The Elementary School Counselor's Role in Fostering Caring School Communities

The school counselor can play a key role in fostering a caring school community (CSC). The counselor can engage in a comprehensive, preventive, and developmental intervention that helps to promote a sense of belongingness. Furthermore, this intervention reflects a strengths-based counseling approach because it considers how contextual changes can be made to promote overall development of youth. Seven elementary school counselors’ perspectives were examined for their understanding about what constitutes a CSC and how they help to facilitate such a context. The school counselors in the study reported the following: There are a core set of elements that they believe make up a CSC; they draw upon their personal experiences within the school environment to help them understand how their CSC efforts can best be implemented; they implement a set of effective strategies to foster a CSC; and they utilize a shared guiding philosophy that is reflected by their efforts to foster a CSC.

“He's a Nice Man, but it Doesn't Help”: Principal Leadership, School Culture, and the Status of Deaf Children

Building principals are confronted with a host of challenges, particularly when serving children who live outside of the stereotypical mainstream. This article, drawn from a larger ethnographic study, examines the leadership behavior of one building principal who was the administrator for a program serving deaf and nondeaf children. Although students and teachers saw the principal as a caring and highly skilled administrator who made verbal commitments to building an integrated and caring school community, the school culture was ultimately exclusive. The norms of the dominant nondeaf culture went largely unquestioned, and the deaf students were reminded daily of their diminished status. This article concludes with a discussion of deaf education, educational administration, oppressive niceness, and how leadership practices can be moved toward a social justice ethic for students with special needs in general and for deaf students in particular.