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Budget cuts in education demand that school counselors learn how to do more with what is presently available, and to collaborate with families and communities to find resources that meet student needs. In an effort to address how school counselors can be proactive in finding needed resources, this article draws on information from various disciplines to explore the utility of community asset mapping. An approach for developing and creating a community asset map is presented.
Schools across the nation are being adversely affected by the current economic crisis. For example, California is predicting $3.9 billion cuts to K-12 education (Rau & Halper, 2009), Florida has cut aid to local school districts by $140 per student, and Colorado has proposed suspending a number of educational programs and cutting K-12 funding by almost 4% (Johnson, Koulish, & Oliff, 2009). Recently, 36 states have proposed cuts in education due to the massive effects of our current economic climate (Johnson et al.). Additionally, school districts are proposing to make these cuts by reducing teaching and school counseling staff. One school district in California, the California Pacifica School District, is not only asking teachers to take a voluntary 5% pay cut, it is also planning to cut the only school counselor position in the district (Scott, 2009). Likewise the Hartford, CT, school district announced plans to cut 10 school counseling positions. In addition to cutting counselor positions, schools are being forced to decrease or eliminate other services that were once available to students. In 2008, it was projected that funding for these programs would drop from $1.08 billion to $800 million. According to the Department of Education, anywhere from 635,000 to 1.1 million students will lose access to learning centers and other after-school supervised enrichment programs (Dorgan, 2008).
Ironically, as the staff members and school programming that were in place to deal with students' personal and academic problems decrease, the needs of students are both increasing and diversifying. Poverty has continued to increase with 13.2 million children under the age of 18 living below the federal poverty level (Douglas-Hall & Chau, 2008). A recent analysis by First Focus, a Washington-based advocacy group for children and families, estimated that 2.2 million foreclosures on subprime home mortgages will affect two million...