School for School Counselors Podcast
Ready to cut through the noise and get to the heart of what it really means to be a school counselor today? Welcome to The School for School Counselors Podcast! Let’s be honest: this job is rewarding, but it’s also one of the toughest, most misunderstood roles out there. That’s why I'm here, offering real talk and evidence-based insights about the everyday highs and lows of the work we love.
Think of this podcast as your go-to conversation with a trusted friend who just gets it. I'm here to deliver honest insights, share some laughs, and get real about the challenges that come with being a school counselor.
Feeling overwhelmed? Frustrated? Eager to make a significant impact? I'm here to provide practical advice, smart strategies, and plenty of support.
Each week, we’ll tackle topics ranging from building a strong counseling program to effectively using data—and we won’t shy away from addressing the tough issues. If you’re ready to stop chasing impossible standards and want to connect with others who truly understand the complexities of your role, you’re in the right place.
So find a quiet spot, get comfortable, and get ready to feel more confident and supported than you’ve ever felt before.
For more resources and to stay connected, visit schoolforschoolcounselors.com.
School for School Counselors Podcast
School Counseling Has Two Futures- and We’re Running Out of Time
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 will require a shift few are talking about.
Stop being helpful. Start being undeniable.
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Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us!
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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.
This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.
This week, National School Counseling Week, thousands of school counselors across the country are going to be celebrated. Some of you will get donuts in the lounge, a shout-out in the morning announcements, maybe even a nice email or card from your principal. And some of you will get nothing. No acknowledgement, no recognition. You'll scroll social media and see other counselors posting their gift baskets and appreciation lunches, and you'll spend the rest of the week wondering if anyone on your campus even knows what you do. Now, I know some listeners are already thinking, well, it's not really an appreciation week, it's an advocacy week. And technically, yes. National School Counseling Week was designed to shine a spotlight on the profession, not to receive thank you cards. But here's the thing: that distinction doesn't make the sting go away. You can know intellectually that the week is about advocacy and still feel the gut punch of being invisible when everyone else is posting their celebration picks. Both things can be true. And pretending the hurt isn't real doesn't make it go away. It just makes you feel like you're not allowed to talk about it. So if that's you, I want you to know I see you, and I still need you to keep listening. Because here's the harder truth. Even the school counselors who do get celebrated this week, by Friday, most of them will go right back to being invisible. Right back to being the person who does a little bit of everything, but owns nothing. Right back to being first on the list for lunch duty and last on the list for professional respect. This probably isn't what you expected me to say this week, and I promise I am not here to be a killjoy during National School Counseling Week. I'm here because I believe in this profession with everything that I have. But loving something means telling the truth and being honest about where it's headed. Welcome back, school counselor. This week I'm laying out two possible futures for our profession. One ends with school counseling fading into irrelevance within the next decade, and the other, it's the path where we finally become the essential respected clinicians we were trained to be. The data is clear, the stakes are real, and the choice is yours. 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. Today we're going to look at two possible futures for school counseling, not hypothetical, abstract futures. These are concrete paths based on what's happening right now in the data, in the policy landscape, and in the day-to-day reality of your campuses. Path one is the trajectory we're on if nothing changes. And I'm going to be very real with you. That path ends with our profession fading into irrelevance within the next decade. Path two is the one we build intentionally. It's going to require a fundamental shift in how we think about our work, our expertise, and our voices. But it's the path that not only saves school counseling, it elevates it to the essential, respected profession that it was always meant to be. This episode will not be a motivational speech. This is a strategic assessment. Think of it as our profession's annual performance review from someone who is immersed in the realities of school counseling on real-world campuses and is watching these patterns unfold in real time. So, first, let's talk about where we stand right now. And I'm gonna paint this picture with data because if we're gonna have this conversation, we have to start with reality. The national student to counselor ratio is 376 to 1 as of 2023-24. Ask a recommends 250 to 1. Only three states, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Vermont, actually meet that 250 to 1 benchmark. And here's where it gets worse. At the elementary level, ratios are often above 600 to 1. And in some states, like Indiana, it's 694 to 1. To top that off, 8 million students in this country don't have access to any school counselor at all. And an even worse never than that, which should haunt all of us, 1.7 million students attend a