Even though he underlying goal of creating a path that facilitates portability for licensed professional counselors moving to Virginia is admirable, the NCLEP does the opposite. It creates an extremely restrictive precedent for the field of counseling and those who have not attended and graduated from a CACREP accredited school. This piece of legislation is harmful to those that are competent providers. The state of VA already has a shortage of counselors, this will only make things worse, not better. 

Legislators should take note that the American Counseling Association (ACA), the worlds largest association exclusively representing professional counselors, declined to endorse the NCLEP. 

The ACA developed their own portability plan that avoids the dangerous harmful exclusions associated with the proposed NCLEP portability plan. This includes removal of the CACREP education standard. Many seasoned professional counselors obtained their masters in counseling degrees long before CACREP accreditation was available, or from institutions that had legitimate reasons for not pursuing a CACREP endorsement. Adopting the NCLEP standard would prevent these licensed professional counselors from moving to Virginia, with their years of valuable clinical experience, which would undermine the goals of portability and increasing license mental health providers.