects of deferred action for childhood arrivals on the educational outcomes of undocumented students. Demography, 55(4), 1487–1506. https://doi-org.easydb.angelo.edu/10.1007/s13524-018-0691-6

Migration Policy Institute [MPI]. (2018, December). Deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) data tools. Retrieved from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca-profiles

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What I learned about the Dream Act and DACA

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What I learned about the Dream Act and DACA

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Both of these Acts were put into place to help students who were not citizens of the United States gain citizenship and an education. The Dream Act was put into place after DACA was ended to help immigrant students create a better life for themselves. I have had two students in my classes that were in the United States due to DACA and the Dream Act, and I believe it is important for these programs to exist to help students like I had create and accomplish their goals.

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Hsin, A., & Ortega, F. (2018). The effects of deferred action for childhood arrivals on the educational outcomes of undocumented students. Demography, 55(4), 1487–1506. https://doi-org.easydb.angelo.edu/10.1007/s13524-018-0691-6

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Learn about participation in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program nationally and by state, as well as by top countries of origin. The two data tools offered here provide the numbers of DACA recipients at U.S. and state levels and offer an estimate of participation rates as of August 31, 2018, by geography as well as by country of origin. The first tool offers DACA recipient numbers at U.S. and state levels, as well as MPI's estimates of the overall participation rate. The second tool displays MPI's estimates of the participation rate for the top origin countries. Hover over a state or country to see the data.

For notes and sources, please see below second data tool.

Notes:

Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates of the DACA immediately eligible population as of 2018 include unauthorized immigrant youth who had been in the United States since 2007, were under the age of 16 at the time of their arrival in the United States, and were under the age of 31 as of 2012. Immediately eligible youth met both age and educational criteria (i.e., they were ages 15 to 34 in 2018 and were either enrolled in school or had at least a high school diploma or equivalent). To capture the population eligible to apply as of 2018 based on the 2016 data source, MPI "aged in" the otherwise eligible 13- and 14-year-olds in 2016 assuming they remain enrolled in school. In the meantime, using the percent of the DACA-eligible population ages 19 to 24 without a GED or high school diploma and not enrolled in school in 2016, a portion of the immediately eligible 15- and 16-year-olds in 2016 was excluded from the group to account for potential dropouts as this population ages. Eligibility due to adult-education program enrollment and ineligibility due to criminal history or lack of continuous U.S. presence were not modeled due to lack of data.

The program participation rate refers to the share of the immediately eligible population who were current DACA recipients as of August 31, 2018.

The 20 national-origin groups included in the tool were selected based on a combination of factors including estimated population size, sample size, and the availability of application data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Totals may not add up due to rounding. Percentages are calculated based on unrounded numbers and may not match those calculated based on rounded numbers.

Sources: Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from the 2012-16 American Community Survey (ACS) pooled, and the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), with legal status assignments by James Bachmeier and Colin Hammar of Temple University and Jennifer Van Hook of The Pennsylvania State University, Population Research Institute; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), "Approximate Active DACA Recipients as of August 31, 2018," www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/All%20Form%20Types/DACA/DACA_Population_Data_August_31_2018.pdf.

Acknowledgments
James Bachmeier and Colin Hammar at Temple University analyzed the data on legal status of immigrants that provide the basis for these estimates. Jennifer Van Hook at The Pennsylvania State University advised in developing the methodology.

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Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Data Tools

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Learn about participation in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program nationally and by state, as well as by top countries of origin. The data tools offered here provide the numbers of DACA recipients at U.S. and state levels and offer an estimate of participation rates by geography as well as by country of origin.