Where are the counselors?
The Department of Education (DepEd) has been touting its drive to accelerate the hiring of 10,000 school counselor associates (SCAs), a newly created position that was envisioned to provide administrative support to licensed school counselors. But while there is a lot of energy propelling the hiring of SCAs, where is this same energy in actively recruiting licensed school counselors, especially registered guidance counselors?
Prior to the enactment of the Basic Education Mental Health and Well-Being Promotion Act, or Republic Act No. 12080, there were 4,470 existing vacant and dormant government positions for guidance counselors and guidance coordinators. There are also more than 5,000 registered guidance counselors (RGCs), with over 4,000 maintaining their licenses. Strictly speaking, there should have been enough RGCs to fill the existing counselor positions. However, fewer than 1,000 RGCs are employed by DepEd.
So where are the counselors?
What the government has not addressed is the fact that a guidance counselor career in public education is not sustainable, particularly when there are more attractive options in the private sector. Guidance counselors have been severely underpaid in the public sector. Despite RGCs requiring a master’s degree and passing a licensure exam, they only receive a Salary Grade (SG) of 11 or P31,705. The administrative workload of guidance counselors in public schools is enormous, given that there is, on average, only one such counselor per school, if any at all. Career progression is also stagnant, with very little room for growth. The demand for mental health and well-being services in the private sector, on the other hand, has grown exponentially, giving RGCs more viable options than in decades past. We now see RGCs beyond schools, placed in corporate and organizational settings.
RA 12080 attempts to address the compensation issue by reclassifying the plantilla positions, upgrading the licensed counselor from a meager SG 11 to SG 16 or P45,694. However, DepEd seems bent on prioritizing the hiring of SCAs, who are at salary grade 11, the original pay of guidance counselors. It has also yet to finalize the reclassification of incumbent guidance counselors, who are now stuck at the same pay as the newly hired SCAs.
The newly created plantilla items for the SCAs also did not come from a vacuum. They were converted from the existing unfilled positions of guidance counselors and coordinators through a “scrap-and-build process.” So those 4,470 positions for licensed RGCs are no longer there as they have been converted into the SCA items. We made room for more associates at the expense of being able to hire more licensed counselors in the future.
These strategies make sense if all we want to do is to add more guidance personnel, regardless of their training, license, or experience. However, if we implement RA 12080 properly, we should be mindful that school counselor associates should be supervised by licensed school counselors. They are there to provide support to actual school counselors; SCAs are not counselors themselves. So, what are we doing hiring SCAs without ensuring that there are licensed school counselors in place to supervise them? What happens when SCAs inevitably have to refer most of the mental health cases, if not all of them? Who do they refer them to if licensed counselors do not exist in schools?
Currently, there already is a referral bottleneck as licensed school counselors themselves usually have to refer out significant mental health cases to specialists such as psychiatrists, developmental pediatricians, and psychologists. We would anticipate an even worse bottleneck if only SCAs are in place.
I also worry for the welfare of the SCAs themselves. Without mentoring and supervision, they are most likely to burn out due to the sheer workload. They will also face tremendous pressure to perform outside of their scope and be forced to manage high-risk cases, if licensed school counselors do not exist in their schools. Unless a system of support is in place for them, I foresee a high attrition rate and these positions will become hard to fill, similar to what is happening to school counselor positions now.
While DepEd feels the pressure to hire the greatest number of people at the bottom of the pay scale, they need to be careful that they might be setting themselves up to fail. They need to prioritize the hiring of trained and licensed school counselors so that they can, in turn, effectively supervise and support the school counselor associates in order to ensure a robust system of care for students. That is the spirit of RA 12080. We need to build and support the whole system, not just focus on one piece.
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aatuazon@up.edu.ph
