Over the last year, Cameron Elementary school counselor John Casey consoled students who lost parents to COVID-19. He comforted youngsters grieving the death of 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams, a Cameron first-grader shot at a McDonald’s drive-through. He helped students navigate high school applications and academic troubles.
Often, he had to offer that support over a screen, to students with their cameras off or in bustling households with little privacy. One child went to the bathroom and locked the door so they could talk.
It was all part of an unprecedented school year that tested Chicago’s counselors like never before — and trained a stark spotlight on their caseloads.
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…
