Nebraska Endorsement Requirement News

The new school year also brings new Nebraska Department of Education endorsement requirements for school counselors and new guidelines for content taught in school counseling master’s degree programs. The process of updating the endorsement requirements and guidelines involved many invested school counseling parties including representation from the Nebraska School Counselor Association.
 
The biggest change is that the two-year teaching requirement is no longer needed for obtaining an endorsement in school counseling. Nebraska now has two pathways to obtaining a school counseling endorsement. One pathway is a bachelor’s degree in education plus a master’s degree in school counseling. For the second pathway, instead of a bachelor’s degree in education, the candidate must possess some kind of a bachelor’s degree and complete an additional 12 semester hours of education coursework related to core curriculum design, lesson plan development, classroom management strategies, student assessment and differentiated instructional strategies.
 
Being education experts, in addition to being counseling experts, will continue to be a vital part of the identity of school counselors in Nebraska and nationally. However, the reality is that prior to this year, Nebraska and Texas were the only remaining states that required teaching experience. As a result, it was extremely difficult for some school counselors from other states to come to Nebraska and be state-endorsed school counselors. The result was an increasingly small pool of school counselor candidates to fill school counseling vacancies in Nebraska. Furthermore, other Midwest states have numerous unemployed and highly qualified school counselors, many with experience. Those individuals were unable to come to Nebraska to fill vacancies that were left unfilled each year due to the lack of any certified candidates. In the end, the school counseling professionals in Nebraska came together in a compromise that will keep the importance of educational knowledge while providing two paths to choose from in place of the required teaching experience. It is a cutting-edge endorsement criterion for other states to model. These pathways not only bring Nebraska’s endorsement requirement up to date, they help Nebraska maintain its status as a strong leader in the school counseling profession in our country.
 
There are also new guidelines for content to be taught in school counselor master’s degree programs. These guidelines closely align with the newest version of the ASCA National Model, further placing Nebraska at the front of the pack on the national school counseling stage. You can read both the new endorsement requirements and master’s degree guidelines on the Nebraska Department of Education website.