Principals and school counselors, as advocates and leaders, have a moral and ethical imperative to interrogate and disrupt the educational inequities pervading P-12 schools. Trained in data collection, disaggregation, and analyses, principals and school counselors must utilize their knowledge and skills in program evaluation to challenge systemic…

As migration and displacement continue to increase around the world, guidelines are needed clarifying how school counselors can use their power and privilege in working with refugee students and their families across K-12 education, more so in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. We introduce the Refugee Well-Being Project intervention to school…

As noted in Part 1 of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) Social Justice Committee's (SJC) series on health disparities, more than a century of scholarship has documented differential health outcomes among minoritized groups in the United States (Proctor et al., 2020). Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the…

This article focuses on what school-based mental health counselors need to know to be anti-racist and culturally responsive for Black students, while recognizing that many of the presented theories and frameworks have implications for other minoritized gifted and talented (GATE) students/clients. The authors provide an overview of the most…

In this article, I outline an approach for critical hip-hop school counseling (CHHSC) for novice and tenured school counselors to use when working with Black boys. Various facets of hip-hop culture (e.g., music, hip-hop scholarship) can sharpen Black boys' "conscientização" (Freire, 1996) and help them discern how interconnected social…

Over the past two decades, research on urban schools has focused predominantly on achievement gaps. However, achievement gaps exist because of gaps in opportunities for urban, low-income, and racially/ethnically diverse students. Partnerships among schools, families, and communities can provide the enrichment opportunities, support, resources, and…

Transgender students have unique and intense needs to be addressed for a safer and more inclusive school experience. Experiencing harassment and feeling unsafe at school can lead to negative educational outcomes, such as depression, victimization, poor academic outcomes, substance abuse, school avoidance, risky sexual behavior, suicidal ideation,…

Drawing from three case vignettes and the extant literature, the authors seek to identify, problematize, and expand the discussion on colorblind approaches to diversity within the practice of school counseling. The authors discuss how such an approach to working with students from under-represented groups subtly blames the victim, limits the…

The sheer amount of time that school psychologists spend conducting assessments, coupled with the shift in the field toward incorporating a socially just lens into practice, elicits the question: What constitutes socially just academic assessments, and what are the related best practices? Considering the complexities related to applying a social…

The social justice issue of human sex trafficking is a global form of oppression that places men, women and children at risk for sexual exploitation. Although a body of research exists on the topics of human trafficking, literature specific to the mental health implications for counselors working with this population is limited. Counselors should…

Adjusting to the world of work or challenging it is a dilemma that career counselors and helpers encounter daily. Counselors and clients may opt for one of the following choices: (a) adjust to, and challenge the system, at the same time, (b) adjust to the system but do not challenge it, (c) challenge the system but do not adjust to it, and (d)…

Arguably, the defining feature of the counseling profession is an appreciation for human diversity. Early counseling movements emphasized individual diversity, while multiculturalism and social justice highlighted cultural diversity. The author maintains that contemporary psychoanalytic thought can supply a needed intraindividual diversity…

In the southwestern United States, there is a group of children who are referred to as "borderland children" who experience additional challenges that place them at higher risk of developing mental health and other related problems. For the purpose of this article, borderland children are defined as children who reside in towns and…

In the past 10 years, gender-variant (GV) children (children who do not conform to traditional gender norms) have received increased attention from scholars, mental health practitioners, and popular media. In schools, these students have been shown to be particularly vulnerable to violence and harassment, leading to myriad negative…

The denial of civil marriage rights is a specific example of minority stress that can negatively affect the psychosocial well-being of self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals in same-sex partnerships, their families, and their allies. Counseling psychologists have an important role in addressing the…