Social media drama has a price tag now. A Kentucky school district recently settled a lawsuit against social media companies for approximately $27 million, arguing that the platforms helped create a student mental health burden schools have been forced to absorb. But school counselors didn’t need a lawsuit to know this was costing something. The screenshots. The group chats. The parent emails. The cyberbullying investigations. The friendship blowups that started online and landed in your offi...

I don’t buy printable counseling resources anymore. Haven’t for years. But to test a theory on the air, I broke that rule. I bought a popular, well-reviewed anxiety resource from one of the big teacher marketplaces and ran my paper test on it live. I expected to find junk. I didn’t. It was polished. Thoughtful. Well-organized. It even cited real research. And that’s what made the problem harder to ignore. In this episode, I look at what happens when a school counseling resource looks right, s...

If somebody else could do exactly what you're doing after reading the same slide deck- Why did you go to grad school? That's the question that hit me after I reviewed a state-sponsored training that handed school counselors a watered-down counseling model and called it evidence-based. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. But this episode isn't really about one training. It's about what happens when a profession starts confusing the appearance of counseling with co...

On the last day of school, the district sent an email about spreadsheets. But not one person asked what you needed to do your job better next year. Not what you were seeing. Not what students needed. Not what kept support from reaching kids faster. Just the spreadsheet. There’s a name for that kind of silence. This episode is about why nobody asks school counselors what they’re observing… and what it costs all campuses when the people seeing the most are treated like support staff instead of ...

A school administrator once told me the reason I couldn't finish a single classroom lesson was because the kids just liked me too much. She meant it as a compliment. It took me years to understand what it actually revealed. This episode is about the gap between the job we were trained to do and the job we're actually allowed to do. How that gap gets handed to counselors as personal failure. And what happens to a profession- and to the people in it- when nobody's willing to name th...

Most school counselors think the new school year starts in August. I don’t think it does. I think a huge part of your August gets decided right now… in May… while you’re mentally saturated, emotionally exhausted, and trying to crawl to the finish line. Because the things you leave unresolved this time of year have a way of following you right back into the building. The role conversation you keep avoiding. The administrator dynamic you replay in your head at 2 a.m. The resentment. The confide...

You’re about to get a referral that says: “It’s been happening all year.” And somehow… now it’s urgent. This episode is about why that happens, and why treating May referrals like October problems will burn you out fast. Because most of what’s hitting your desk right now isn’t new. It’s late. We’re talking about: The predictable end-of-year referral surge (and what’s actually driving it) How adult burnout reshapes what gets labeled a “problem” The one triage questi...

You’re doing meaningful work. You’re supporting students. You’re handling things no one else on campus is equipped to handle. But somehow, when big decisions get made, it’s like none of that exists. This episode looks at why that happens... and why it keeps happening. The school counseling profession has made its impact almost impossible to see. So in this episode, we’re talking about the visibility problem in school counseling… how confidentiality plays a role in it… and why showing up with ...

You know the feeling. The one that says: If you were better at this, it wouldn't be this hard. If you had advocated more effectively, the caseload would be manageable. If you were really cut out for this work, you wouldn't be sitting in your car wondering if you can walk through the doors.That feeling has a name. And it isn't burnout. In this episode, Steph Johnson makes the case- through peer-reviewed research and a story she's never told publicly before- that the school counseling...

You’re not overwhelmed because there’s too much work; You’re overwhelmed because too much of it is not your job. You're not saying yes because you "lack boundaries". You're saying yes because, in that moment, saying yes made sense. And that’s the problem. ******** Join our new Skool for School Counselors community ******** Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us!&nb...

You sat in the circle. You heard the apology. And you knew… nothing actually changed. Restorative justice can work in schools- the research supports that. But the versions most campuses are implementing... Are something else entirely. Research describes restorative practices as structured, resourced, and time-intensive. What most schools are doing is faster, lighter, and handed off. That's how school counselors end up in the middle of things: Facilitating conversations that aren't meant to ...

There’s a reason the same explanation keeps showing up in every staff meeting, every training, every conversation about struggling students. It feels good. Problem is- It wasn’t built on evidence. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs became one of the most widely accepted frameworks in education without ever being meaningfully tested the way we use it. In this episode, we go back to where the pyramid actually came from, walk through what the research has (and hasn’t) found, and take a hard look at why it...

