Abolition in School Counseling

Practicing Liberation and Community in PK-12 Schools

Riley Drake, Alicia Oglesby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040661437
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling

This book calls for re-examining traditional school counseling and moving toward embracing abolition within the profession. School counseling can't reform its way to liberation. We need to create something new, something different. The authors argue that school counselors, who are regularly tasked with teaching students to assimilate to schooling with a hyper-focus on individual grit and decontextualized self-management skills, often use various methods of control, emphasized without question within the profession. This book provides an orientation to abolitionist school counseling and draws from lessons the authors have learned from school counselors practicing abolition across K-12 levels. Chapters cover the current state of policing and the school-to-prison nexus, surveillance, harm reduction, community care, mutual aid, liberatory futures, and more. Abolition in School Counseling invites school counselors to probe the impossible and find ways to build liberation in schools today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Letter to Readers
• Acknowledgements
• Biographies
• Part I Why Abolitionist School Counseling?
• Chapter 1 Moving from Traditional School Counseling to Abolitionist School Counseling
• Chapter 2 Why We Need Abolition in School Counseling
• Chapter 3 Abolitionist School Counseling is Practicing the World We Want and Need
• Part II ASSC Theory of Change in Action
• Chapter 4 Dismantle School Counseling and Change Everything
• Chapter 5 Build Communities of Care
• Chapter 6 Connect to Something Bigger
• Part III Building an Abolitionist School Counseling Approach
• Chapter 7 Rethinking the Logic of School Counseling
• Chapter 8 Practicing Counseling in Schools as Mutual Aid
• Chapter 9 Being an Abolitionist School Counselor in a School, District, or State That Does Not Support Abolitionist School Counseling
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• References
• Appendix A Copaganda Audit for Abolitionist School Counselors
• Appendix B1 Is This Actually an Abolitionist School Counseling Practice?
• Appendix B2 Case Study: Is This Actually an Abolitionist School Counseling Practice?
• Appendix C Excavation Tool: Carceral Sources and Questions for Excavating Carceral Logic
• Appendix D Excavation Tool: Emotional Attunement Circles for Processing Carcerality
• Appendix E Excavation Tool: Anti-Carceral Meditative Body Scan
• Appendix F Excavation Tool: Anti-Carceral Stroll
• Appendix G Counseling as Mutual Aid Case Study
• Appendix H Mutual Aid Pod Map for School-Communities
• Appendix I Visioning for Abolitionist School Counseling