The Kids Just Like You Too Much

Classroom Reality Interrupts The Plan

I remember standing in front of a classroom trying to teach a tier one lesson on a campus that had a lot of challenges. And every single time that I would get a lesson going, every single time, Milwaukee would crackle to life. Mrs. Johnson, we need you. Again and again and again, to the point that after a few months, I realized something that kind of took me by surprise. I don't think I had finished a single classroom lesson on that campus. Not one. Because every time I started, coping skills, conflict resolution, emotional regulation, whatever the curriculum said we were delivering that week, something real would happen. A kid would melt down, a disclosure would come, a crisis, a restraint, a child would run. And eventually I went to my principal because I genuinely thought that I was doing something wrong. I remember sitting across from her and saying, What do I need to do differently? How in the world am I going to meet all these expectations? And she sat back, thought for a second, and then she very calmly said, I think the kids just like you too much. I can still remember the complete disorientation I felt when she said that. Because of course I wanted the kids to like me. Of course, I wanted them to trust me. I thought that was the job. I remember realizing in that moment for the first time that the version of school counseling I had been trained for and the version that most school counselors are actually trying to survive might not be the same thing at all. And that realization, that's what this whole episode is about. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. This episode is about a gap I've been thinking about for a long, long time. It's the gap between the job we were trained to do and the job we're actually allowed to do. And what happens to a profession and the people in it when nobody's willing to talk about it. 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. I would love to tell you that I dreamed of becoming a school counselor from the time I was a child. That is absolutely not what happened. I was a classroom teacher working for someone that I still believe was probably the worst principal on the planet. And I needed a way out, and I needed one relatively quickly. And there weren't a lot of openings in my teaching field at the time. So I started looking around at what other people in my school were doing every day. And school counseling looked, I'm gonna be honest here, it looked pretty easy from the outside. You sat in an office, you talked to kids, you filed some paperwork, but the most important thing in that scenario to me was you could go to the bathroom whenever you wanted. And if you've been a classroom teacher, you will understand why that was my primary criteria for entering my master's program. No joke. And I say that without an ounce of shame because I suspect many of you ended up here by an unexpected route yourselves. So thank goodness, thank goodness it turned out that I actually loved the work and I was kind of good at it. I love talking with kids, I loved the complexity of it, and I loved helping families navigate the things that nobody had prepared them for. But I also entered this profession with an incredibly idealized picture of what it was going to look like. I genuinely believed that campuses would be excited to have counseling initiatives. I genuinely thought administrators would want to collaborate. I genuinely believed that if I showed up with enough training and enough passion and enough good ideas, schools would basically throw the front doors open and say, Where have you been? We've been waiting for you. That is not what happened. What I found instead were budget shortages and staffing shortages and impossible ratios and constant crises and competing priorities and systems that often did not have the operational capacity to support the things we were being told we were supposed to build. And I think, honestly, that was probably the beginning of school for school counselors, even though I didn't know it yet. Because I started realizing something that really bothered me. A lot of school counselors that I knew weren't struggling because they were bad counselors. They were struggling because the expectations they were being handed, the models, the benchmarks, the comprehensive program frameworks, none of those matched the actual reality of their campuses. And I know that because I lived it. But I also know that because of what almost got lost in all of that noise. There is a moment from my career that I think about almost more than any other. She shut the door and then she started talking. And I'm not going to share what she said because it's not mine to share, but I can tell you it is the absolute worst story I have ever heard come out of a child's mouth. What I can tell you is that I sat there trying to hold space for what she was telling me while I could hear the classes changing outside, the cafeteria sounds, the kids laughing in the hallway, and the ordinary noise of a school day. It felt so surreal. And then at some point she stopped and looked at me and said, Mrs. Johnson, why are you scared? And I said, Oh, honey, I'm not scared. What you're seeing on my face is sadness. Because nothing like this should ever have to happen to a kid. And she took a breath and smiled. And she said, I knew you would think that. That's why I came to you. Y'all, I had never formally counseled that child. I had barely spoken to her beyond passing her in the hallway. But somehow, somehow she knew I was the safe person. And I think about that a lot. What it means that a child carrying something that heavy had done the work of figuring out which adult in that building was safe enough to tell the truth to, without being counseled by me, without a referral, without a program or a curriculum or a check-in system. Just watching and deciding. And I remember sitting there after she left thinking, I didn't know we were allowed to do that, to just be a person without this framework behind us holding us up. And that realization was the beginning of everything. And that is why I get so frustrated when our work gets reduced to printable activities and performative programming and checklists. Because kids are walking into school counselor offices carrying things we can't even imagine until we're sitting across from them. And the profession deserves frameworks that actually protect our ability to show up for that. And that was what was missing from every school counselor conversation that I kept seeing online. We didn't need more information or more resources. We needed to acknowledge the weight of this, the seriousness of it. And nobody was talking about what this work actually asks of you. So eventually, I did. School for school counselors started unofficially during quarantine in 2020, and it was not some grand entrepreneurial vision. I was watching