It’s National School Counselor Week and we’d like to take a moment to thank you. We know how hard you work and that you are instrumental for our kids’ success.

Here are four things we do to try to help:

• Junior and Senior Surveys: Through UT’s Ray Marshall Center, we survey all juniors and seniors in Central Texas. We gather this information and make it available so you can better target college advising to your students.
• Student and Parent Texting: The OneLogos data portal will tell you if your student is missing a deadline or financial aid form. Based on this information, you can now send and receive texts to both students and parents. As of January 2016, over 40,000 texts have been sent to the Class of 2016.
• Counselor-to-Student Ratio: With our input, you district representatives created a methodology to capture available resources devoted to advising seniors. We will use this to assess the quantity of resources needed, by campus, to ensure that direct-to-college goals are met.
• State Advocacy: We meet regularly with elected and appointed leaders to provide real-time, high quality data tools to help you spend more time on counseling and less time on paperwork.

Posted by Drew Scheberle, Senior Vice President of the Austin Chamber.