80-20 School Counseling Mandates: Not Quite the "Win" We Expected

Are you grappling with 80-20  expectations? Do you feel the pressure of tracking every minute of your day while managing a huge caseload?

In theory, the idea of 80-20 is good, where 80% of counseling services directly impact students, with the remaining 20% of efforts supporting these services. However, a recent 80-20 mandate shows the complexities of its real-world implementation, the hurdles encountered by counselors, and the unsettling realities that have emerged.

This episode further discusses the expectation for school counselors to log their time usage, leading to concerns about overwork and perceptions of underperformance. As part of this, we highlight the crucial role of advocacy at both state and national levels and explore the potential power of social media as a tool for raising your voice.

Listen now to become better informed- and ready for advocacy!

**********************************

Our goal at School for School Counselors is to help school counselors stay on fire, make huge impacts for students, and catalyze change for our roles through grassroots advocacy and collaboration. Listen to get to know more about us and our mission, feel empowered and inspired, and set yourself up for success in the wonderful world of school counseling.

Hang out in our Facebook group

Jump in, ask questions, share your ideas and become a part of the most empowering school counseling group on the planet! (Join us to see if we're right.)

Join the School for School Counselors Mastermind

The Mastermind is packed with all the things your grad program never taught you IN ADDITION TO unparalleled support and consultation. No more feeling alone, invisible, unappreciated, or like you just don't know what to do next. We've got you!

Did someone share this podcast with you? Be sure to subscribe for all the new episodes!!

Transcript

Steph Johnson: 0:07

All that glitters is not necessarily gold. We've learned that very recently here in my home state of Texas with the 80-20 mandate for school counselors. I'm going to hop into it this week and tell you my thoughts and takeaways from the initial implementation of 80-20 in our state, what I'm hearing from other school counselors and where the major drawbacks are coming from. I'm so glad that you're here for another week of the School for School Counselors podcast. This is absolutely the highlight of my week to be able to bring you these episodes to perhaps inspire you to expand your thinking or your perception of your craft, and I'm just so grateful and humbled that you continue showing up to hear more episodes. It's just so awesome.

Steph Johnson: 1:01

We recently received a new review from a school counselor listener. Jane Sturford said love this show. The review goes on to say thank you for creating a show that tells it how it is. You managed to cover how it feels to be a school counselor in a real way, dealing with unsupported families, burnt out faculty members and children struggling with depression and children struggling with depression and anxiety. Times are tough, but I love being a school counselor. This podcast helps me stay motivated to focus on the aspects of the job that I love. Thank you so much, jane Sturford, for such a phenomenal podcast review. I tell you what this is better than gold to me. Speaking of gold this week, this is the highest praise and biggest compliment that you could pay to me and to my team as we strive to get all of this information and awesome content out to you each week. So it just motivates us, so it propels us forward, and so reviewers like Jane Sturford are the gas that keeps this engine rolling. So thanks again for that wonderful, wonderful review.

Steph Johnson: 2:16

So this week I want to talk about the idea of 8020. So 8020 is that elusive goal that we have in most of our school counseling programs, where we're striving to reach 80% of services that have direct impacts on students and 20% more supporting roles, fair share duties, those kinds of things. So let me break it down for you a little bit, just to refresh your memory and you probably are familiar with this, but it never hurts to hear it again, just to solidify it in your mind. If someone were to walk up to you right now and say what is 8020 and tail, could you give them a quality rundown? Let's hop into it real quick. Generally, and talking just kind of in a general consensus. 80% would include direct student services, which would be things like your school counseling curriculum, your individual student planning, responsive services with individual and group counseling, crisis response, those kinds of things. Your 80% would also include supporting services. So these are times when maybe you're referring students out for services, you're giving families resources out in the community that they can utilize, you're consulting with other professionals to try to develop strategies to support students on campus, trying to figure out how to better support student achievement and how to advocate for students through collaboration with stakeholders. Those are all part of that 80%. Basically, how I think about it is any activity that would have a direct and substantial impact on a student or group of students. Then your 20% goes into more of the program management side of things. Emails, planning, events, diving into accountability data. Sometimes fair share responsibilities will fall into that category. So basically all of the things that support direct services but aren't directly tied to looking at students eyeball to eyeball or talking to someone person to person. So in a perfect world we would be aligning with this 80-20. We know it's been recommended by the American School Counselor Association. We know intuitively it's probably best practice, but we also know that those numbers are notoriously hard to meet.

