No One Knows What You Do- And That's Dangerous

The Quiet Emergency In Schools

School counseling programs are disappearing, and our response to that as a profession is making it worse. So I have to ask, are we trying to give away our jobs? Because from where I'm standing, it's starting to look that way. Gaston County, North Carolina is the most recent example I want to talk about. School counseling positions were eliminated, and the remaining school counselors were moved to halftime positions spread across multiple campuses. Responsibilities are being redistributed in ways that blur lines this profession has spent decades trying to combat. And those lines, let's be clear, exist for students, not for us. So what happened after these cuts were announced? There were some posts, some frustration, and then there was quiet. The quiet part is the emergency. Not Gaston County specifically. They're a symptom. The emergency is a profession that keeps being surprised by something that is entirely predictable, responding the same way every time, and then wondering why nothing changes. Nobody is coming to fix this for us. Not a national organization, not a policy change, and not a groundswell of public support from the families we serve. And we'll talk about why that is in just a few minutes because it's not what you think. But here's what's true. The only people who can change this are already listening to this episode. And that's exactly what we're going to get into. Hey school counselor, welcome back. If your district decided to eliminate your position tomorrow, could you walk into that room and make them change their mind? Because if you're doing what most school counselors are doing, the real answer is no. As a discipline, we've relied far too long on position statements, models, and emotions rather than the tools that actually move the needle. And because of that, school counselors are losing their jobs. That's what we're fixing today. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity in 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. Okay, so how does something like Gaston County happen? I want to kind of resist giving the easy answer because the easy answer is that administrators don't value school counselors, or that budgets are just sometimes hard to balance, or that nobody is out there fighting for us. I've been guilty of saying a few of those myself. But while those things may contain some truth, they're not the explanation. They're the outcome. One of the issues at play is that no one seems to know the difference between a school counselor and a school social worker, because we haven't made that difference obvious to the people making the decisions. These are two distinct professions built for related but genuinely different purposes. A school social worker working at the top of their training is connecting families to resources, navigating attendance barriers, and coordinating with child welfare. A school counselor working at the top of their training is delivering direct counseling services, individual counseling, group work, crisis response. Both are necessary, but they are not interchangeable. And when a district gets into trouble, they tend to want to collapse them into one single halftime position where real students lose access to counseling and wraparound supports. That is the kind of loss that won't show up on a budget spreadsheet, but will eventually end up showing up somewhere. That's the first layer of our visibility deficit. And it points to something much more longstanding and deeper than any single budget crisis. There is a visibility deficit in this profession that has been accumulating for years. And when I say visibility deficit, I mean something very specific. I don't mean awareness. Plenty of people know that school counselors exist. I'm talking about the kind of visibility that makes cutting a school counseling position feel like it is too costly before it's even done, instead of just being regretted after the fact. Let me give you an example. Think about what happens in a budget meeting when someone proposes cutting the athletic director. There is immediate resistance, right? Immediate outcry from coaches and parents and the community that shows up to the Friday night games. The cost of that cut is apparent to everyone in the room before the vote even happens. Now think about what happens when a school counseling position goes to the chopping block. Who in that room is making the cost of that decision apparent? What does the administrator sitting across from that decision actually know, right? Concretely and specifically about what that school counselor has been doing and what they stand to lose when they're gone. In too many school buildings, if we're being honest, the answer is not enough. And so there's another part to this that needs to be said it's not entirely the fault of the people who are making the cuts. It is partly the result of a profession that has historically been better at doing the work than communicating its impact. We close the door, we serve the kid, we document in the system, and we move on to the next one. The work is often invisible by design because of confidentiality, the nature of counseling, and the fact that some of the best outcomes are the things that didn't ever happen, a crisis that didn't escalate, a student who didn't drop out, a family that got connected to something before it became an emergency. And the families on the other side of that work are often at some of the lowest points in their lives. A husband who makes it into rehab, a parent learning to regulate their anger before it becomes something worse. A family that got through a potential suicide crisis with their kids still here. Those families are not going to show up to a school board meeting and testify publicly about what their school counselor did for them. And that's not because they're not grateful for what you've done, but showing up means disclosing their dirty laundry in front of their neighbors and their community and their child's future teachers. Y'all, the stigma surrounding mental health, we all know this around addiction and crisis and