School for School Counselors Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 ...

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...

"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...

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 ju...

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...

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...

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...

Everyone was laughing... until suddenly someone wasn’t. Learn how "burns" work, why it’s usually mutual until it isn’t, and how to know when it’s time to shift from counseling to consequences. Burn culture shows up in those fast, sarcastic exchanges where students trade “jokes” for laughs, status, and social footing... until someone becomes the cost of the humor. In this episode, we unpack why these moments feel so hard to respond to in real time, how adolescent peer dynamics fuel them,...