Steph Johnson: 5:01

Here in Texas we are struggling now with the implementation of 80-20. It was really weird the way it came around. It just sort of popped up out of the blue. Hey, everybody, we're going to be aligning with this 80-20 mandate. It came from our legislature. All school districts are expected to comply. Initially everybody was super excited about this like validation. Finally we have the opportunity to do our jobs as we know we need to be doing them. But, as with anything in the political arena or bureaucracy, you know that we've hit some hiccups, we've hit some snags and it's been really interesting to see how this has evolved. And through watching that evolving of approaches, of reconsidering our workloads, what we're doing on campuses, trying to work with administrators on this 80-20, some of which are none too happy about the mandate we've come to some interesting conclusions and I think I'm in a unique situation because I get to talk to so many school counselors across the United States that I get an even more in-depth glimpse of what's really happening at schools.

Steph Johnson: 6:22

So here are some of the problems with implementing or mandating an 80-20 ratio. First of all, when 80-20 was mandated in Texas, there were no preliminary requirements that were also mandated. What that means is 80-20 was expected to apply to any school counselor, regardless of their campus size or their caseload. Let that sink in a minute. So if you're a school counselor carrying 700, 800, 900 students, you're expected to hit the same ratio as a school counselor who maybe has 300 or 400 students within their purview. That's an interesting conundrum to be in. When 80-20 was mandated and school districts were directed that they must comply, there was no additional funding given for hiring additional school counselors to meet appropriate school counselor to student ratios. Here in Texas they like 350 to 1. That ASCA recommends 250 to 1. There was no assistance given with that at all. And so you have a lot of school counselors now who are carrying these crazy caseloads who are saying there's no way on this earth that I'm going to be able to hit 80-20 with what I'm doing Now. Theoretically, that ratio should apply, no matter your caseload. But in the real world here, in the real world where we all live you and me we know that it definitely does, because a lot of the things that start to tie up your time outside of school counseling, those things get bigger and bigger and bigger with the more students that you introduce into the ecosystem. So it's inevitable it's going to be difficult for school counselors with large caseloads to hit these at ratios and to be able to be successful.

Steph Johnson: 8:18

Secondly, I think we need to take a close look when we're talking about 80-20, the composition of that 80%. Now go back and remember when I just walked through an 80% a moment ago and it said that 80% could be direct student services or could be supporting services. Here's the problem and this is just personal opinion, but it's one that I've seen echoed with many, many conversations that I've had with other school counselors as your caseload gets larger, your support services ratio increases. The more students you have in your site, the more services you're probably referring out to, and so this referral process could begin eating into your direct student services time Eventually. What could end up happening is school counselors end up working like glorified case managers instead of counselors. You see the problem Without additional staff or additional support, there's no way to meet the needs of seven, eight hundred students without referring lots out for services. So an interesting problem that I haven't really heard many people talking about, but I think it's something that we really need to be aware of. We need to be thinking about these things.

Steph Johnson: 9:43

Third, we have seen and this is anecdotally, but we have seen some districts finagling their circumstances for auditing purposes. So random districts, reportedly random, in our state, have been selected to be audited with regard to this 80-20. And so I've heard stories of districts in Texas changing school counselors' titles, where there are no longer school counselors but maybe their social emotional staff, their SEL teachers, their student support staff, those kinds of things, to get around this 80-20 requirement. We've seen a lot of school districts transfer responsibilities onto school counselors in an effort to try to force them to hit 80%, but haven't removed any of the other responsibilities they had to begin with. So basically they just piled a whole bunch of extra counseling stuff on them and said, hey, this will help you hit your 80%. We're just going to give you so much work to do that it's inevitable you're going to hit 80%. Unfortunately, real life doesn't work that way, so that's been a problem for some folks.

Steph Johnson: 10:57

And, in an interesting turn of events, our education agency in Texas has told school counselors not to log time spent on job responsibilities outside of the allotted school day. Now why is this interesting? Because the things that support direct services are going to happen after school. If you're trying to hit an 80-20, you're going to save the stuff that you don't want to log, you're going to save the stuff that maybe is pushing that 20% on up into 25, 26%, and you're going to do that on your downtime. The state says, hey, really, in essence, the way I interpret this we really don't care about whether or not you're actually hitting 80-20. We just need the stats to show that you're making it happen. And school counselors have been told things like teachers work after hours. So should you teachers spend unpaid time after school doing their job duties? So should you? It's only fair those kinds of things.

Steph Johnson: 12:00

It's really concerning, very concerning, that this is the rationale that's been given out as blanket statements to large groups of counselors. Not only is it a boundary violation and unhealthy and borderline exploiting workers. I think it's dangerous a little bit. We'll get into that a little bit more in a minute but I think it's crossing a dangerous line. I think people are not taking the time to understand how the role of a school counselor on campus is so different than other folks on campus. If they can't see it, they don't believe it and they're not really understanding the extra stresses involved, of seeing the worst of the worst among your students every day. There is an emotional toll to that, there's a mental health toll to that. I don't have to tell you that. You see and hear it every day too All the compassion, fatigue, the vicarious trauma. And now we have legislators and leaders within our school counseling communities coming back and saying yeah, anyway, we still expect you to get this done, do it on your own time, make the numbers look good.