districtslash budgets. I was seeing counselors with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans struggling to get a job. I had some experience in interview prep, so I started helping people online inside of other groups, just answering questions, talking through scenarios, nothing fancy. And eventually it got big enough that I had to create my own Facebook group just to keep track of everybody. And that's when I started noticing something. These counselors knew textbook information. They knew definitions, theories, terminology, but a lot of them had never been taught how to actually operationalize any of it inside of a school building. So I started doing Facebook Lives. And y'all, this is genuinely embarrassing, but I would sometimes sit in front of my computer for 30 or 45 minutes, trying to build up the courage to hit the button to go live. I was terrified because who would want to listen to me talk? But this little group of counselors kept showing up week after week. And they would say things like, say that again. I've been thinking that for years. I didn't know we were allowed to say that out loud. And I think that's when things started to shift for me. Because I realized I wasn't introducing foreign ideas to these counselors. I was putting words to things they had already been thinking about. I didn't know we were allowed to say that out loud. That thought. Because that's what everything I've done in the school counseling world has always been about. Not information, permission. Permission to question the model, permission to grieve the gap, permission to stop measuring yourself against a standard that was never built for your reality. I thought at the start that I was building a library. What we were actually building was a room. I remember going to a Texas counseling conference a few years ago. I was sitting in one of those big ballrooms where you are a completely nameless face in the crowd. You know the ones. And the person next to me kept glancing over at me. And finally they leaned in and said, I think I know you from somewhere. Well, not you, but I think I know your voice. That was mind blowing because I genuinely thought I was going to be invisible all weekend. But then at that same conference, it happened again and then it happened again. And at some point I thought, okay, so what if I just invite whoever's around for dinner? So I did. I put something out in the Facebook group and told them I was there. I gave them the address to a sports bar nearby and said, show up if you want. Was amazed at the people who showed up. These were people who gave up a Friday night in a fun city to sit with me over nachos and iced tea in the middle of a loud sports bar and geek out on school counseling. And we laughed like we had known each other for years and we connected beyond anything else that was happening anywhere else in that entire conference. And by the end of the night, we were hugging and we were taking pictures together. And I drove back to my hotel that night thinking this is becoming something bigger than me. That sports bar is what I kept thinking about when our mastermind members started asking for an in-person event. So, y'all, we're meeting in Columbus this summer for two days of being in a room like that together with nowhere else to be. But I want to be honest about something here. Getting here and building something worth showing up for required me to admit that some of the things I had been saying with a lot of confidence earlier in my career were just flat wrong. Younger Steph and current Steph would disagree on a lot. But the disagreement that bothers me the most, and the one that I most wish I could go back and correct, is what I used to say about national ratios and models. I believe completely that we should be working toward those standards at all costs because that's how I was trained. That's what everybody else was saying. And so who was I to question that? CurrentMe understands that most campuses literally do not have the operational capacity to support these expectations consistently. And that chasing them inside a system that can't support them doesn't make you a better school counselor. It makes you a more burned-out one. And I think one of the saddest things happening in this profession right now is school counselors internalizing structural impossibilities as personal failure. That hurts my heart because I watch genuinely phenomenal school counselors walk around feeling like they are failing every single day because they just can't meet the expectations that have been placed on them. Now I understand the ratio problem and the worksheet problem that we have in school counseling are actually the same problem. Both of them ask counselors to measure themselves against a standard that was never built for their reality. Because when you can't hit the ratios, you grab the worksheet. It feels like doing something. It looks like school counseling from the outside. And I understand that impulse completely. I felt it myself. But here's the thing: a school counselor's value is not in the worksheet. It's not in the activity, it's in the counseling judgment behind the decision to use it. The ability to read a room, adjust in real time, notice what a kid isn't saying, know when to push and when to back off. That's the master's degree. That's years and years of sitting across from kids in crisis. When the material becomes the product, when the deliverable is the PDF and not the counselor, something gets lost. And not to hurt your feelings, but if someone can pick up your materials, read the instructions, and facilitate them pretty effectively without any specialized training, what exactly is the counseling contribution the system is paying you for? That's a professional survival question we really need to consider because we've already watched this happen to another group in schools, school librarians, deep expertise in information literacy, research skills, curriculum integration, and they were all systematically reduced in district after district to a room management role. Because when the work started to look like something anybody could do with the right software, budget committees started asking whether a degree specialist was necessary. