Why It Feels Like You're Always Putting Out Fires

We're starting a six-week series highlighting the heroic work counselors do in our high schools and sharing some insight and resources to help them.

A few years ago, when I was a principal in Florida, I had to walk into my counseling office and ask my team to take on one more thing.

I don't remember the exact initiative anymore (Florida has never met an unfunded mandate it didn't love), but I remember exactly how it felt to ask. My counselors were already drowning. Caseloads that had no business being that high. Parent emails stacked up from the night before. A senior in crisis in one office and a recommendation letter deadline blowing past in the next. And here I was, principal, walking in with a clipboard and a new "quick ask" from the district.

I felt sick about it.

Not because the initiative was bad, most of them weren't, but because I knew what it actually meant. It meant one more thing landing on people who were already sprinting just to keep up with the fires already burning. I'd stand in that doorway, initiative in hand, and think: these people didn't sign up to spend so little time with kids.

That feeling never left me. It's a big part of why I do what I do now.

The job nobody trained you for

Here's what I think is true about school counseling, and I don't think enough people say it out loud: you were trained to counsel.

You were not trained to be a financial aid office, a mental health triage unit, a scheduling department, a college research firm, a letter-writing machine, and the calm voice on the phone with an anxious parent, all before lunch, all for a caseload that should legally require three of you.

Nobody sat you down in grad school and said, "By the way, you're going to spend half your year doing damage control instead of the work you actually trained for." But that's the job. And when the job is structured that way, you don't become a bad counselor. You become a firefighter, because that's the only way to survive it.

You know the feeling. You walk in with a plan for the day, and by 9:15 that plan is gone. A parent is in your doorway. A student needs you right now. An email chain from three families is somehow all your problem simultaneously. You put out that fire, and the next one is already smoking. By the time you get to the thing you actually wanted to do, the real counseling, the real advising, the work that made you want this career in the first place, you're out of hours, out of energy, or both.

I want to be crystal clear about something before I go any further with this series: I am not writing this from a place of "here's what you're doing wrong." I built everything I'm about to share with you over the next six weeks because I watched this exact exhaustion up close, in a real building, on real people I respected. This isn't a series about doing more. If anything, it's the opposite.

Firefighter isn't the only option

Here's the question I've been sitting with for a long time: what if the job didn't have to be reactive?

Not because the caseloads magically shrink, and not because the emails stop coming, they won't, but because there's a different way to structure the work itself.

A firefighter runs toward whatever's burning, in whatever order it starts burning. A conductor works from a score. Every section knows its part. The tempo is set ahead of time, not discovered in the middle of a crisis. Nothing about a symphony is easy, but nobody in that room is guessing what happens next.

I don't think counselors need to work harder. I think the job needs a score. And I think handing families a real framework, one that gets ahead of the financial conversations, the college list conversations, the "wait, what do I even do senior year" conversations before they become emergencies, is one of the only things that actually changes the shape of your year instead of just adding to it.

That's what this series is about. Over the next six weeks, I'm going to walk through exactly what "conductor instead of firefighter" looks like in practice, not as a nice metaphor, but as an actual system, built from the ground up for people who are already doing too much.

I'll be talking about this in person at the conference this week, and I'd love to see you there. But if you can't make it, you'll get the whole thing here, one piece at a time.

You didn't sign up to be the fire department. Let's build you a better score.

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