When They Want Your Spreadsheets, Not Your Insight

A Brutal Year And No Questions

This has been one of the hardest years in my school counseling career with new administration, new programs dropped onto my campus that I haven't necessarily agreed with, new staff, and student situations so far outside the box that I know if I could tell the story to others, they'd just stare at me for a minute before they could even respond. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also got subpoenaed. Y'all, it has been a year, and I haven't made a big production out of it. I'm not a watch me survive kind of person. You're probably not either. But I also haven't kept it a secret. The people around me know this year has been hard because they've watched it happen in real time. And yet, the last day of school came and went last week, and not one person asked, What do you need next year? Not what would help, what are you seeing? What kept students from getting support faster? Just silence. And honestly, I don't think that silence is personal. I think it reveals something very, very wrong for all of us. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. The last day of school looks the same everywhere. Kids spilling into hallways, teachers

Paperwork Matters More Than Insight

breathing for the first time since August, and the year ending the way it always ends. Loud, boisterous, and then suddenly quiet. And in the middle of all that, I get an email from the district reminding me to turn in my use of time spreadsheets. Not a single person asked what I needed to do my job better next year. Not what I was seeing, not what got in the way, not even my plans for the next round of awesomeness. They just wanted paperwork. And it turns out that kind of silence has a name. 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. All right, so this episode is going to be short and sweet, but I hope it's super powerful in really reframing

Labeled Support Staff By Design

the way you see the end of the school year. The fact that nobody asked those questions is not a coincidence, it is a structural outcome. School counselors are categorized either formally or informally on campuses as support staff. And that type of job classification shapes how the campus interacts with you. Support staff are the doers, the people who absorb whatever the rest of the campus can't quite take care of. So when we're seen that way, nobody stops and asks the school counselor what she observed across 400 students in nine months, because that point of view, the school counselor as a clinical observer with real diagnostic insight, doesn't fit the category she's been placed in. The category she's been placed in is closer to the person who handles students when the teacher can't. So nobody asks. And here's what that means for the campus. When a professional's expertise is systematically underutilized, lots of things happen, but there are two

Self Editing And Smaller Language

primary things we really need to be worried about. And they tend to happen under the radar, which is even more problematic. The first is self-editing. The school counselor learns through a thousand small moments in time which observations are considered acceptable and which ones make people uncomfortable. So she starts translating. Instead of saying the lack of management in this classroom is escalating student anxiety, she says, the students in here seem a little overwhelmed. Instead of the adults in this building are severely dysregulated, she says, morale has been difficult. And instead of this caseload expectation makes meaningful follow-up impossible with students, she says, it's been a busy year. She's not lying necessarily. She's learned to say true things in ways that won't create friction. She doesn't have the energy to manage anyway. And there's actually organizational research behind this. In healthcare and workplace psychology, there's a concept called normalization of deviance.

Normalization Of Deviance At School

How's that for a title? And it describes what happens when people adapt to increasingly unsustainable conditions until the abnormal starts feeling normal. That idea is worth thinking about because I think school counseling has normalized a lot of things that really should shock us. The caseload numbers that some of us are carrying, constant crisis response with no recovery time, being pulled from meaningful counseling work to cover lunch duty or run testing or handle whatever other baloney gets dropped in your lap at 10 o'clock in the morning. And because school counselors keep pushing through it, the educational system starts interpreting that as, well, this works. And we all know exactly what this looks like in our schools. It looks like a counselor eating lunch at her desk at 2 15 because that's the first time they've been alone in that room since 745. And nobody flags that as a problem because, well, she ate lunch. That doesn't make any sense. The second thing that happens when expertise goes consistently underutilized is that the campus loses access

Losing The Best Student Need Data

to the most accurate information it has about what students actually need. And let's be specific about that because it sounds dramatic, but it's not. The school counselor is often the best positioned person in a school building to see what's actually going on. And that's because of where she works. She sees students across every classroom, every grade level, and every teacher. She hears what kids say when they're not being monitored. She sees the patterns that emerge when you're watching the whole system from inside of it. She knows which family is in crisis before the crisis even becomes visible. She knows which teachers' classrooms are generating referrals at a rate that suggests the problem is in that classroom, not with those kids. She sees the emotional weather of a campus, the anxiety that's been building in a grade level, the family instability that's spiking, or the interventions that everybody just keeps mindlessly repeating because it sounds good in the district presentation. That is expertise. And schools need access to that expertise now more than ever. Research increasingly points to schools as one of the primary access points for youth mental health support in the United States. And for many students, school is the only place mental health support exists at all. If schools are going to function as de facto mental health systems, then the professionals embedded inside those systems need to be treated as strategic assets rather than the emotional cleanup crews. And nobody asks. Because they built a system that categorizes the school counselor in a way that makes the question feel unnecessary. When you're the support staff, you're the person the system asks things of. You're not the person the system asks. And the tragedy is that it works fine without asking, at least from where the people who aren't asking are standing. I think our school counseling roles will not meaningfully change until the perception of our work does. It will change

Making Counselor Expertise Visible

when enough school counselors stop translating themselves into smaller language, when we have the courage to actually make the assertions and be confident in what we're saying. It changes when enough of us get precise about what we're actually seeing, when our expertise becomes visible often enough that campuses can't pretend anymore that it's not there. Those are going to be the things that change the game. Because I'm going to level with you, waiting for somebody to ride up on a white horse and make the case for us hasn't happened. And I don't foresee it happening anytime in the near future. We have to take care of this ourselves. Some counselors are going to start that conversation with me when we get together

Rebellion And The Columbus Invite

this summer in Columbus. So if that sounds like something you've been needing, the link is in the show notes. But until then, just think on that. Think about the normalization of deviance and how it presents on your campus. Are you the person the system asks things of? Or are you the person the system asks? I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, take care.