Conducting an annual Comprehensive School Counseling Program (CSCP) program review, as required in the CSCP written plan, should include feedback from school administrators and other educational partners. SSB 5030 requires each school to develop a process for conducting an annual CSCP review, but it allows schools to develop their own process. If you have not yet established a process for collecting feedback, allow us to make a suggestion: consider a simple open-ended survey. 

We have always found that surveys requiring narrative feedback contain distinct comments that are much easier to understand and accept than a numerical value on a Likert scale (1-5 for example). When you receive a 3.5 average on a question such as, “Was the CSCP program successful,” there isn’t much you can do with this information. But with a narrative response, stakeholders have an opportunity to tell you what is working and what isn’t, and the specifics included can be very helpful in determining your next steps needed to improve.  

A simple and effective way to obtain feedback from stakeholders is to distribute an anonymous survey (such as on Google Forms) to staff, students, and parents asking two open-ended questions and including a comment section. The form could look something like this:

School Counseling Program Review (See sample here.)

Please identify which stakeholder group they belong to [ ] parent/family [ ] student or [ ] staff/admin. 

1. What are three things the school counseling program should continue doing?

2. What are three things the school counseling program should consider changing/adding?

3. Additional comments:

This simple survey format produces rich feedback on what is working or going well in the program (things to continue) and areas to change, improve or stop (things to consider). The comment section also allows individuals to explain their opinions. My experience is to limit individuals to three items because it suggests that the items they mention are the most important. 

A good time to annually send out this survey is in May, allowing enough time before the end of the school year to reflect upon and quantify responses. Because the survey isn’t using a numerical scale, it will take longer to analyze the data, but typically key areas to continue and to consider become obvious in the data review.