Four Decisions to Make Before the School Year Starts

When Everything Feels Like Yours

You're gonna walk onto your campus this fall to start the new school year, maybe for the first time, maybe for the tenth time, but regardless, something's gonna happen that nobody necessarily warns you about. It's not gonna be a crisis or a kid in your office that you're not exactly sure how to help. Those things are gonna happen, but they're not the thing. The thing is this: you're gonna stop at some point in the year, and everything on your campus is going to feel like it belongs to you. The kid who is struggling, the parent who's upset, the teacher who's overwhelmed, the administrator who just needs somebody to cover lunch duty, the testing schedule, the 504 meeting, the counseling referral that really needs to go out to therapy. And all of it is going to feel like it is sitting there in your lap waiting for you to pick it up. And the part that nobody tells you is nobody's gonna stop you. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. Today we're getting into a question that sounds simple but changes everything once you start asking it. What is actually your responsibility and what's not? All school counselors struggle with this because your grad program may have taught you the role on paper, but it did give you a system for sorting out every messy situation that's gonna land in front of you. And since this was a hot topic of conversation in our mastermind just a few days ago, it's probably on your mind too as the new school year gets underway. Today we're gonna walk through four places where school counselors take on things that aren't theirs. And I want to give you the language and the strategy to finally give some of those back. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. All right, so here's what we're getting into. I want to talk about the single most dangerous pattern in this profession. And it starts early, sometimes in your very first year on a campus. But if you're being honest with yourself, it doesn't stop just at the first year. Now you went to graduate school, you did your practicum, you did your internships, you know things. You have skills. That is not the problem. The problem is that most of us never created a sorting system. We don't have a good way to look at everything that's thrown at us on a campus and determine is this really for me to handle or is it not? And without that filter, we default and we end up handling everything that somebody sends our way because we care, because we were trained to help. And it feels wrong to walk past something that looks like it needs us. And when we struggle with that, when we end up inundated with too many responsibilities and we're feeling overwhelmed, people try to tell us we just need better boundaries. Essentially, they're telling us, good luck, and I hope you figure it out. But what if instead we could actually find the places where this happens the most? That's what we're going to do today. We're looking at four areas and asking one question. Does this really belong to the school counseling program? Let's start with

Matching Admin Hours Is A Trap

the one that punches you in the gut almost instantaneously, especially if you are new to school counseling. But honestly, I know veteran school counselors who are still doing this. You get to campus and you notice that your administrators are staying until 5, 5:30, 6 o'clock in the evening. Maybe they're getting there at 6:45 in the morning, and you start to feel like you should be matching that. You start to feel like if you leave at your contract time, you're somehow not committed enough or working hard enough or earning your place. And to be real, it is really hard to work out of the mindset of if everybody needs me all the time, that means I'm needed. I was in a consultation session just a few days ago where multiple school counselors admitted that thought was always running in the background. It is a real thing, and it will keep you on campus way past when you should be home. So we've got to be rational about this. Administrator schedules are built around a different role with different functions, and we're going to call this out a different level of compensation. You are not doing the same job. You do not have the same responsibilities. And trying to match somebody else's hours because it makes you feel less guilty is not a professional strategy. That is a resource leak. And when your role already asks you to take on some of the hardest stories on your campus, adding unnecessary hours creates one more drain on resources you actually need to do the work. And there is research to back this up. Stephen Hobfall's conservation of resources theory, which you hear me refer to all the time, tells us that people are more driven to prevent losing resources than they are driven to gain new ones. And when you're spending resources faster than you can replenish them, you enter what he calls a loss spiral. Each resource you lose makes you more vulnerable to losing the next one. That's the danger of a loss spiral because the depletion starts accelerating. So the first thing to really think about is is this pace actually mine to match? Or am I running on somebody else's clock because nobody told me I don't actually have to? So that was you taking on someone else's working rhythm. But what happens when it's not just about time?

