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School counseling in the 21st century: where lies the future? Introduction to the special section.

Article Excerpt
In a span of merely 10 years, the school counseling profession has reinvented itself. Since the late 1990s, school counseling has progressed from the tradition of a responsive services focus to a proactive and programmatic system that is inextricably integrated with the mission of schools. The national standards of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA, 1997; Campbell & Dahir, 1997), the Transforming School Counseling Initiative (Education Trust, 1997), and the ASCA (2003, 2005) National Model have directed school counselors to respect the past and embrace the present but forge a new vision to the future. The challenges facing students and 21st-century schools have influenced the paradigms and practices that forward the profession and place a renewed emphasis on supporting student achievement, social justice advocacy, and school counselor accountability.

* We Are in Charge of Our Destiny

The imperative of any professional organization is to choose with intentionality how to lead the organization and propel its members forward by anticipating what the future may hold and establish a foundation to shape its destiny. Theobald suggested that we need to envision the society we really want and to develop a plan to move from the present into the future that we choose to shape (Maples, 1984). More than 20 years ago, Inbody (1984) identified six basic premises that were critical to the future of school counseling:

1. What the school counseling profession does today wild have an impact on the quality of the field of school counseling and educational environments in...

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