school that has a police officer on campus, but no school counselor. Let that one sink in a minute. So when we talk about the youth mental health crisis in schools, we're not throwing around buzzwords. This is a legit national crisis. Nearly one in five adolescents experience a major depressive episode in a given year. For girls, it's one in four. 45% of young people ages 10 to 24 report struggling with their mental health in the past two years. And the most devastating statistic: 70 to 80% of children and teens with mental health disorders never receive professional help. So demand and need for school-based mental health support is skyrocketing. More than half of all public schools report raising demand, and fewer than half say that they're actually effective in meeting that demand. The need for mental health supports in schools has never been greater. So the question that I keep coming back to is who's gonna meet it? Now, over the past few years, schools received nearly$190 billion in federal pandemic relief funds called ESSER. And a huge portion of that, about 77% of districts that received it, used that money to increase mental health professional staffing. Almost half of those districts specifically added school counselors. Many of our listeners were hired with ESSER funds. But that money is now gone. Districts had to obligate ESSER funds by September 30th, and they had to spend them down almost immediately afterward. And 83% of districts anticipate that students will continue to have greater mental health needs, even though we no longer have the funding to support them. So here we are. We have unprecedented demand, expiring funding, and a profession, school counseling, at a crossroads. But that's just setting the stage. Now we've got to talk about the two paths available to us and the direction that each one leads. So we're gonna call path one the slow fade. This is where we are now. And we'll start with advocacy because this is the biggest misfire in our profession right now. The school counseling world has spent decades talking to itself. We write position statements that no other industry reads. We create infographics for National School Counseling Week that get shared in our own Facebook groups. We host galas and give awards at conferences attended entirely by other school counselors. Here's my question, and I'm asking it genuinely. When was the last time ASCA launched a sustained advocacy campaign directed at school administrators, or at superintendents, at state legislators, at the people who actually control budgets, staffing, and job descriptions? I bet you've never seen it because I have never seen it either. And here's what makes this even more frustrating: the advocacy that does happen is largely falling on the shoulders of individual school counselors. You sticking your neck out in your building, speaking up in staff meetings, pushing back on inappropriate duties while worrying that you're also jeopardizing your job. That's not sustainable. Ask is asking the people with the least institutional power, you, to carry the heaviest advocacy load. And then we're all wondering why nothing changes at scale. We talk about advocacy as a pillar of the ASCA national model, but our advocacy efforts are almost entirely inward-facing. Y'all, we are shouting into our own echo chamber. Administrators don't read our position statements. Legislators don't attend our conferences. And the people who actually decide whether your campus gets another counselor or another resource officer are not hearing from us in the language that they understand. And as if it couldn't get any worse, it does, because when we advocate as an industry, we tend to lean on just because we say so arguments instead of empirically validated data. We need to show up with outcome data, cost-benefit analyses, and ROI language that decision makers respond to, not pamphlets about what school counselors wish they could do. This is heavy, right? But then there's another problem in path one. And I get a lot of hate mail for this, more than you probably realize, but I'm sticking to my guns here because I really do believe this. One of the things that school counselors have crafted as their own biggest obstacle are materials on platforms like teachers pay teachers. There are ads right now, today, and I know because I saw many this morning, marketing school counseling materials as quote, classroom supports that anyone can use. SEL worksheets, coping skills, coloring pages, feelings, check-ins, all designed to be purchased and implemented by anyone. No training, no clinical judgment, no understanding of the students sitting in front of you. A Fordham Institute review rated many of the most popular lesson plans on teachers pay teachers as mediocre or probably not worth using. 30% of top lessons were found to pose potential harm to students. This is big, but that's not even the worst part. The real danger is that every time a school counselor walks into a classroom with a downloaded worksheet and acute activity, they are reinforcing the message that what we do does not require specialized training. You spent years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars earning a graduate degree. Do you really want to walk into a school and essentially communicate? I do exactly what you do, only I talk about feelings instead of decimals. If a teacher can do what you do with a$4 printable from the internet, then why does the campus need you? Ouch. But I'm gonna warn you that is the question that administrators and their higher-ups are already asking. And our reliance on these types of materials is handing them the answer. And what gets me even more, we have the research showing these types of resources aren't helpful and in some cases can be genuinely harmful. The data is on our side with that. But the other side, the people selling