Are non-counseling duties taking over your job? If you’re spending more time on testing, paperwork, and hall duty than actually working with students, you’re not alone and it doesn’t have to be this way. In this episode, I dive into the reality of these overwhelming responsibilities and why they can lead to burnout and resentment. But don’t worry, I’m not just here to vent! I’m sharing practical ways to manage these tasks so you can get back to what you do best: supporting your students.

Resources Mentioned:

• Resource: Student Ambassadors Program
• Resource: Beginning of the Year Presentation
• Free Resource: New Counselor Podcast Playlist
• Free Resource: 4-Day High School Counseling Advocacy Email Challenge
• Podcast: Episode 156, Time Management Strategies to Lighten Your Mental Load as a School Counselor with Kaci Ranger
• Podcast: Episode 154, How to Set Up a Peer Leader Program in Your School
• Leave your review for High School Counseling Conversations on Apple Podcasts

Connect with Lauren:

• Sign up for the free, 3-day prep for High School Counseling Job Interviews https://counselorclique.com/interviews
• Visit my TpT store https://counselorclique.com/shop
• Send me a DM on Instagram @counselorclique https://instagram.com/counselorclique
• Follow me on Facebook https://facebook.com/counselorclique
• Send me an email mailto:lauren@counselorclique.com
• Join the Clique Collaborative http://cliquecollab.com

Full show notes on website: https://counselorclique.com/episode160

Mentioned in this episode:

Learn 3 powerful tips for interviewing for high school counseling jobs with confidence through this video series: https://counselorclique.com/interviews/

Hi, my friends. When I sat down to come up with another episode

for you all, I thought back to the podcast survey that a lot of

you all answered, and I was thinking, we need to talk about

non counseling duties. So let's talk about how we navigate non

counseling duties that just take up too much time, because it's a

real thing. And depending on who your administrators are, what

your team looks like, how many counselors are at your school,

you might feel a little overwhelmed by those non

counseling duties.

And then, you know what? You might not be very happy in your

job when you're doing more non counseling duties than direct

hours with students. Isn't that always the case? We want those

direct hours with students, because we want to feel like

we're making an impact, and it often feels hard to make an

impact when you're drowning under paperwork and your desk is

an absolute mess because you have a lot of administrative

type things to get to.

Now when I say administrative, I don't mean like being an

administrator, like an assistant principal at your school. I mean

those tasks that just take up your day, eat at your time with

things that feel a little pointless, like spreadsheets,

checklists, to do lists, paperwork, credit checks on

transcripts, emailing people, all of the other things that are

not directly face time with students.

Okay, first, I want to give you some examples of how I have

dealt with these non counseling duties, like, what are the

duties that I'm talking about here, and how did I really feel

weighed down by them? Because you might be able to relate, and

you might be able to pick out some of these same things, or

maybe yours are a little bit different, but I kind of want

you to pinpoint what those are for you. And then I want to talk

about how to advocate for your time, especially to your

administrators at your school. And then how to think about

possibly outsourcing some of those non counseling tasks, or

just at least considering what could be possible if you were

able to outsource those or put them somewhere else so that you

could get other things done.

You got into this profession to make a difference in your

students' lives, but you're spread thin by all of the things

that keep getting added to your to do list. I can't create more

hours in the day, but I can invite you into my counselor

clique where you'll finally catch your breath. Come with me

as we unpack creative ideas and effective strategies that'll

help you be the counselor who leaves a lifelong impact on your

students. I'm Lauren Tingle, your high school counseling hype

girl, here to help you energize your school counseling program

and remind you of how much you love your job.

So let's talk about those non counseling duties. When I say

that, what comes to my mind are things like testing, lunch duty

or hallway duties, bus duties, and then those other

administrative tasks or responsibilities. So let me give

you an example of each of these, and where I have really felt

stuck with each of these, and then I'll kind of tell you my

problem solving process and how I worked through these things

and what the result was.