At some point, someone has probably told you to “find your why.” I gave that advice last week. I wish I hadn't. In this episode, I’m getting more personal than I ever have on this podcast. I’m sharing what one of the hardest years of my career has done to me physically… what happened when I defaulted to the weakest advice I could have given… and what the research actually says school counselors should be doing when purpose isn’t enough to keep you going. If you’ve been trying to survive t...

You said yes… then suddenly it was your job. At some point in your career, something changed. You stopped being the person students came to see and started being the person students got sent to. Behavior referrals. Classroom removals. Crisis containment. The emotional labor nobody else knew how to handle. And it happened one "yes" at a time. In this episode, I'm taking a hard look at how school counselors slowly became the system's pressure valve- justified by "trauma-informed care"- and why ...

"The research supports trauma-informed schools..." You've probably heard it in a staff meeting, read it in a district memo, or repeated it yourself. But when you go looking for the studies, something becomes clear: most people are citing a sentence, not a source. This episode is for the school counselor who's been asked to implement trauma-informed practices without anyone handing you the actual research- and who wants to know what it actually says. What we cover: What "trauma-inf...

Is managing student behavior actually school counseling? If you’re spending most of your week handling behavior referrals, putting out fires, and decoding defiance before you’ve even opened your calendar… this episode draws a line most schools never clearly defined. Because somewhere along the way, behavior didn’t just increase. It migrated. And it landed in the school counselor’s office. In this episode, we unpack how school counselors quietly became the default behavior managers in many bui...

In this episode, I’m challenging a common habit in school counseling: labeling student distress as “anxiety” before it actually meets clinical criteria. You’ll hear the research behind "prevalence inflation," how DSM standards separate normal worry from clinical anxiety, and the four-question test that will change how you approach 504 plans, school refusal, and all your anxiety-related counseling referrals. Because when we mislabel discomfort, exclusion, or instability as anxiety, we don’t just ...

What if the anxiety accommodations you've been writing into your 504s and IEPs are actually making your students more anxious? In this episode, I'm sharing a section from a recent masterclass inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind- one that had members circling accommodations on their plans before it was even over! You'll hear the research behind why avoidance-based accommodations backfire, how we're accidentally teaching students they can't handle hard things, and one dead-simple...

You hold a master’s degree. You studied crisis intervention, psychopathology, and therapeutic technique. So why is your profession still fighting to be seen as essential? It doesn’t have to stay this way- but the window is closing. In this episode, I lay out two possible futures for school counseling: one that ends in irrelevance, and one where we finally become the campus influence we were meant to be. What’s pushing us toward the wrong path isn’t what most counselors think. And fixing it wi...

Most school counselors aren’t ineffective. They’re mis-measured. In this episode, Steph challenges one of the profession’s most sacred assumptions and names something about her own work that most counselors wouldn’t dare say out loud. This conversation explores what it means to do catalytic work in a system obsessed with finished products, and why that mismatch is costing counselors their confidence. ********************************* Join the next-level conversation in my Substack. ********...

Caring is what makes you good at this job. It’s also what puts you in the most danger. If you’re a school counselor who still cares deeply about students, but you’ve noticed yourself feeling flatter, heavier, or more guarded than you used to- this episode is for you. You’re still showing up. Still doing the work. But the caring itself has started to weigh on you, and you don’t know why. In this episode, I talk about a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from being busy or overwhe...

If you’re exhausted in a way that rest doesn’t fix, this episode is for you. School counselors are often told they’re burned out, so they’re handed self-care tips, boundary advice, and mindset shifts that never quite work. There’s a reason for that. In this episode, I unpack the research that shows what school counselors are actually dealing with- and why calling it burnout misses the point. When you name the real problem, the way you relate to your exhaustion, your work, and your expectation...

School counselors are told to: Be flexibleMake it workAdvocate harderAnd somehow still be accountable for everything. But what if the real problem isn’t your mindset- or your effort? In this episode, Steph Johnson revisits an early message from the podcast and names what was missing. She explains why reassurance has a shelf life, how guilt gets mistaken for professionalism, and why endurance keeps getting rewarded in roles that were never built to work. This isn’t about doing more. It’s about...

Why does everything at school seem to turn into a competition... and why does it so often become a school counseling issue? In this episode of the School for School Counselors Podcast , we explore what’s really happening when students compete over small moments and why school counselors are frequently asked to intervene even when there’s no clear behavior problem. We look at the neurological and social drivers behind competitive behavior, how these moments get misread by adults, and how that mis...