these printables by the thousands, they have zero evidence that any of it actually works. Not a single outcome study, not one data point showing student improvement, not even action research. They are selling based on aesthetic appeal and convenience, not efficacy. So if we are going to stand up and claim to be evidence-based and data-driven, and we should, then by ding dang, we need to follow through with that. We cannot say that we are a research-informed profession while simultaneously filling our student visits with materials that have no research behind them. That's not just inconsistent. Y'all, that is indefensible. And look, really, this isn't even about the printables. It's about what they signal to decision makers about who we are. Every time we lean on materials that require almost no expertise, we are writing our own job description, and it is not the one we want. Y'all are getting me fired up. All right, no, we've got another problem though here. And I hope I'm not beating you down, but y'all, I'm just trying to be real and I promise I'm gonna have some solutions. Okay. This is not all gloom and doom. This next one is gonna push some buttons again, and I'm okay with that. Our profession has adopted short-term counseling as a defining framework. But somewhere along the way, short-term became a permission slip for surface level. Short term does not have to mean shallow. Brief, focused intervention can be powerful when it's grounded in clinical skill, theoretical framework, and genuine assessment of what's happening with a student. But too often what I see is quote, short term being used to justify three sessions of worksheets and a feelings chart, then moving on because that's outside my scope. We have been trained as clinicians. We hold master's degrees. Many of us hold license. And yet we've allowed this profession to drift toward interventions that require almost no clinical judgment at all. That drift is what makes us replaceable. And here's something we don't say often enough. Many of us have more master's level and postmaster's training than the administrator supervising us. But we are still letting them define us as worksheet people. At some point, we have to own the expertise we actually have and stop accepting a diminished version of what we're qualified to do. So, with all of this being considered, the advocacy that talks to itself, the deprofessionalization with cute fonts, and short-term counseling leading to very shallow interventions, let's follow the trajectory to its logical conclusion. Districts are already navigating Medicaid billing conversations. Do you know this? As of January 2024, mental health counselors and marriage and family therapists can now bill Medicare directly. School-based health centers have nearly doubled from about 2,600 in 2016 to nearly 4,000 now. The infrastructure for billable campus-based mental health providers is being built as we speak. And the part no one in our world is talking about is the massive missed opportunity. As school counselors, we know how schools work. We understand the systems, the schedules, the culture, and the constraints. An outside therapist walking into a school building doesn't necessarily know how to navigate an IEP meeting or a master schedule or a district crisis protocol or a conversation with a parent in the drop-off line. We do. That's an enormously powerful position, and we're completely failing to build a voice around it. Right now, those billing conversations are happening without us. Outside providers are building the case for why they belong in schools. And whether or not you can bill yourself, school counselors should be making the case that no one understands the school ecosystem better than we do. We should be essential partners in any mental health model a district builds, not the afterthoughts. But that argument does not land if we've spent the last decade proving that we're interchangeable with the teachers pay teachers download. If we continue down path one with no meaningful advocacy, deprofessionalized tools, surface-level interventions, then when a superintendent sits down to decide who is going to fill the mental health roles on campuses, they're going to choose providers who can generate revenue over the ones who distribute worksheets. And we won't be able to argue because we have never built the case for why our expertise is irreplaceable. Within 10 years, the school counseling role as we know it fades away. It won't be dramatic, it won't be a big explosion. But one by one, our budget lines are going to be redirected and we will no longer have a place working with students. That's path one. Okay, so then let's talk about path two. Path two starts with the fundamental reorientation of who we're talking to. Our advocacy has to move beyond the echo chamber and get in front of the people who hold the levers of power, the legislators, the superintendents, the school board members, and the building administrators. This means showing up at school board meetings with outcome data, not sentiment. It means framing our value in language that resonates with budget decisions, like retention, graduation rates, reduced disciplinary incidents, college enrollment, FAFSA completion rates. Not we support the whole child. Y'all, that doesn't mean anything to a superintendent who is staring at a budget shortfall. And I want to give credit here where credit is due because many state school counseling associations are turning themselves inside out to try to make a dent here. They are showing up at state legislatures, building relationships with education committees and fighting for racial legislation. But most of them are doing it with shoestring budgets and volunteer labor. They need our help. They need our membership, our voices, and our data. The difference between state-level advocacy and what we see