So I'm pretty sure I've told this story before, but it's been

a while. I have very vivid memories of being in my first,

second, maybe even third year of being a counselor at my school

and being stuck with testing. I was the 10th grade counselor, at

that time we were grade level counselors. We didn't roll with

students. We did not divide by alphabet. We were strictly grade

level counselors, because that's how many counselors we had at

our school. Maybe some of you can relate to that. I was the

10th grade counselor. And along with being the 10th grade

counselor, came being in charge of the state testing that all

10th graders took. It was one of those graduation exams that

tested their English and Math basic skills, and they had to

pass it in order to graduate from high school. They gave it

to them in 10th grade, if they didn't pass it, they had a

couple more tries to get their diploma.

Okay, I was the one in charge of all of the testing for, I mean,

how many students was that? Over 450. I mean, probably 480

students. And I had the delight of organizing the test booklet,

sharpening the pencils, putting them all in the correct baskets,

training the teachers and making sure it all went well on the

test day. That was not even all of it. I know, if you have had

any part of testing, you know a lot goes into it, from filtering

lists of students, taking out the students with

accommodations, planning the accommodations for those

students and who is going to give those tests, what you're

going to do with all the other students who aren't testing. I

mean, it feels like a big responsibility that they want to

put on one person.

At this point in time, our district was not on board with

counselors not having testing. So what I'm saying is counselors

had testing on their plates at this point, there was not a push

to take this off counselors' plates as a non counseling duty

yet. So I have these memories, terrible memories. Let's talk

PTSD about these memories. Yes, I do. I would be sitting in a

locked testing room, basically a room with a metal door, no

windows, with all these baskets as I was trying to organize

these tests. I would come in when it was still dark outside.

I would leave for the day when it was still dark outside.

I was exhausted. It felt so high pressure. I mean, all you hear

is, you don't do this right, you mess up, you're going to jail. I

mean, that's what I thought about when I was leaving work

and when I was doing this. It was high stress, high stakes. It

was tedious, it was boring. It was all those things.

And I don't remember why, but either my principal called me

into his office or I went in there. I think I was going into

his office kind of after hours, asking for help, saying, Hey, I

could just use some extra hands. Or, teachers are complaining

about this. Can you get some of them on board with me? I don't

know. I was just asking for something because I was doing

something that I didn't want to do, and I was getting a lot of

pushback, and I didn't feel like I had people on my team. And now

I can rally people for something, but it's very hard to

rally people to get excited about testing that no one wants

to do. And it looked like I was, I mean, I was the one in charge

of it, and so it looked like I was giving all these directions.

I was the strict person about this, which really does go

against everything in my personality. I don't care. I

don't care about anything that much. It's hard to care about

testing, which took me away from working with students.

I remember feeling so absolutely defeated because when I went to

talk to my principal, he just didn't hear me or see me. I

remember turning around leaving his office and crying. I have

only cried a handful of times in this job as a high school

counselor, and this was one of those times I just knew that

counting test booklets, sharpening pencils, writing

procedures for teachers. It just wasn't my skill set. It wasn't a

good use of my gifts. And now I am a big proponent for being a

team player. I would never just not do something because I was a

snowflake and I just didn't feel like it aligned with my gifts,

like I am going to put my head down and I'm gonna work hard. I

am not saying I could not do something hard. It was just this

feeling of being misunderstood, knowing that this wasn't the

role of a counselor, and feeling like I had no help and no

support. I was on an island.

And a lot of you feel that way right now, like what I just

described is how you go to work every day. You feel like nobody

hears you, nobody sees you, and you're doing things that are

outside of your scope and outside of what your

responsibility should be. I hope you know it can get better. This

is not everywhere. It's not every school. It's not every

administration. This was not my experience forever. It partially

had to do with the principal, and when the principal shifted

and the district initiative shifted, everyone started

advocating for counselors a little bit more to have less of

those non counseling duties.

I will say I did during this season, put my head down and do

what I was supposed to. And there was a push to have

administrators come in and take that role of testing coordinator

off of the counselors, but it was a slow grind. Let me tell

you, like even though they put the title on an assistant

principal, they didn't want to be trained. They didn't want to

do it either. It was so hard, a real slow burn, to get that

responsibility off of our counselors.