The Role Flood Of Extra Duties

What if it's entire sets of responsibilities that don't belong to you that still keep coming to you? You know what I'm talking about. You're building the master schedule, you're covering the front office during lunch, you're coordinating testing, you're spending way more time than everybody else's on lunch or bus duty, you're flirting with assigning discipline consequences because the AP is in a meeting. Y'all, we all know those are not school counseling services, but they show up on your plate anyway because nobody drew a clear line about what school counseling actually is on your campus. And this is not just my opinion. Researchers Scarborough and Colbreth published a study in 2008 using an instrument called the School Counselor Activity Rating Scale. And what they found is exactly what you would expect, but you probably haven't heard anybody say this clearly. School counselors consistently reported wanting to spend more time on counseling, consultation, coordination, and curriculum, right? The things that actually define our work and less time on clerical work, administrative tasks, and the random responsibilities that just get dumped on whoever's available. But here's the part about that that really matters. Caseload size did not predict the gap. The mismatch was firing regardless of how many students the counselor had. So volume alone does not explain this. Something about the structure of the role in that study mattered as well. And here's what makes this even more interesting. Ask a surveyed about 1,600 school and district administrators nationwide. And pretty broadly speaking, administrators actually did understand what school counselors are there to do. That may shock you, but they actually did. The problem was when they got specific, the lines got a whole lot more fuzzy. Significant numbers of administrators still reported that their school counselors were responsible for things that AskA classifies as inappropriate counseling duties: coordinating 504, building master schedules, coordinating state testing. So think about that for a second. This isn't necessarily a matter of your administrator having no idea what you do. Knowing the job in theory is not the same thing as knowing where the lines are. So both of you can be operating in good faith and you could still end up in what's called a role flood. Your administrator may value you, they may understand counseling, but then the morning comes and somebody needs the testing coordinator or the AP is underwater and the scheduling is behind, and all of a sudden the theoretically understood role of the school counselor starts to bend. Which means when they hand you something that isn't part of your job, it's not necessarily a battle. It's just a moment for education. And the sooner you build the fluency to be able to have that conversation constructively, calmly, professionally, with the data and the evidence in your hand, the sooner you'll stop drowning in the work that doesn't belong to you. And I'll tell you, that fluency is something that we actively work on in our mastermind community. Things like impression management, how to frame a conversation with an administrator so you're educating without creating conflict, how to negotiate role boundaries inside of a functioning professional relationship. That kind of professional influence doesn't just happen. You have to build it. And it's a whole lot easier to build it with other school counselors who are doing the same thing. So those first two categories are about work that should not be on your plate. Somebody else's schedule, somebody else's job description. But this next one is different. This isn't about something that you need to get away from. It's

Relationship First With Hard To Reach Kids

about a timeline you can't rush. Because at some point, you're gonna have a kid in your office who will not connect. They won't make eye contact, they won't talk, they won't engage with your activities or your interventions or your very best, most positive counselor energy. And you're gonna feel like a failure. But is that failure actually yours? No. It may simply be that you haven't spent enough time with them yet. The relationship is not built yet. And for some kids, especially kids who have learned that adults are not safe, that relationship takes way longer than you think it should, longer than your administrator thinks it should, and longer than your MTSS timeline suggests that it should. And the research backs up the importance of that relationship. Shirkin Carver published a meta-analysis in 2003 and found a modest but consistent association between the quality of the relationship and outcomes across child and adolescent treatment. Then they looked more closely at the pieces of that relationship a few years later in 2006, and counselor interpersonal skills, things like empathy, warmth, and genuineness, those were the stronger predictors of youth outcomes. And that matters in our schools because a lot of the kids that are sent our way didn't exactly volunteer to be there, right? Technique matters, activities matter, but the perfect intervention cannot bypass the relationship. They're looking for evidence that you're safe before they're going to give you anything real. So the work is not to try harder in the counseling office. It's not to pick another printable. The work is to show up outside of the techniques. Walk past their classroom. Hey, bud, glad to see you. That's it. Swoop into lunch and give some knuckles. Show up in the courtyard or at PE to play kickball. You're not doing counseling in those moments, but you are doing something more important. You're proving that you're gonna keep showing up regardless. Maybe they decide to talk to you next week. Maybe it takes three months. Maybe you never get the relationship you hoped for. You cannot control that part. What you can control is whether you keep giving them reasons to believe you're safe. And that 100% belongs with you. That patience, that willingness to keep showing up for a kid that just isn't ready to communicate with you yet. That is one of the best things about being a school counselor. It really is. But there is a version of this impulse that's really gonna hurt you, and it's the hardest one on

