22/10/2026
The renaming of Guidance Offices to Care Centers by the Department of Education is a welcome move.
The shift is more than nomenclature. Because it is new, it carries the capacity to reframe long-standing misconceptions about guidance services — that it is disciplinary, punitive, or reserved for students with problems. A Care Center, if established with intention, can reposition help as early, accessible, and non-threatening.
However, the manner of implementation warrants critical attention. It is obvious in many divisions that School Counseling Associates were deployed first, in a bottom-up approach, prior to ensuring the presence and capacitation of Registered Guidance Counselors and Psychologists who are mandated to supervise them. The issue is not with the hiring itself (happy on the part that there are work opportunities in SCA positions), but with the sequencing. This means a support structure was built before its supervisory foundation was secured.
This is not the fault of the SCAs. In fact, despite the absence of stable funding, clear plantilla, and licensed supervisors in many schools, many SCAs have shown commendable initiative in curating Care Centers that are warm, welcoming, and child-friendly. That labor must be recognized.
Yet precisely because Care Centers are new, pioneer SCAs hold a formative power. They set the precedent for what a Care Center is understood to be by children, parents, and the school community. The first impression determines whether a child will perceive the space as safe enough to return to.
That formative power comes with a professional boundary. A Care Center must hold more than emotional burdens. It will inevitably be confronted with cases that demand technical competence — risk assessment, crisis intervention, management of abuse disclosures, structured referral, and documentation that carries legal weight. These are functions that fall within the scope of a Registered Guidance Counselors and Psychologists, and cannot be extended beyond it.
The question then becomes: When acuity rises and risk is imminent, who will be at the boiling point? Who bears the liability when the center has been successfully framed as safe, and families come expecting that safety to be both emotionally present and technically equipped?
A safe space that is only welcoming but not competent places both the child and the frontline worker at risk.
Given the present status, in my perspective, the following are immediate imperatives:
1. Prioritize the hiring of Registered Guidance Counselors and Psychologists. No Care Center should operate without licensed supervision. Supervision is not an adjunct; it is the structure.
2. Reclassify existing Guidance Counselors and Designates. Many have carried the function for years without commensurate item, compensation, and protection.
3. Source sustainable funding for Care Centers and SCAs. Intentional design cannot be sustained by personal resourcefulness.
4. Strengthen recruitment as recruitment is formative. The pioneer cohort establishes the norm. If hiring is not competency-based, transparent, and aligned with scope, the system risks normalizing a model where care is reduced to aesthetics rather than service.
The transition to Care Centers is a step forward. Its potential will be realized only if the name is matched with structure — with the right competencies, in the right positions, especially in communities where access remains most absent.