Next, I remember a very specific time when my principal, who I

loved so dearly, sat us down for a meeting. It was like our team

meeting, and he was going to come to it. He was sort of

coming to us as a mouthpiece for the teachers, but I also knew

that he was a huge advocate for us as counselors, and he wanted

to support us, but he basically sat us down and said, okay, the

teachers want you to have duty in the hallways just like they

have. They feel like it's unfair that you all are not doing that

part of the job that they are doing, that they have to give

out some of their planning time to do it. And he basically was

like, tell me why you cannot do this. Like he knew in his heart

that we shouldn't be doing it, but he was like, I need

something to go back to them and tell them.

So we laid it all out there. We said we are doing crisis

management. If we're on duty in the hallway and we have to leave

because there's a crying student, or there is an absolute

emergency where there's a safety issue with a student, if you

want us to leave that spot in the hallway that we are supposed

to be manning and watching and checking passes, if we walk

away, are you okay with that? Is that okay that you're not gonna

have that person there? Because chances are we're gonna get tied

over in a meeting, or we're gonna be in a crisis situation,

or we're not going to be able to report to that spot. So if

you're okay with that, then sure. And we said we have a very

specialized skill set that not anyone could just jump in and

handle that crisis situation with a student who is wanting to

end their life. Okay, if you have another body who could

stand in the hallway and check hall passes, that feels a little

more generalized that I'm gonna say anyone could do.

And then, as counselors, it feels like we just have to be

available for walk ins. You know, we have people scheduling

appointments, and that would be really hard to do, to block off

a big chunk of time every single day to sit in the hallway when

there are parents who want to come in and talk to us, or who

are making appointments to come in and talk to us. It just felt

silly to have to say to us that, yeah, you must be available to

people who are walking in. You must be available for people to

be able to make appointments with you, but then to say, Nope,

you're actually going to use your time sitting in the hallway

here.

So we got out of that real quick. It was something that we

had never had on our plate before. And then when it was

brought to our principal to potentially put that on our

plate, we came in with a PowerPoint ready to say why we

couldn't do it and what we would be doing instead. And he went

back and reported, and they backed down when they realized,

yeah, I don't want to be the one having those conversations with

students in case of emergency.

So he, our principal, walked away from that and basically

said, okay, then I want you to be visible when you can. I want

teachers to see you in the hallways and to be talking with

those students when you're not doing this duty position. I want

you to be with students all the other times. Don't be the person

who's sitting in their office just doing all the paperwork. I

want you to get to do what we hired you to do, which, let me

tell you, feels really good as a counselor, to have that kind of

support. He basically was like, I want you to be doing the

things that make your program a ramp worthy program. He said, I

will cut these non counseling duties if I can have you working

on board, everybody on board to have a program that really

serves students that we can be proud of.

And I think it's inevitable that in high school, you're going to

have a lot of those administrative duties, more so

than elementary and middle. Now, that's a generalized assumption.

My only experience in elementary and middle is in my internships.

I have never had a full time job in either of those. But my

perception is that high school has a little bit more of your

basic paperwork, your spreadsheets to manage, reports

to fill out and submit, letters of recommendation to write, 504s

to manage, write, print, schedule, disseminate. You can

keep that list going, I'm sure. I've never been in one of those

other level roles, but I'm pretty confident that high

school counseling does have a lot of this.

So let's first accept that like that's gonna come with the

territory. But let's also be proud that we get to work with

the coolest students. I know I'm a little biased here. I won't be

too braggy that high school counseling is the absolute best.

But if you're listening to this, chances are you probably think

this is true too. I would gladly take a few of those type of non

counseling duties, the administrative paperwork type

stuff, if it meant that in exchange I got to keep working

with teenagers. I think it's a small trade off that I'm willing

to take.

Okay, so how do we advocate for our time as a counselor with

administration? It could totally depend on where your

administration is coming from, what the culture at your school

is like, but I think if you are going to have the opportunity to

get a new principal or any new administrators, this is your

shot. I don't want you to miss it. You only get one shot. Okay?

You have a new principal, you have a new administrator. Use

the beginning of the year presentation that I have in my

TPT store and offer to do that in front of your principal or

your administrators in some sort of team meeting. If they can

hear about what you do and what your role is, everybody's gonna

be clearer up front.

