In a state with one of the country’s worst counselor-to-student ratios, Chicago does better than many other Illinois districts, where two or more schools sometimes share a counselor: It staffs a counselor on every campus and spells out their roles. But caseloads exceed recommended standards at many Chicago schools — and are larger the more Latino students a campus serves, a Chalkbeat analysis found.

Elementary schools where 80% or more of the students are Latino — many of them in Chicago’s zip codes hardest hit by the pandemic — have an average counselor caseload of 665 students, with a few as high as 1,000 students or more.

Such ratios can leave counselors scrambling to provide emotional support, reach out to families who have disengaged from learning, and help students apply to high school. That workload is likely to grow as students grappling with trauma, anxiety, and learning gaps return to fully reopened campuses in the fall.

The district has said it will address those challenges by hiring 64 additional counselors over the next two years as part of a broader, federally funded pandemic recovery plan. The teachers union put money for an additional counselor at every school on its list of fall reopening demands.

A push to expand the ranks of school counselors is also underway statewide and across the country. With input from a state counselor group, Illinois recently released school reopening guidelines for fall that recommend 250-to-1 counselor ratios, the standard long embraced by the American School Counselor Association. The state’s average ratio is 626-to-1, the fourth highest nationally.

Read the full article about school counselors by Mila Koumpilova at Chalkbeat Chicago.