Over the past two decades, research on urban schools has focused predominantly on achievement gaps. However, achievement gaps exist because of gaps in opportunities for urban, low-income, and racially/ethnically diverse students. Partnerships among schools, families, and communities can provide the enrichment opportunities, support, resources, and programs that students need to be educationally resilient despite adversity. School counselors are in a unique position to promote resilience through equity-focused school–family–community partnerships and parent/family–school compacts based on empowerment, democratic collaboration, social justice, and strengths-based principles. This article describes a step-by-step, equity-focused partnership model that school counselors can implement as part of their school counseling program.

The literature has lauded parental involvement as an effective strategy to increase student achievement, but schools still struggle with how to effectively involve parents of color and low-income families. In an effort to assess the effectiveness of the Epstein Model of Parental Involvement in high-poverty, high-minority schools, the authors conducted a case study of an urban elementary school that uses parental involvement practices stipulated in the model. This article provides implications for school counselors and suggestions for future research.

A multidimensional study examines both the dimensions of school counselors’ involvement in school-family-community partnerships and the factors related to their involvement in partnerships. The School Counselor Involvement in Partnerships Survey was revised and its factor structure examined. Principal factor analyses revealed three dimensions of partnership involvement. A national sample of 217 school counselors was drawn from the Common Core of Data, and hierarchical regression analyses indicated that collaborative school climate, school principal expectations, school counselor self-efficacy about partnerships, role perceptions, time constraints, and hours of partnership-related training were associated with school counselor overall involvement in partnerships. Implications for school counselor practice, training, and research are discussed.

Disproportionality plagues schools nationwide in special education placement, dropout, discipline referral, suspension, and expulsion rates. This study examined predictors of teacher referrals to school counselors for disruptive behavior in a sample of students selected from the Educational Longitudinal Study 2002 (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.). Findings demonstrated that students’ race predicted English teacher referrals; students’ gender, previous disciplinary infractions, and teachers’ postsecondary expectations for students predicted English and math teacher referrals. Implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed.

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.