School guidance and counseling services, as one of the pillars completing the education and training cycle, have experienced institutional ups and downs since the 1950s; despite a growing consensus on their necessity, they continue to face serious challenges in specialized human resources, service delivery quality, and the gap between overarching documents and implementation. Within the framework of the Fundamental Education Transformation Document (2011–2025), school counseling is considered a key capacity for achieving balanced development across six domains and responding to psychological, educational, and social challenges in schools. Nevertheless, the current status of schools exhibits a significant gap from desirable indicators such as responsibility, self-esteem, discipline, entrepreneurship, and empathy, while emerging issues such as cyberspace, weak parenting skills, psychosocial harms, addiction, violence, and suicide have exacerbated this divide. The role of the school counselor is defined across three domains: developmental-educational, vocational, and personal/emotional/social. Fulfilling service standards requires allocating employment slots and establishing full-time counselors for approximately every 360 students. Proposed strategies include stabilizing the professional role of counselors, specialized and motivational policymaking, redefining counselors' professional identity as agents of school transformation, strengthening skill-based training in universities, and establishing sustainable interaction among education authorities, higher education, and policymakers to transform counseling into a public demand and narrow the policy-implementation gap.