family dysfunction. It doesn't just pause because a budget is on the line. If anything, when it gets public, it gets louder, right? So the very things that make families willing to walk through our doors, the promise of confidentiality and the safety of the counseling relationship are the same things that make them unable to defend us when it counts. It's a system working exactly like it should, but it also has a cost. And that cost lands squarely on our shoulders when the budget conversation starts, and nobody in that room can speak to what we actually do. So if the families won't speak for us, and the outcomes that we produce are invisible just by their very nature, and most of the work we do happens behind closed doors, what does that leave? It leaves us. And that's exactly where we need to go next. So let's talk about what we've been doing in the school counseling field and why it isn't working. When school counselors mobilize around a crisis, when the social media posts start, when the petitions start circulating, or when the hashtags start appearing, I understand that impulse. I get it completely. I might even do it myself because it comes from a real place. But I want you to honestly think about what those efforts actually are. They're emotional appeals. They contain references to ASCA standards and recommended ratios. They contain language about what school counselors are supposed to do according to our professional framework. What they almost never contain is hard data. Specific, building level, district level, longitudinal data that connects the school counselor presence to the outcomes that people making budget decisions actually care about. Attendance, discipline referrals, graduation rates, crisis escalation frequency, teacher retention. Those numbers make a CFO or a superintendent or a school board member sit up differently in their chair. And like it or not, that's what it's going to take. Emotional appeals don't work because those standards don't matter to the decision makers. In a budget meeting, feelings lose to numbers every single time. So if we show up with passion and a position statement and the person across the table from us is holding a spreadsheet, we have already lost the fight. So here's a model we should think about instead. The athletic director in a district doesn't just have visibility, they have a portfolio. It contains a win-loss record, gate revenue, booster donations, college scholarships earned by students in the sports programs. They can walk into any budget meeting in this country and put a number on the table, and not just any number. A number that connects to things the community already cares about. Pride, legacy, their kids' future. Nobody asks the athletic director to justify their position in the abstract. The data does it for them in advance before anybody ever even thinks to question that. So ask yourself, what's your portfolio? And before you answer, because I already know what some of you were thinking, Steph, that's apples and oranges. The athletic director can report that stuff. I can't. I can't tell everything because of confidentiality. I hear you, but I want to push back on that because I think a lot of us have accidentally collapsed two very different things into one blanket restriction. Confidentiality protects the content of the counseling relationship. It does not make your outcomes unreportable. Those are not the same thing. The football coach doesn't tell you what he said to a kid at halftime. He tells you the kid scored three touchdowns in the second half, right? The conversation part stays private, but the outcome gets counted. You are not disclosing anything protected when you report that discipline referrals in ninth grade dropped after you implemented a certain intervention. You are not violating anybody's privacy when you document that attendance improved among the students in your tier two caseload. You are not revealing counseling information when you note that three seniors who were academically at risk in October graduated in May and that you were actively working with all three. Those are your wins. Those are your scholarships. The counseling content stays in the room, but the outcome goes in the report. So an all-or-nothing approach to confidentiality is understandable because we are trained to protect information and we take that very seriously. But when that instinct extends to hiding every measurable outcome from every stakeholder who could use it to protect our programs, it stops being ethical and starts being professional invisibility. And we cannot afford that right now. So back to the question: what's in your portfolio? Not your caseload number, not how many groups you ran, the actual operational impact of your presence in that building connected to outcomes the people making decisions already care about. Captured over time, reported clearly in language that can be communicated outside of a counselor-to-counselor relationship. And let me address something else because I know this is coming if it isn't already here. Steph, I hear you, but I am already drowning. I don't have time for data collection on top of everything else I'm having to do. And I get it. But I'm gonna say something that might sting a little, but I'm gonna say it with love because I know you need to hear it. If you are too busy to document the impact of your work, you are too busy doing work that isn't yours to do. That is a role clarity problem. And it's one that we've talked about a lot on this podcast. Because the counselors who feel the most overwhelmed, the ones who are running testing coordination and covering lunches and handling discipline referrals, those are often the ones with the least amount of documented counseling impact because they've drifted so far from their actual school counseling role that the work that they're doing can't be communicated as school counseling to anybody that's making the budget decisions. Bottom line, you cannot be too busy to protect your own position. That is not a sustainable professional strategy. Not now, not in today's educational climate. So if you are consistently too overwhelmed to capture