Steph Johnson: 13:20

I was in a recent conference workshop where I thought a full-fledged brawl was about to spark off. I legitimately was sitting in a chair thinking should I get my camera on my phone ready because this is about to become something to see? It was this conversation that was being had. How can you mandate 80-20 when you're not giving the help? You're not giving the support, you're not giving the ratios and now you're telling us to make up the slack on our own time. Very concerning situation going on here. The last concern I'll give you regarding 80-20 is kind of a curveball.

Steph Johnson: 13:59

If you've been a member of my School for School Counselors, mastermind, you've heard me talk about this off and on for the past year, year and a half. If you're not part of that Mastermind. You may not believe me when you hear me say this, but there is a pretty influential leader in the national school counseling space who truly believes that one of the best options that we have for evaluating school counselors right now is quantitatively. That's a sink in a minute. So they believe the best way to evaluate your job performance is to have you log your use of time, turn it over to your administrator and receive a score based on your quantitative statistics. I have no words for that. That may be an untruth. I've had lots of words about that in my Mastermind. I will save them as I'm in a public forum here. But suffice to say I think that is a dangerous thought. I think it is dismissive of so much of the work that you do, the kinds of intervention that you provide, and generally communicates a misunderstanding of our role on campus. But you need to know these thoughts are out there. You need to know that people are talking about these things. It's good to be informed about them. So if the opportunity arises where you can somehow make your voice heard, you can speak intelligently about the concerns and goings on in other places All of these things when we begin mandating time without the appropriate reinforcements in place can really affect school counselors.

Steph Johnson: 15:42

We end up being overworked, right? We're working on our own time making our numbers look good, not logging that stuff. No one really knows how much time we're putting in outside of the school day because we're not supposed to report it. It's a really concerning situation. Side note to say I'm still recording that information. It's going to come in handy one day. I feel confident in that and there's no rule saying you can't record it for your own reference. So keep that in mind.

Steph Johnson: 16:12

Texas counselors, I also think it really oh goodness, what's the word I'm trying to think of the right word for this? I think it really enhances the perception that school counselors do so little on campus that we have to be held accountable for our time. You don't see speech pathologists accounting for every minute of their day. Certainly they may be accounting for service minutes provided to students, but they're not accounting for their day insofar as they're logging. This phone call Lasted 10 minutes. That phone call lasted 15 minutes. I referred a student to an outside therapist that took X number of minutes.

Steph Johnson: 16:55

There's no one else on our campuses to my knowledge that's running this kind of use of time data. And it's an interesting conundrum, because the whole use of time thing started with really wanting to advocate for our programs, really wanting to prove what we do every day, really wanting to make an impression about we're not just sitting talking with kids about their feelings and handing out candy and playing board games all day. But on the flip side of that sort of what it has evolved into is now this subclass of workers on campuses who can't be trusted to manage their own time as professionals. They now must log every single minute. It's concerning. It's concerning I know I've used that word a lot in this episode, but this is really really concerning. Two and I talked about this earlier I think there's an ethical concern here too.

Steph Johnson: 17:55

We don't have enough people talking about vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue on our school campuses, and although I realize that teachers are subject to that too, especially if you're working in a tough campus right, you have a super high-need student population it can be draining. I know I was a teacher in a school just like that, so I get it. But I can say unequivocably that as a school counselor, I have way more compassion fatigue concerns than I ever had as a teacher, because as a teacher I might know some details. I might be concerned about my students, I might have an inkling something is wrong Once they get to the school counselor, typically the majority of the details start coming out, and sometimes those details are worse than we could have possibly imagined. Not in all cases, thank goodness, but a lot of the time. That's what I mean when I say we're here to see the worst that our campuses have to offer. We have to try to figure out how to support students, some of them in the worst times of their lives. Some of them were supporting through generational trauma. Some of them were supporting through super high A scores and just lots of experiences that children shouldn't have to go through. But here we are walking through it with them, trying to help them, trying to find the resources, the services that they need, and that wears on your heart and on your mind. So we need to be giving an eye toward vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue as we're talking through these campus scenarios.

Steph Johnson: 19:46

With regard to use of time, I also think it's really hard to teach others to hold healthy boundaries and assert healthy boundaries when we're not being allowed to hold our own. It's the classic do as I say and not as I do kind of thing. It feels very disingenuous. This whole conversation reminds me of the conversation we had in the previous episode, where we talked about the cycle of role dysfunction for school counselors and how we're given these random duties. We succeed more and more as piled on us, and so we're given more and more to complete and to do, and I think that really describes a lot of what's happening here in this 80-20 conversation. I didn't do justice to the explanation at all. If you need to hear more about the cycle of role dysfunction, go back to episode 73. It will line out all the details for you on what we have coined the cycle of role dysfunction for school counselors.

