TaRael Kee is currently the principal of West Elementary School. He is deeply passionate about building community, challenging students to think critically, and working collaboratively with staff. At West Elementary, he is committed to upholding the school’s standard of excellence.
Previously, TaRael served as an Assistant Principal and Director of School Counseling at Alton High School, where he led the English Department in adopting a highly engaging curriculum and spearheaded the Automatic Acceleration process, allowing many students to access honors courses and more rigorous curricula. He also has a strong background in student support services, providing comprehensive college and career advising, academic planning, and social-emotional learning.
TaRael is a past-president of the Illinois School Counselor Association and a Site-Based Trainer for the American School Counselor Association. As a former school counselor at Collinsville High School, he utilized data and technology to make the counseling department more innovative, efficient, and inclusive. He is a published author and has received several accolades, including the Collinsville School District e-Educator of the Year (2017), recognition by the College Board (2018), the Lindenwood Alumni Spotlight (2019), and Illinois School Counselor of the Year (2021). He graduated from Lindenwood University with a specialist degree in Educational Leadership in May 2021.
In this presentation, TaReal uses his life story to provide educators with inspiration and strategies to become agents of change for themselves, their students, and school communities.
School counseling programs must account for the rapidly changing school demographics. Students from multiple backgrounds have a variety of needs that standardized school counseling programs cannot address. Learn how school counselors can practice cross-cultural communication skills, utilize ASCA’s National Model from an equitable lens, identify student needs from an MTSS perspective, and use data to identify and remove equity barriers.
After attending this workshop, you should be able to:
School counselors must prepare to engage with students from varying demographic backgrounds. Students have so many needs and educators simply cannot meet them without preparation. As school and community leaders we must develop our ability to communicate effectively with the people that we serve. In this workshop, we will use data-based strategies like the ASCA National Model and MTSS to build effective programs for our students and our schools.
This training will provide a starting point for educators to begin having uncomfortable conversations about race. Recent history shows that no progress is made by avoiding conversations of this nature. Participants in this conversation will enter breakout rooms with strangers of varying ideological stances. Prepare for and expect discomfort. The idea is not for everyone to leave the conversation in agreement but to lay the foundation for understanding.
Many school counselors do not realize that equity is baked within the newest ASCA National Model. School counselors can use ASCA’s mindsets and behaviors to promote, assess, and lead students and the school community. In this session, we will discuss how we can utilize data to promote our program, write a sample lesson, and design pre- and post- tests that lead to success for all students.
