Building Cultural Competencies in School Counselors

School counselors are the nucleus of a school. We are the central intelligence agency, housing all of the information about the ins and outs of everything. This includes staff, community, students and culture and climate.

As school counselors, we are like Sherlock Holmes. We are constantly watching our student population, keeping an eye out for any inequalities. Our ears are always perked and our eyes always open. Our role requires us to see the big picture. Our responsibility is to educate others on all of the paintings that make up the mural.

What we do as school counselors is important. It expands the scope of schedule changes, creating 504 accommodation plans, and helping students with post-secondary options.

We are the peacekeepers of the school and the safe place for marginalized students.

I don’t want to go so far as to say that our role is powerful, but our role is powerful. Being a school counselor is a high honor and a great responsibility. Because of this, it is extremely important that we are culturally competent.

Cultural competence does not just mean understanding ethnic differences. It is also understanding religious differences, gender identity differences and dynamics that may happen when cultures interact, and being able to self-assess our own cultural bias and competencies.

To be culturally competent, we must first understand ourselves. This is tough because it requires us to look at ourselves in a mirror and face our own biases. Don’t say you don’t have biases, because you do. We all do. It’s okay; you are human. What makes you super human is your ability to identify these biases and work on challenging them so that they do not interfere with your ability to be impactful.

If we don’t know who we are then we are unable to help other people be comfortable with who they are. It is kind of as if you did not realize that you were afraid of heights, and then went bungee jumping off a bridge, only to realize that you may have stepped a little too far out of your comfort zone as you soar through the air in what feels like a free fall into a body of water.

If we walk into a room of people who do not look like us, believe like us or live like us and expect that we will be able to understand them simply because we are all human, we are wrong. We need to understand different cultures and lifestyles, and the best way to do that is simple.

Ask.

Well that’s awkward. Ask someone what it feels like to be a different race, religion or gender?

We can read about it, take classes around it and develop our own narrative of what it means to be X, Y and Z, but none of that is as powerful as simply asking a person who is different from us what it is like to walk in their shoes.

Diversity is a tricky thing to talk about, especially in this day and age. The political climate is one that has created a greater divide and a more intense fear of the possibility of being seen as discriminatory simply by asking a question.

But we need to ask the questions. Our students need us to ask the tough questions so that they feel empowered to ask the tough questions.

School counselors need to be culturally competent if we want to be effective. We see people come to us from very different circumstances than our own. If we don’t take the time to understand someone’s past then we will never be invited to be a part of their present. If we can’t be a part of their present, we cannot help impact their future.

Monica Fugedi is a wellness counselor at Groves High School in Birmingham, Mich.