Steph Johnson: 20:50

What do we need? What do we do about all of this? Most of us our hands are tied, especially if you're in a state that's legislating 80-20. You're kind of in a precarious situation. You do want to record your use of time data so that you can show what you're doing on campus. You want to use it for your own data-driven initiatives, just because that's good school counseling, but at the same time, you don't want to be held to these unrealistic expectations, these maybe perhaps borderline, unethical practices that are being supported.

Steph Johnson: 21:23

There's just a lot of stuff going on here, and I think really the number one thing that we need are strong voices from the start. So often when legislation like this has passed, we hear a little bit about it as it starts to near the finish line and folks want us to really raise our voices and help get it passed or defeat it or whatever's going on. But we need more involvement from the get-go of these initiatives, whether good or bad. And that falls, guys, that falls on us. We have to get more active in our state organizations. We have to really put ourselves out there and say how can I help? Do you know what's coming up? Who's your legislative point of contact in this association? I would like to be more involved in that and make your voice heard. Learn how to get active on social media, how to build an effective email campaign, how to build an effective publicity campaign. Those are skills our organizations need right now. Sadly, many of them are really lacking in those areas, so it's going to be up to us to pick up the torch and help run part of the race, because things are getting pretty dicey in the school counseling world.

Steph Johnson: 22:46

I think we need a strong voice nationally as well, and I'm going to lay this at the feet of our national organization. I think we need to get more intentional and more intensive about really examining all of the aspects of legislation like this 80-20 rule in Texas. We can't conform to 80-20 if we don't have the right circumstances in place. We just can't. We're amazing School counselors are the best people on the planet. You hear me say that all the time, but there are laws of reality that are at play and you're not going to be able to hit 80-20 just because you want to. You've got to have the right circumstances in place, and I think we need to get louder about that.

Steph Johnson: 23:33

When folks are proposing these kinds of legislation, it's like we've taken this pool of people and we've told them hey, you've got 10 minutes to get across town and everybody has to make it in 10 minutes, just like everybody has to reach 80, 20. You see where I'm going with this, and so you have to get across town in 10 minutes, but you, you right there. You get a bicycle so you might make it. You're pretty close. You right there. We're gonna give you a scooter. It's not a motorized scooter. You gotta push with one foot. So good luck. I hope you get there. You start right there. You can walk or run. You've got your tennis shoes. You should be good. Next person in the line, we're gonna make you wear some swimming flippers. You're gonna have to hustle because you have a lot working against you, but we still expect you to get there in 10 minutes. And you right there, ma'am, you're gonna be going barefoot. You need to be going barefoot and backwards, so anyone who doesn't cross the finish line in 10 minutes will be subject to consequences. Good luck, may the odds be ever in your favor and they send you off.

Steph Johnson: 24:39

We need to have a little bit more control in the situation, a little bit more voice as to, perhaps, why walking backwards across town or wearing swimming flippers would not be appropriate, and that's gonna have to come from an entity larger than we individually. We can advocate all day long on our campuses. We talk about it in our mastermind all the time, about advocating from the inside out, and I do believe it is powerful, it's effective and it is especially appropriate for school counselors. But on the other side of that, we need a strong entity backing us up. So I'm hoping that, as these rules continue to evolve, as these ideas come forth and I'm glad that everybody's talking about school counseling and examining ways of making the school counseling world better, especially for our students. I still think we need to have a better advocacy system or gatekeeping system in place so that we can really push back against some of these unrealistic mandates.

Steph Johnson: 25:48

All right, that was a mouthful, you know. I start with an outline of probably five or six bullet points and I never know how long this is gonna go, how long I'm gonna talk. So hopefully, if nothing else, this gave you some insight and some things to chew on. With regard to 80-20. And I do believe that it's in our students' best interests for us to hit an 80-20 ratio of services, with 80% being direct to students' services. I think that would be phenomenally amazing, but I think we need to have the right constructs in place to support mandates like that. I think we have to be realistic about the expectation. I think we need to be honest about the school counselor's role on campus and what should and should not be expected, and I think we need to actively build a stronger collaborative voice. Then, and only then, do I think we will be able to achieve what we know is possible for school counseling in schools All right.

Steph Johnson: 26:56

In the meantime, keep fighting the good fight out there. Thank you for the work that you do. I'm constantly in all of you, each and every day, working as a full-time school counselor. Just like you, I know the struggles, I know the hardships, but I also know the immense joy and fulfillment that this job can bring, and so I thank you for walking into the school doors each and every day to love on your students, to serve them to the best of your ability and to be an amazing school counselor. I'll be back soon with another episode. Until then, I hope you have the best week. Take care.