You’ve been advocating for your position for years. You’ve done everything you were told to do. You printed the ASCA appropriate and inappropriate duties list, pulled your use-of-time data, gathered your caseload numbers, highlighted the standards, and walked into the meeting with your principal ready to advocate for your school counseling role.

Your administrator may have even nodded and agreed with you. It seemed they really understood your concerns this time. Then Monday came, and you were still coordinating testing (or another non-school counseling role you shouldn’t technically be doing ). If this has happened to you, there’s something important you need to hear: your advocacy may not be failing because you explained your role badly. You may be trying to solve the wrong problem.

We’ve Been Taught That Advocacy Starts With Education

School counselors hear this message constantly: educate your administrator. You should explain what school counselors do and share the ASCA standards. If you just show your administrator the appropriate and inappropriate duties and use data to demonstrate how your time is being spent, then all your problems will be solved. None of this is inherently bad advice. Sometimes an administrator really doesn’t understand the school counselor role, and providing information can absolutely change the conversation.

The problem is that we’ve started treating lack of understanding as the default explanation for every advocacy problem. What if your administrator already understands? What if they know testing coordination isn’t the best use of your time? What if they know your caseload is too high? What if they know you need more time with students?

What if they understand exactly what school counseling is supposed to look like, and things still aren’t changing? That’s a very different problem.

Knowing Isn’t the Same as Changing

Think about testing. Your administrator may know that school counselors shouldn’t be coordinating state testing. They may even agree with you. They may say, “I hear you. I know this isn’t really part of your role.” Then they may follow that with, “So who else is going to do it?” That’s not a misunderstanding or lack of education; it’s an operational problem. The responsibility still exists. Someone still has to coordinate the testing schedule, track accommodations, organize rooms, manage materials, or handle whatever else is involved. Your administrator can agree with every word on the ASCA list and still not have another person available to take the work.

The same thing happens with caseloads. You can show your superintendent that ASCA recommends a ratio of 250 students to one school counselor. They may already know or even agree that your caseload is unreasonable. Hiring another counselor, though, means finding money for another salary, benefits, space, and everything else that comes with adding a position.

At that point, you’re not advocating against ignorance. You’re competing against other priorities.

Maybe they don’t have the staffing. Maybe district policy dictates the assignment. Maybe another department is already overwhelmed. Maybe they’re responding to an immediate crisis that feels more urgent than protecting your counseling calendar.

Maybe you’re also the person they turn to because you’re capable, calm, dependable, and you’ve historically said yes. Sometimes people aren’t giving you more because they don’t value your role. Sometimes they’re giving you more because they trust you to handle things. That’s not necessarily a compliment when it results in your actual job disappearing underneath everyone else’s emergencies.

Sometimes the Problem Isn’t Information. It’s Influence.

This is the piece I think school counselors need to talk about much more. Knowing what should happen and having the ability to make it happen are two completely different things. You know this in every other area of your work. You can tell a student exactly what they need to do, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to do it. You can explain a behavior strategy perfectly to a teacher, but they may or may not use it. You can give a parent all the information they need, but they may not agree with you.

Information matters. Influence matters too. So why do we keep assuming that if administrators aren’t making the changes we want, we simply need to continue and explain ourselves better? Sometimes the missing piece isn’t another data point or another position statement. It isn’t a prettier infographic about appropriate duties. Sometimes the missing piece is your ability to influence the decisions happening around you.

Advocacy Requires More Than Explaining

This doesn’t mean school counselors shouldn’t educate administrators. There are absolutely times when education is necessary. The bigger question is: What is actually standing between you and the change you’re trying to create? Is it misunderstanding? Staffing? District policy? Budget? Competing priorities? Your administrator’s perception of your role? Your relationship with that administrator?

The amount of professional influence you currently have on your campus? Those are very different problems, and they require very different strategies. That’s why simply handing someone another list of appropriate and inappropriate duties isn’t always enough. You need to know what problem you’re actually solving.

The next time you’re preparing for an advocacy conversation, resist the urge to immediately start gathering evidence. Pause first and ask yourself: What problem am I actually trying to solve? Then ask: Is this a problem of information, resources, priorities, policy, relationships, or influence?

You may discover that you’ve been preparing for the wrong conversation all along. You don’t need to stop advocating. You need to stop assuming that every advocacy problem can be solved by explaining your role one more time. Your administrator may already know. Your job now is to figure out what comes next.

Final Thoughts

This is exactly the kind of deeper school counseling conversation we’re having throughout the School for School Counselors Hub, Blog, and Mastermind. The goal isn’t to hand you another script and tell you to try harder. It’s to help you understand the systems you’re working inside, make strategic decisions, and build a school counseling role that actually works in the real world.