Collaborative leadership between principals and school counselors as a predictor of students' PERMA well-being in wetland-based senior high schools

  Student well-being is increasingly recognized as a core indicator of educational quality, yet its structural and leadership determinants remain underexplored in wetland-based school systems. This study critically examines whether collaborative leadership between principals and school counselors predicts students’ PERMA well-being in public senior high schools in Provinsi Kalimantan Selatan, Indonesia. Using a multisite quantitative survey, data were collected online from 12 randomly selected schools involving 12 principals, 36 school counselors, and 515 students. Three Likert-scale instruments were developed from Stone and Dahir’s framework of collaborative school counseling leadership and Seligman’s PERMA model. Descriptive analyses show consistently high levels of collaboration, with accountability and data-driven decision-making emerging as the strongest dimension, while resource coordination and empathic support appear relatively weaker. Students report overall strong psychological well-being, with meaning scoring highest and positive emotion the lowest, indicating an affective gap in day-to-day school experiences. Structural analysis reveals a strong and significant positive relationship between principal–counselor collaboration and students’ PERMA well-being, suggesting that flourishing is shaped less by isolated counseling efforts than by the relational and systemic coherence of school leadership. These findings extend the literature on collaborative leadership and school well-being to an ecologically and socioculturally marginalized context and underscore the need for policies that institutionalize collaborative, data-informed, and emotionally responsive leadership practices as a strategic pathway to enhance student flourishing in wetland-based education systems.