nationally is often the difference between people who understand the urgency and the people who are still writing position papers. Get involved with your state organization, y'all. They are doing the real work. Next, we have to stop advocating with feelings and start advocating with evidence. Every claim that we make about our impact needs a citation, a study, or a data point. Because the people making decisions about our positions respond to evidence, but we've been busy giving them slogans. At every level, building, district, state, national, our advocacy needs to be empirically grounded. We need to be the profession that shows its work, not the one that asks to be taken on faith. This is exactly why we maintain such a heavy focus on school counseling data practices inside my mastermind. Because data isn't something that you just collect for a report, or let me be real, a couple weeks a year for a ramp distinction. It's the foundation of every argument you'll ever make for your position. At the start of the school year, only 30 30% of school counselors in my data cohort were consistently tracking their outcomes. And only 20% said they felt good about their data practices. After one semester of focused work together, 90% of the cohort is consistently tracking data, and 100% feel more optimistic about their data practices. And we still have an entire semester to go. That shift didn't happen because I handed them a spreadsheet template. It happened because we engaged in structured consultation and accountability inside a community that made data feel doable instead of overwhelming. That's the kind of infrastructure that Path 2 requires. Now, on to legislative engagement. Some states are already doing this pretty well. Indiana is fighting for legislation requiring counselors to spend at least 60% of their time on actual counseling. Texas has an 80-20 policy, but these efforts are piecemeal and they're reactive. What we really need is coordinated, proactive legislative strategy in every state, led by a focused and intentional national organization with real strategy, not just position papers. An organization that puts resources behind getting our data in front of the people writing education policy, not just the people reading the newsletters. And then in path two, it's time to reclaim our clinical identity. We need to stop behaving like activity coordinators and start operating as the clinical professionals that we were trained to be. Again, you hold a master's degree. You studied human development, psychopathology, assessment, group dynamics, crisis intervention, and therapeutic techniques. You are not a worksheet dispenser. You are a clinician embedded in a school system, and that positioning is powerful if you lean into it. But this means being willing to evaluate the tools and materials that we use with the same rigor we'd expect from any clinical setting. It means asking, is this intervention grounded in evidence? Does it require clinical judgment to implement effectively? Or could literally anyone with internet access do what I'm about to do? So here's a practical filter that I want you to start using right away. Before you use any material in your school counseling work, ask yourself and be honest. Could a parent volunteer do this? Could a paraprofessional? Could a teacher with no counseling training provide this? If the answer is yes, that activity is not demonstrating your expertise. It may still have value as one small piece of a larger intervention, but it can't be the centerpiece of what you do day in and day out. Differentiate yourself from staff. Make the unique value of your clinical training visible and undeniable on your campus. Now, I want to acknowledge something here, because I know this is a hard shift for a lot of you, and it's scary because printables feel safe. And when you've built your entire workflow around activities and worksheets and structured lessons, being told to step into clinical territory can feel overwhelming. I get that, and I'm not dismissing it. And I also want to name something that doesn't get talked about enough. Some of you aren't choosing printables. You've been told that's your job. You may have been hired under the title of school counselor, but what you were really hired to be was an SEL teacher. You push into classrooms, you run guidance lessons, and when you try to do actual counseling, you're told that's not what your role is on campus. I hear you. It's frustrating. That is a systemic problem and it is not your fault, but it is your fight. Because if we accept that redefinition of our role, we're handing over the profession. The answer is not to quietly comply, it's to build the case with data and advocacy for why that model is failing students. And here's what I need you to hear. Those who do not commit to redefining their work in this way are not just risking their own careers. They're putting all of their students at risk. Because when the profession gets replaced, and if we stay on path one, it will. Ouch, right? But it's true. If you're listening to this and you're realizing you really do want to make that shift, but you're not sure where to start, that's exactly what we work on in my mastermind. One hour of constructive consultation per week. That's it. It's not about adding any more to your plate than that. But by doing that, you will build the clinical confidence and the data practices that make you impossible to ignore. I'm going to drop the link to that in the show notes if you're interested. And now I need to talk about something that might kind of feel like a sharp turn, but stay with me because this is critical. Billing conversations are coming to every school district in America. Medicaid reimbursement for school-based services is expanding. More provider types can now bill. Districts are looking at this as a revenue stream, and