School counselors in action reframing professional development to engage families

Co llege enrollment rates in the U.S. have increased over the last 40 years, yet students from undcrservcd communities remain underrepresented. Families in these communities aspire for their children to go to college, but often lack access to the necessary social capital to transform aspirations for their children into action. Federal 6 initiatives focused on increasing educational attainment for students in underserved comn1tmities emphasize the critically important role of the school counselor. The school counselor is ideally positioned to reduce barriers to family engagement in the college access process. Yet, there is a lack of focused support and professional development resources for school counselors. To gain more in sight into how professional development might improve counselors\u27 abilities to support family engagement in college access, I employed an action-oriented qualitative case study to critically consider how urban school counselors took action to address local educational inequities and engage families as partners in the postsecondary process