any data on your program's impact, your position is at risk. And when the cut comes, you will not be able to say you never saw it coming. The busyness that feels like proof of your value on your campus is invisible to everyone who isn't inside of that with you. Numbers are not invisible. This is the work that is hard because it requires consistency and discipline over a long period of time before anything ever really starts feeling urgent. You have to capture your data when the year's going fine. You have to build the evidentiary record in the years before anybody tries to cut your position, because by the time they get the idea, it is too late to build your defense. And this doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to look like a big research study or data disaggregation. It starts with deciding which outcomes you're gonna track this year and then actually tracking them. That's it. Minimal data points captured consistently and reported clearly. That's the beginning of a portfolio. And that's exactly what we walk our mastermind members through each and every school year. As a matter of fact, the day I am recording this episode, I just walked my mastermind members through my most minimal of project-based advocacy interventions that had tremendous results in my district. And we're going to be forming a collaborative lab to test this out in this coming year, step by step, walking through it together with project-based advocacy. So if you've been wanting to do this kind of work in your school counseling program, but you just didn't know where to start or how to keep it going, that's what we're there for. You can find us at schoolforschoolcounselors.com/slash mastermind. And to the school counselors who are currently thinking, I've tried. I've pushed, nothing changed, and I burned out trying to enact change. I hear that. I believe you. The long haul is genuinely long, right? And the structural resistance is real. And sometimes you do everything right, and the position gets cut anyway. But there is a difference between a school counselor whose position gets cut because no one genuinely understood what they would be losing, and a school counselor whose position gets cut despite everyone knowing what's being sacrificed. The second situation is still terrible, but it is also a fundamentally different professional reality. Because the decision makers on that side of the situation can fight to restore it. They think twice before making the same call again. And they talk differently about school counseling for the rest of their career. That's how the profession's visibility accumulates or doesn't over time. One data point at a time, one decision maker at a time, even when it feels like it's all for nothing. Gaston County is a symptom. The diagnosis is a profession that has been waiting for someone else to notice how valuable they are, and who continues to show up with passion instead of proof when things get desperate. The real truth is that nobody is coming to do that for us. And our passion, while it is noble, is not enough to save a position without data behind it. This is not an indictment or an accusation of anybody in Gaston County. Those folks have been working their guts out. They didn't do anything wrong. And this is not playing the blame game. But we should feel outraged. We should feel empowered to take the next steps to start building our cases. And we should be looking toward our leadership to provide better resources for confronting these situations than they have historically. So I want to end with something here. Usually I'm uplifting and motivational. Today I'm going to be a little bit more in your face. Gaston County is not an isolated event. Y'all, it's a preview. State budgets are under tremendous pressure. Districts everywhere are sitting down to make hard decisions, and school counseling positions are on those lists. If you are waiting for a national organization to step in and make the case for you, I want you to hear this. That cavalry may never come. And even if it does, a position statement issued after the cuts are announced has never saved a single position. What saves school counseling positions is the work that happens before anyone ever thinks of cutting them. That means data. Consistent, specific, building level data that makes your impact obvious to the people who make decisions. Not your caseload number, not the reference to the ASCA model, the actual operational impact of your presence in that building, captured over time, communicated clearly, and in language that makes sense outside of a counselor-to-counselor relationship. That means real relationships need to be built with your administrator, with higher-ups who shape the conversations in your building about how we talk about school counseling long before formal decisions get made. And that also means endurance. Doing this work consistently throughout the years when nothing feels especially urgent, when nobody is asking questions, when it all feels like it's just extra and for nothing. Because the record that you build in those quiet years is the only thing that has any chance of mattering when the contentious situations arrive. And I want you to know something before I let you go. As a full-time school counselor myself, in weekly consultation with school counselors all over this country, I know in and out what our work actually looks like. I don't just hear the outcomes of tough situations. I watch you walk through the hard things. I watch you wrestle with best practice when there's no clear cut answer. I watch you love the students you're trying to serve, even when those students make it extremely difficult. I watch you carry things home that were never yours to have to carry and show back up the next morning anyway. This work is not easy. It has never been easy. And yet you keep walking through that door every single day saying, Let me do it. Let me help. And my friend, that says everything about your character as an educator, but also as a human being. Kids would be in a world of hurt without you. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. I'll see you next time. Take care.