they should. And let's be real, right? Economics is driving this. District budgets are shrinking, ESSER money is gone, and states are tightening their belts. Mental health billing is money on the table, and somebody is going to pick all that up. Now, I want to be clear about this. Most school counselors cannot bill insurance or Medicaid right now. Billing typically requires state licensure, LPC, LCSW, LMFT, some sort of credentials that go beyond our school counseling degrees. So if you're thinking, well, I'm not allowed to bill, you're right. And I'm not pretending that you could, but here's what I'm saying. This is a fork in the road. And we've got to decide what path we're on. If licensure is accessible to you, if you can pursue an LPC or the equivalent of that in your state, this is the moment to seriously consider it. Not because being able to bill should be your goal, but because being a licensed provider positions you to be at the table when these conversations happen. You become someone the district can't easily replace with an outside contractor. If licensure isn't in the cards for you, whether it's time, money, or just your life circumstances, your job right now is to become so clinically indispensable that you cannot be eclipsed. When the district brings in an outside therapist to handle billable services, you need to be the person they say they can't live without. The one who knows the building, the families, the systems, the one who coordinates, consults, and catches all the things that people don't say, but that you recognize. Either way, here's what you can't afford to do. You cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while these decisions get made. Because if school counselors are not in the room when districts decide who provides mental health services and who gets the resources to be able to do that, we will be written out of the story. We will be written out through budget lines that get redirected to someone who generates revenue. So let's talk about something that I believe is the single biggest gap in most school counselors' professional development, and that is clinical consultation. If you listen to this podcast, that should be no surprise to you whatsoever. You should be receiving consultation for yourself. Structured, ongoing, clinical consultation that builds your fluency as a practitioner. Think about how other clinical professions develop expertise. Therapists in private practice have supervisors. They have consultation groups. They have colleagues they call when they're stuck on a case. That infrastructure exists because clinical skills don't develop in isolation. They develop through dialogue, feedback, and guided reflection on real cases. School counselors are mostly flying solo. We close the door, we see students, and we figure it out on our own. Maybe we vent to a colleague at lunch, or worse, we post in a Facebook group. But that's not consultation. That's not building fluency. That's just surviving. And here's why that matters and why it's so critical to everything else that we've talked about today. You cannot demonstrate clinical expertise that you haven't built. You cannot show up as a consultant to teachers if you've never experienced what real consultation looks like. You can't move beyond printables if you don't have the clinical confidence to know what to do instead. The fluency comes first. The campus presence comes after that. When you are regularly processing cases with someone who can push your thinking, who can ask the questions you didn't think to ask, who can name the patterns that you're not seeing, you start to internalize that voice. You start asking those questions to yourself. You start seeing students differently. And when a teacher comes up to you with a struggling kid, you're not reaching for a worksheet or a checklist. You're drawing on a clinical framework that you've developed through practice. That's what makes you irreplaceable. Not your title, not your credentials. It's the depth of your clinical thinking. And that only comes through when you're engaged in ongoing consultation. Let me show you what that kind of fluency enables. Let's say a teacher tells you about a student that's acting out in class. You and the teacher brainstorm together, and maybe you come up with a behavior chart, more frequent check-ins, something like that. That's collaboration. It's fine. But with clinical fluency, the same conversation goes differently. You ask targeted questions about where the behavior escalates. You start to recognize a pattern. This isn't defiance, it's displaced grief. The student's grandmother died six weeks ago and no one's connected the dots yet. You help the teacher understand what's actually happening developmentally. You explain the process of grief and you recommend trauma-informed responses that they would have never even thought to try. The teacher walks out of that conversation with an insight they couldn't have gotten from anyone else in that building. And that's not because you sat down and read a book or attended a webinar. It's because you were doing the deeper work to sharpen your clinical lens through structured consultation. That's the difference. And it's the difference between following path one or path two. And a caveat here: there are going to be people online who are going to try to sell you consultation that's really just collaboration with a fancier name. Going to hold these co-planning meetings and brainstorming sessions and very basic mental health information attached to the backside of whatever worksheet they're throwing at you. That's not what I'm talking about. What I provide is a true clinical consultation model designed specifically for the school counseling context, one that builds your fluency week by week, case by case. And again, it's the backbone of what we do in the