Brief History of the ARCA Student Task Force

In 1998, Dr. Charlene Kampfe and Dr. Mark Stebneki were tasked with increasing the student enrollment in the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association.  To accomplish this, they decided to develop the Student Task Force.  Evans Spears, a rehabilitation counseling doctoral student at the University of Arizona, was chosen to head the task force.  Tina Buck, another doctoral student at the University of Arizona, was then brought on as the co-chair.  They served as the chairs until 2000, when the position was transferred to other students.  

During their time as chairs, student enrollment increased and attention was turned to other areas.  Most of the efforts went towards two different arenas, student collaboration and student recognition.  To meet the need to student collaboration, the framework was set up to start with the Student Task Force at the national level, then have regional groups, and school groups.  The idea behind this was to have individual rehabilitation counseling programs start their own ARCA student chapters, and then have representatives who would meet at the regional level.  From those regional levels, representative would be chosen to serve and report to the national task force.  While the work on some elements of this plan continues today, progress has been steadily made and today many schools have started their own student chapter.  The first were the University of Iowa (the first student chapter of ARCA) and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (the first online student chapter).  Since that time, there have been more and more chapters formed at various universities, and student collaboration within ARCA has never been higher.

To meet the need of student recognition, the task force proposed three new awards to ARCA.  These awards were Doctoral Student of the Year, Master Student of the Year, and Mentor of the Year.  The Mentor of the Year award was proposed as way for students to show their appreciation to those faculty members in ARCA who went far beyond just their own program, and were mentors to all the students in ARCA.  This was the only award that would be run solely by the students.  The ARCA Board approved the Doctoral and Master Student of the Year award, but did not approve the Mentor of the Year.  In 2000, the first recipients of the Doctoral and Master Student of the Year were awarded.

As time went on, the Task Force began to decline, while student chapters increased.  In 2006, Nykeisha Moore, a doctoral student from the University of Iowa, began the process of revitalizing the ARCA Student Task Force.

Contributed By: Dr. Evan Spears