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that school counselors are next, but I am going to tell you that if our work becomes indistinguishable from what any other adult on campus could facilitate, systems are going to start asking the same question. And in some districts, they already are, which is exactly why this next part felt so risky. I did not start out trying to challenge the profession publicly. In fact, I spent years trying very hard to fit inside of it correctly. But eventually, probably, I don't know, 2022, 2023, I got a little more comfortable saying things out loud that I had been observing for a long time. Unrealistic expectations, the emotional damage of telling school counselors that they are personally responsible for changing entire systems, the professional erosion that comes from leaning too hard on resources that don't require counseling expertise to deliver. And I was scared to say all of that. Because there's a side of the online school counseling world that people don't always see. A lot of the big pockets run like the mafia. There are certain godfathers in charge of certain categories, certain lanes you're expected to stay in. And if you don't kiss the ring, you are made to pay. That might sound like an exaggeration, but I assure you, it is not. And I have paid. I have been chastised publicly. I've been pressured to soften my messaging. I've had people who I used to look up to online and at conferences try to mandate changes to my website and my philosophies. People who felt challenged by what I was saying and decided that the solution was just to make me shut up. I've been excluded from rooms that I used to be welcome in, from conversations that I used to be part of, in spaces where my presence became inconvenient. And it bothered me. I won't pretend that it won't. These were people whose opinions I cared about, whose work I had respected. And watching them respond to honest professional disagreement by trying to shut it down, well, that was its own kind of education. But at some point in all of this, I stopped and thought, no, I care too much about this profession to perform like a trained monkey in order to stay in the club, especially when I can back up what I'm saying with research, with decades of lived experience, and with the collective voice of thousands of counselors telling me the same things in my inbox every week. And once I stop trying to earn approval from those people, that's when this show became what it is. And what it actually is, is an argument for something I've started calling sanity-based school counseling. All of the things I've talked about, the gap between training and reality, the structural impossibilities being shouldered as personal failures, the professional erosion of our entire industry happening in real time, those are what are becoming the idea of sanity-based school counseling. And let me try to explain what this actually means because it is not another national model with a new coat of paint. Sanity-based school counseling builds a program around the reality you are actually working inside. Your campus mandates, your enrollment numbers, your specific student population, and their specific challenges and your own personal strengths as a counselor. Not the strengths a model assumes you have, yours. Because the needs of students living in rural poverty are not the same as the needs of students in urban districts. Inner city is not suburban. High poverty Title I is not affluent and dependent, and on and on. And yet, we keep handing every single school counselor in every one of those situations the same framework, and then we wonder why it doesn't work. Or worse, we blame the school counselor. Our current national model does not recognize that. It can't because it was never built to. And the education world keeps trying to make it worse. I remember reading a framework recently that was circulated by a state school counselor leader, presented as a model for solution-focused school counseling. And when I read it, I physically had to put my phone down. Just set it down and stare at the wall for a second. What in the world are we doing here? Why are we diluting counseling practice so we can check boxes? And then I said a few things that I can't repeat on the podcast. Because what I had just read was not only grossly misinterpreting solution-focused brief therapy, it had packaged it into four sessions as a bing bang boom intervention style. Four sessions. Bing bang boom. That's what they're saying is solution focused. Solution focused brief therapy is a sophisticated, evidence-based clinical modality that requires real training and excellent judgment to implement well. What that framework was describing was not solution focused. It was, as you speak, dressed up in solution-focused clothing and handed to counselors as a shortcut, as a checklist, and as something anyone could pick up and run with. That is the homogenization of school counseling. And it is happening constantly from every direction. National organizations, state leaders, consultants, online influencers, all of them continuously flattening one of the richest student support programs in existence into something generic enough to be packaged and sold. Sanity-based school counseling is the argument against that. It says your program should be specific. It should be yours. It should be built around what your students actually need and what you are actually able to deliver, not what a framework developed somewhere else decided you should be doing. And when school counselors encounter that idea for the first time, something happens. You see it. Their shoulders drop, they take a breath, and you can see the shape. Shame lift because someone finally said out loud that the version of the job that they've been failing to achieve was never actually designed for the campus that they're walking into every day. Oh my gosh, they say, I'm not failing. No, you are not failing. You have been handed the wrong map. My principal's answer has stayed with me for years. I think the kids just like you too much. I remember driving home that day thinking about everything that I had been trained to build the programs, the benchmarks, the comprehensive models, and how little any of that had prepared me for what was actually happening in that school. And I think a lot of school counselors are living inside of that same sense of disorientation right now. Trying to build something real and substantive inside of a system that keeps interrupting it, believing that the gap between what they train for and what they're actually allowed to do is somehow their fault. It isn't. The School for School Counselors mastermind exists because counselors needed a place to work through that honestly every week. And if you want to be in that room this July, Columbus, Ohio, July 17th and 18th, the link is in the show notes. But above all that, here's what keeps me here. Somewhere on a campus right now, there is a child doing the work of deciding which adult is safe enough to tell the truth to. Not because of a program, not because of a curriculum or a referral system or a check-in protocol or a four-session intervention. It's because of a school counselor who showed up, who stuck around, who let their face show sadness instead of fear, who didn't know they were allowed to just be that person. And they did it anyway. That child is going to walk into that school counselor's office and shut the door. And what happens next is gonna matter more than any framework ever written. That's why school counseling matters. That's why I built this. If not us, then who? Take care.