Developmental Guidance
The Carrollton-Farmers Branch School District provides Guidance and Counseling support in keeping with the guidelines set forth by the Texas Legislature. The guidance program consists of four components:
Guidance Curriculum
The purpose of the guidance curriculum component is to help all students develop basic life skills. It is the foundation of a developmental guidance program. In Texas, seven areas have been identified for the guidance curriculum:
- Self-confidence Development
- Motivation to Achieve
- Decision-making, Goal-setting, Planning, and Problem-solving Skills
- Interpersonal Effectiveness
- Communication Skills
- Cross-cultural Effectiveness
Responsible Behavior
Responsive Services
The purpose of the responsive services component is to intervene on behalf of those students whose immediate personal concerns or problems put their continued personal-social, career, and/or educational development at risk. Although counselors respond to any concerns presented by students, some topics have been identified as having high priority and/or relevance within the school setting. Topics of priority in Texas include:
- academic success
- adolescent and child suicide
- child abuse and neglect
- school drop-outs
- severe stress
- substance abuse
- school-age pregnancy
- gang pressures/involvement
- harassment issues
Individual Planning
The purpose of the individual planning system is to guide all students as they plan, monitor, and manage their own educational, career, and personal-social development. Schools can systematically use a variety of resources-staff, information, and activities-and to focus resources toward the students and to assist individual students to develop and implement personalized plans. Through the individual planning system, students can:
- Set challenging educational, career, and personal-social goals that are based on self-knowledge and information about school, the world of work, and their society;
- Make plans for achieving short-, intermediate-, and long-term goals;
- Analyze how their strengths and weaknesses enhance or hinder the achievement of their goals;21
- Assess their current progress toward their goals; and
- Make decisions that reflect their plans.
System Support
Whereas the three components previously described serve students directly, the system support component describes services and management activities which indirectly benefit students. The services include:
- consultation with teachers;
- support for the parent education program and community relations efforts;
- participation in the campus-based school improvement plans and goals;
- implementation of the state and local standardized testing program;22
- cooperation with relevant research projects; and
- provision of input from the students’ perspective to policy-makers and instructional/curriculum planners.