Yuridia Nava, a counselor at Riverside Polytechnic High School in Riverside, Calif., has been getting to work at 7 a.m. lately. It's class registration time, so she wants to be available before school for parents and students to come in with questions as they plan for the next year of courses, SAT tests, and college preparation.
Poly — as her school is known — employs six counselors for its 2,700 students, so Nava and her colleagues each work with about 500 teens. That's just above average. According to the most recent data, school counselors across the country manage caseloads of about 482 students each. In California, where Nava works, that average ratio is 760 students per counselor — the second highest in the nation. She says counselors there are just trying to "stay afloat" and get through each day. The American School Counselor Association recommends that counselors work with 250 students each, but just three states follow that advice.
[For more of this story, written by Clare Lombardo, go to https://www.npr.org/sections/e...t-try-to-stay-afloat]
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