The school counselor can play a key role in fostering a caring school community (CSC). The counselor can engage in a comprehensive, preventive, and developmental intervention that helps to promote a sense of belongingness. Furthermore, this intervention reflects a strengths-based counseling approach because it considers how contextual changes can be made to promote overall development of youth. Seven elementary school counselors’ perspectives were examined for their understanding about what constitutes a CSC and how they help to facilitate such a context. The school counselors in the study reported the following: There are a core set of elements that they believe make up a CSC; they draw upon their personal experiences within the school environment to help them understand how their CSC efforts can best be implemented; they implement a set of effective strategies to foster a CSC; and they utilize a shared guiding philosophy that is reflected by their efforts to foster a CSC.
Development of the elementary school counselor self-efficacy Scale