mastermind. And it's why our members rarely download resources, but they are becoming exponentially different practitioners. So if you don't have access to that kind of structured consultation right now, try to start somewhere. Find a colleague that will go deeper than just venting. Join a supervision group or seek out a mentor who will challenge your thinking, not just validate it. The point is stop trying to build clinical expertise in isolation. Y'all, it does not work that way. And then last, we need to talk about building clout on campus. In path two, school counselors, stop being the people who do a little bit of everything, or as we often hear, serve as the junk drawer of the school, and start being recognized authorities on campus. This means proactively communicating your expertise, leading professional development for teachers on topics that only you are qualified to address, being the person that administrators call first when there's a student in crisis, not because it's your default job, but because your clinical judgment is trusted. It means building relationships with administrators where you're treated as a strategic partner, not as an adjunct placeholder who fills schedule gaps and covers lunch duty. So here's where we are: two paths. And I want to be clear, I don't think this is something that gets decided in school boardrooms or at national conferences. Although, as we've talked about today, that kind of coordinated leadership is desperately needed. But y'all, we've been waiting for that cavalry to write up for a long time now. And to be real, we've been shown that ultimately, at the end of the day, it's gonna be left up to us. This decision is going to get made on your campus, in your office, in the choices that you make every single day about how you show up in your building. Every time you choose a printable over a clinical intervention, you're voting for path one. Every time you accept non-counseling duties without somehow eventually pushing back, you're voting for path one. Every time you advocate to other counselors instead of to the administrators and legislators that actually hold the power, you're voting for path one. But every time you demonstrate clinical expertise that nobody in your building can replicate, you're building path two. Every time you show up with data, you're building path too. And every time you consult with the teacher using your specialized knowledge and they walk away with something they couldn't have gotten anywhere else, you're building path to. Be honest with yourself. Because that moment, that reach for the worksheet when you're out of your depth, that's path one. That's the gap we've let form between what our students need and what we've trained ourselves to provide. And it's the gap that path two closes. Somewhere in your building, right now, there is a kid that has been holding it together all semester, showing up, getting by, fooling everyone. And one day this spring, they're gonna sit down in your office and finally crack. That is not a worksheet moment. That's why you got your degree. And in that moment, they're gonna need someone who spent this year sharpening their skills, not reaching for another printable. The question is whether you've been becoming that person. That's what's at stake. Not just your career, their outcome. Ten years from now, when you look back on this moment in our profession's history, which side do you want to have been on? The counselors who saw what was coming and built something better, or the ones who kept their heads down, passed out the worksheets, and hoped someone else would show up to fight the fight for them. So here's what I want you to remember. Stop being helpful, start being undeniable. So this is National School Counseling Week. Yes, celebrate, you've earned it. Your work is hard and it definitely matters. But let this also be the week that you stop celebrating what you wish school counseling was and start building what it needs to become. The theme is amplify student success, and I'll add to that: amplify our professional voice, amplify our clinical expertise, amplify our advocacy to the people who can actually create change. Because the best way to celebrate a profession is to fight for its future. Hey, if this episode resonated with you, if it challenged you, if it lit a fire in your soul, and it made you rethink how you're gonna show up on campus, I want to invite you into a space where path two is actively practiced, not just discussed. And believe it or not, I'm not going to try to convince you to join the mastermind. We have built a free community over on school, S-K-O-O-L, where school counselors are doing the real work. We are going to be talking data, sharpening clinical skills, and having the kinds of professional conversations that you don't find in typical Facebook groups. No complaining without solutions, no surface level cheerleading. There's going to be honest dialogue about how to become undeniable. And this week, that new community, even though it's small, is especially alive. We're going to have National School Counseling Week celebrations, contests, prizes, and there's already some of the best back and forth I've seen from school counselors anywhere online. Y'all has the energy of the good old days, the Facebook groups, if you remember that, before they all got overrun. So I would love for you to come be a part of that. I'll drop the link in the show notes. Join it, come introduce yourself and tell us which path you'll be choosing. I'll see you in there. And hey, if you're one of the counselors that doesn't get recognized this week, I want you to remember something. The goal is not to be celebrated by people who don't understand what you do. The goal is to become so essential that they can't imagine the building without you. That's path two. And I will see you there. Take care.