I also like to think about sharing my calendar with these

people, these important stakeholders, and you know this

means that you actually have to use your calendar. You can't

just share a blank calendar with them. But when you have that

sort of transparency with your stakeholders, and I'm talking

the people that you're working closely with, those

administrators, maybe department heads, I don't know who needs to

see it. You could have a different one for the public

that's public facing, and a different one for administrators

or your clerk in your office. But I found that the more

transparent I was or the more outspoken I was about trying to

be open about what I do, then the more I was able to dispel

myths about what was actually going on behind the scenes. Of

course, you cannot be sharing what you're talking about and

who you're seeing, but I just found that by being as

transparent as I could be within Re. Reason that people couldn't

assume what I was doing was what they made up in their mind.

And I totally understand being on the other side of this

mentality, like I've been the person who assumes all the way

down the storyline and make something up until I come up

with what I think is rational in my head, because I don't have

all the information at hand. And I would even say in my marriage,

a phrase that we use a lot in our marriage, is believing the

best. We try and believe the best in each other. And I think

that that can be taken into the workplace too.

Now I do know not everybody is going to do this job or their

job in a school with complete integrity, some people are going

to be difficult to work with, like, that is a real thing, and

so that is hard to believe the best of those people. But I want

to try and give people the benefit of the doubt. I want to

hope that people are going to work with integrity and are

going to say what they are doing behind the scenes. So hear me

out. This is not a plea for toxic positivity. I know not

everybody is going to be the best. I know that we cannot

believe the best about everybody, but this is a mental

shift. If you find yourself always thinking the worst about

somebody's work ethic or what they're doing, if you haven't

taken the time or energy to understand the bigger picture or

understand what makes them tick and what kinds of things they

like doing as a counselor, like if you're assuming the worst

about your teammates or your administrators, I think doing

some deep digging into your own thoughts and opinions about them

and their work standard would be a good thing to consider.

When I talked about sharing your calendar and using your

calendar, if you found yourself saying, Well, I don't really use

my calendar, and that is a struggle for you, that time

management and calendar piece of your department and your role is

a struggle, then I would encourage you to go back and

listen to the episode I did just a couple weeks ago with my

friend Casey Ranger. She had some great tips about time

management and batching things and blocking off your schedule

and getting things done. So I'll definitely link that in the show

notes for you.

The last strategy I want to mention about your non

counseling tasks and how to just manage them make them a little

bit more bearable, would be outsourcing them. Of course, we

would like to outsource them out of our building, not even have

to think about them, outsource them out of our brain, and not

even have to bring them to the forefront. But I'm talking about

using people in your building who are either offering to help

or who could take on something else that is more aligned with

what they're doing. And so think about some of the tasks that

maybe you do that aren't directly student centered, or

that take away from the time that you could be using with

students directly. And then think about the people around

you who you could help bring in to help support those things.

So here's one big area that I felt like I could take off my

plate if I could come up with somebody to help me. Some of

those 504 duties. We know them. We love them. When I looked at

my calendar and how I was spending my time, this took up a

huge chunk of time, and it felt like parts of this were pretty

repetitive, like emailing teachers, scheduling a meeting,

confirming with parents, sending calendar invites. And so here is

where I brought in my counseling clerk. We had a clerk or

secretary who sat in our office, and you know, she could do a lot

of tasks for us that were not counseling related, but

supported us as counselors. Now, I had to be organized on my end

to make this happen, and so when she was doing things like

scheduling, she was having to look at my calendar, so I had to

keep that up to date, and I had to put in every meeting that I

had and every appointment that I had and when I was going off

campus to train for something, in order for her to know when I

was available to make that happen.

This was a game changer for me. I just felt like I was doing a

lot of behind the scenes communication, which I don't

mind doing. I like to communicate, but it was just a

lot, and it felt like something that someone else could do if I

found the right person with the right skill set. And let me tell

you, our clerk was the right person. She made it happen. It

made those meetings so much more bearable, because when I was

sitting down to actually concentrate on my 504

responsibilities, do you know what it was? It was sitting down

with the student, the parent and a teacher, where I was being the

one who was running the meeting, talking, kind of doing

counseling type things in a meeting type setting. All of the

behind the scenes stuff was taken care of by someone else.

