Consultation to a School Guidance Program

Abstract

In the fall of 1956, the Queens College Educational Clinic launched a consultation program at a nearby public school that had no professionally trained guidance personnel on its staff. The school, which is located in a middle-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens, has an enrolment of about twelve hundred. Those who planned the program felt that professionally trained clinicians could help guidance teachers who lacked formal preparation in school guidance. The consultants were to offer the guidance teachers suggestions on how to appraise problems, how to discuss them with parents, how to guide parents to appropriate community facilities, how to work with other classroom teachers, and how to help them develop skill in meeting problems. At first, three clinicians took part in the program. One psychiatric social worker who provided continuing service spent two hours a week at the school. During this time she discussed problems that seemed most baffling to the guidance teachers. To permit as much flexibility as possible, the content of the discussions was left