From the Chair: ISCA's With You in the Year Ahead

Hello, my name is Patrick Wildman and I am starting my eighth year as a school counselor and my 13th year in education overall. I have worked for the past eight years as the only school counselor in a district with over 60 percent free/reduced lunch and over 50 percent Hispanic population. This may seem out of place for a small town in west central Illinois only about an hour from our state capitol in Springfield, but for the past 20 years this has been the norm in this small town of about 5,000 people along the Illinois river. Working with a vast array of different cultures has taught me a lot of humility and a passion for guiding my students. As the newly elected chair of the board for the Illinois School Counselor Association, I look back on this past year with pride in our association and with high hopes for the future in a new school year.

This coming year will mark our second year working with our lobbyist – our efforts in growing our membership have afforded us the opportunity to engage with an outside lobbyist and help us work with legislators in Springfield to bring the concerns not only of school counselors but also of other school support personnel. We were able to pass legislation to change the roles and responsibilities of the school counselor in our school code to more closely match those recommended by ASCA, an update not made in more than a decade. We were also able to enact an amendment to a previous act that banned school counselors from accepting any gifts from colleges and universities. The previous act did not make any exceptions for professional development, and the new amendment carves out this exception.

The recent goal of our association has been to increase member engagement across the state. As with many associations in states with large metropolitan centers, ISCA has struggled to balance the needs of the members in urban areas with the needs of those in rural areas. We have endeavored to address this dichotomy by implementing a new pricing model for our membership dues, providing those schools that enroll all their school counselors with a more favorable pricing model. This especially helps schools or districts with only a single counselor. We have held round tables at our annual conference to increase one-on-one engagement with our members in rural areas and private schools, including virtual listening sessions for those who could not attend our annual conference. We have also taken on the planning of our conference and intend to rotate the location of the conference between upstate and downstate to allow our members better access to the effective professional development that is offered every year. As an association, we continue to look for ways to offer better and more effective professional development for all our members, and we hope these engagement strategies with help with this goal.

Contact Patrick Wildman, ISCA Board Chair, at boardchair@ilschoolcounselor.org


The ISCA Board of Directors met in August 2024 for the annual retreat.