Another thing that came to light when I looked at my calendar

where I thought, hmm, maybe somebody else could help us with

this, was having to constantly stop what we were doing as we

were enrolling new students and going and giving them a tour.

Now, I love walking around the school with new students and

chit chatting and showing them around, but at the beginning of

each semester, when you have lots of students waiting to

enroll, and they are trying to get into class, it almost felt

like a frivolous thing to walk them around the school. And I

say that like if I put myself in the student's shoes, yes, that

is very important. I would want to walk around and know where

the auditorium was or where the cafeteria was or where the

bathroom was. But is there somebody else in the school who

could help with that.

So we thought maybe we could have some students partner with

us that feels like something that is not super private,

doesn't violate any FERPA violations. We would have

students come in and essentially be a peer leader or peer mentor,

be a friend to a new student, and help connect them to clubs

and the basic things that they might need to know around the

school. It was really cool to watch those friendships blossom

by equipping students to be leaders in the school and be

welcoming faces, smiling faces to new students.

So in the past, where I would have to sit down with a family,

make a schedule, then take them and walk them all the way around

the school, I could almost pass them off to a student. I'm

helping equip a student to be a bolder, more confident leader in

our school, and I'm helping these two students connect and

make a peer relationship happen. Hence peer leaders were born. I

have a whole episode on how to build out a program like this,

and a TPT resource that has all the important pieces done for

you. So I'll link those in the show notes as well. I think

that's a very practical how to episode, if you're thinking,

wow, I could equip some students in my school to do something

like this for other new students.

And then lastly, a place that I don't want you to miss in terms

of outsourcing, would be taking on a counseling intern. If you

have not taken on a high school counseling intern, yet, this may

be the sign that you need to do so. Yes, it is real work to

teach someone and to give them feedback and to have them kind

of shadowing you and taking the reins on some things. However,

there are so many benefits to furthering the profession

through your influence as a supervisor to an intern. I talk

all about this in episode 134, what I learned from supervising

interns. It was not easy.

I do just want to take a minute and highlight though, when

you've got some good synergy going with you and an intern,

you can multiply yourself. And I'm not saying put all the non

counseling duties on them. That's definitely not the goal,

but you can use them to multiply your direct counseling duties,

because you're in it to make an impact with students, right? And

so if you care about making those direct hours happen more

for your caseload, with an intern, you can do more

classroom lessons, more small groups, more individual

counseling sessions.

You also get the perspective of someone who's eager to learn

right now, and then, you also have their connections to

troubleshoot anything that you're going through with a

student, with their professor, their peers and you. You get to

be learning too. You get to continue being a student when

you have an intern alongside you.

So I want you to look for opportunities to take on more

direct counseling hours so that you can make an impact on

students just like you signed up to do. This doesn't mean all of

your non counseling duties will disappear altogether, but if

you're making small efforts to shift your own mentality around

your transparency, around your calendar and your

responsibilities, you may win over some of those big decision

makers to get them to realize you are best serving students in

the places where you are especially trained to serve

students as a counselor, managing sensitive issues that

not everyone in the school is equipped to do.

If you're a new or aspiring high school counselor, I'd encourage

you to bop over and grab the new counselor playlist that I put

together for you. It's a list of curated podcast episodes that I

think will be perfect for you as you're embarking on a new

journey. I have that listed in the show notes for you. If you

are a veteran and this episode was just refreshing for you, a

breath of fresh air so that you can think through some of those

tedious old tasks you do, and then envision a world that has

less of them, I'm so glad you listened to this episode. I hope

it serves you in some new ways. A great free resource for you

would be those copy and paste advocacy email templates I have

for you to send over to your administrators and to your staff

that advocate for what you do. I challenge you to send them to

your people and see what happens next. Go to

counselorclique.com/challenge and you can get those email

templates sent right to your email.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you for another episode next

week.

Thanks for listening to today's episode of High School

Counseling Conversations. All the links I talked about today

can be found in the show notes and also at

counselorclique.com/podcast. Be sure to hit follow wherever you

listen to your podcast, so that you never miss a new episode.

Connect with me over on Instagram. Feel free to send me

a DM @counselorclique, that's C, L, I, Q, U, E. I'll see you next

week.