The Line Between Support And Therapy

the list. You are gonna have a student in your office who needs more than you can provide through short-term school-based intervention. You're gonna know it. You are going to feel it in your soul, and you're gonna refer them out, which is exactly the right thing to do. But then something's gonna happen and the parents not gonna follow through, or the wait list is six months long, or the family can't afford it, or the administrator is gonna walk up to you and say, Well, can't you just keep talking to them? And you're gonna feel that pull to say, Well, if I don't do it, nobody will. If I stop, this kid is gonna fall through the cracks. And I'm the only one that knows what's going on with them. And the last point, you heard me tell you to keep showing up, but now I'm gonna tell you that there is a line. Both of those things can be true. And knowing where one ends and one begins is developing your sorting system. The school counselor role is not designed to become a substitute for ongoing outpatient therapy. You cannot solve an access to treatment gap by trying to make yourself the treatment. That is the hard part of our job because the kid still needs help. The family may be facing very real barriers, and the outside system may be completely failing them. All of that can be true. And you still cannot personally become the missing treatment system. It is not a lack of compassion on your part. It is just recognition that your school counseling role has limits, even when the system around you has no answers. I can remember working on a really tough campus where families either could not or would not physically drive to access mental health care services. So the campus was always flooded with these big needs. And for a while, I worked myself inside out, trying to meet all of them. I felt like that was what a good school counselor should do. And to be honest, there was also a little piece of me that enjoyed others saying, I don't know how you do all this. But one day I had a revelation. I had confused caring deeply about the outcome with being responsible for producing the outcome. Somewhere along the way, I had decided that if I just cared enough, I could fix it. The question I had to learn to ask myself was am I compensating for this situation in a way that has now made me responsible for solving it? And once I'm really set with that, I felt permission to return to the role of being a helper and not a fixer. And there is a huge difference there. All right, so what I actually do with all this, here is something that you can take with you very concretely.

The Mine Not Mine Sorting System

Before your first week on campus or before the next week starts, I want you to take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, and on one side write mine, and on the other side, write not mine, and I want you to start sorting. Direct counseling services are mine. Matching my administrator's hours because I feel guilty, not mine. Building relationships on campus is mine. Covering the front desk because nobody else is available, not mine. Showing up consistently for students who have not developed a relationship with me, that's mine. But becoming the substitute for ongoing therapy because the outside supports are not there, that's outside my scope. You are not gonna get everything perfect. And a lot of things are gonna land in a gray area, and that is where your clinical counseling judgment comes into play. But the act of sorting, the act of asking yourself, is this actually mine before you engage in it? That's the game. And the more you do that, the better you will get at making those decisions quickly. Now, I do want to be straight with you because this may feel like too tidy of a solution, right? You may feel like there

Why This Takes Practice

is no way in the world this is even gonna matter. Who cares if I think it's my job or not? I still don't get a vote. And I do want to acknowledge that these changes do not happen overnight. And they certainly do not happen the way that social media and counselor blogs and articles try to convince you they will, right? And like it's as simple as asserting your boundary or showing your admin a printout of appropriate and inappropriate school counseling duties. So if you're feeling suspicious of this right now, good. You should be because there is an art to this. It is full of nuance and it takes time and it takes practice. And it also takes having people around you who understand the difference between knowing where the line is and how you actually handle that line on a real campus with a real administrator and real political dynamics. That is exactly what we work on in the mastermind. Not just the theory of it, but the real world practice. I'll give you an example. One of our mastermind members shared just a few days ago that by strategizing and using the approaches we've talked about in the mastermind, she's been able to make huge inroads with her administrator, who was once very suspicious and distrustful of school counselors, but is now coming to her for insight and advice. Y'all, it can be done. So if that sounds like something you need, check out what we've got going on over at schoolforschoolcounselors.com/slash mastermind, and I think you'll find your people. Hey, I started this episode by telling you that you're gonna walk onto campus and everything is gonna feel like it's your

Keep Caring Without Owning Everything

responsibility and that nobody is gonna stop you from handling all of that. But now you know the question. And the question is, does this actually belong to me? Your training taught you what school counselors do on paper. But your administrator, even an administrator who understands counseling and values what you do, may not be holding the map for every line you're gonna have to draw. So you're gonna have to learn how to build that map for yourself. And sometimes we just gotta build it together. So here's what I want you to leave this whole thing with. The goal is not to care less, the goal is to stop confusing caring with ownership. Keep asking that question, does it belong to me? And you'll get better at the answer. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. And hey, if this episode helped you, would you leave a quick review for us on Apple Podcasts? I read every single

Review Request And Goodbye

one. It delights my heart every single time, and it helps other school counselors find the show. It takes about 30 seconds, but it means the world. Until next time, I hope you have the best week. Take care.