School Counselors, Stop Accommodating Anxiety. (Yes, Really.)

What if the anxiety accommodations you've been writing into your 504s and IEPs are actually making your students more anxious?

In this episode, I'm sharing a section from a recent masterclass inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind- one that had members circling accommodations on their plans before it was even over!

You'll hear the research behind why avoidance-based accommodations backfire, how we're accidentally teaching students they can't handle hard things, and one dead-simple question you can ask yourself Monday morning to evaluate any accommodation on your caseload.

Plus- someone left a review calling this podcast "tragic." Wait till you hear my response...

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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.

Chapters

• 0:00 Charlie At The School Door
• 2:42 The Counterintuitive Claim
• 5:19 Evidence Over Comfort
• 9:01 Masterclass Excerpt Setup
• 12:10 The Cost Of Avoidance
• 16:41 OCR Guidance And The Trap
• 20:49 What The Research Predicts
• 24:40 Grit Over Comfort

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

A few years ago, I had a fourth grader, I'll call him Charlie, who out of nowhere could not walk into the school building. And I don't mean that he just didn't want to. I mean his body physically would not let him walk in the door. He would get to the front doors and then he would start gagging. And some mornings he would vomit right there on the sidewalk. Mom was in tears, dad was frustrated, the teachers didn't know what to do. And the principals kept asking me, Mrs. Johnson, what's the plan here? And everything in my training, everything I had been taught or read, everything that felt compassionate in that moment told me to make it easier for him. Let him come through the side door where no one else was arriving. Let him arrive late so that the hallways are empty. Set up a cozy corner for a delayed start in my office where he can decompress before he even attempts a classroom. Maybe loop mom in on a code word system so she knew it was okay to take him home if things went too far sideways. And honestly, that's probably what most of us would do because it feels kind. It feels like we're meeting him where he is. But here's what I want you to hear from me today. And this is going to challenge some things you might believe about how we support anxious students. Every single one of those accommodations I just described would have made Charlie worse. And I almost did all of them. What I did instead changed everything for him. And it's probably not what you'd expect. And I say that with love. We're talking about anxiety accommodations. And I'm gonna share some research with you that made me go back and rethink almost everything I've done throughout my school counseling career. And y'all, if it made me pause, I know it's worth a conversation. So here's the thing. What if the accommodations we've been writing into our 504s and IEPs aren't just not helpful? What if they're actually making our students more anxious? Ah yeah, we're gonna go there today. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity in your role and maybe a little bit of rebellion, hey, you're in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors Podcast. So before we get into the rest of today's episode, I have something that I want to share with you. I recently got a podcast review, and the title was just one word. Tragic. It said that I am self-righteous, inaccurate, and that I take controversial positions as a shameless grab for listeners. And y'all, I gotta admit, I laughed out loud because what I'm about to share with you today, just like every single week, is peer-reviewed research. And if evidence-based practice makes someone uncomfortable enough to call it tragic, I think that tells us everything we need to know about where school counseling stands right now. It tells us we got some work to do. So let's get to it. I haven't done this in a while on the podcast, but today I'm sharing a section from one of our recent masterclasses inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind because this one hit different. I called it rethinking anxiety accommodations. And when I tell you that the response from our members was immediate, I would bet some people were circling accommodations on their 504 plans before that masterclass was even over. So here's why I wanted to bring it to you. I came across some research that really kind of stopped me in my tracks. And it basically said that the way most of us are accommodating anxiety in schools is actually making it worse because we've been operating on outdated assumptions and nobody ever came along and told us to question them. So I dug into the literature. And what I found has completely changed how I approach anxiety on my campus. And it led to a brand new anxiety playbook that I rebuilt from the ground up for our mastermind members. In this masterclass excerpt, I'm going to walk you through the research, show you exactly why avoidance-based accommodations backfire. Spoiler, those are the ones you usually see on your campuses. And I'm going to give you one dead simple question you can ask yourself that will tell you whether your current accommodations are helping or hurting. Now, I'm not going to give the whole masterclass today. It would be way too long. The full class goes way deeper into graduated challenge plans for four different anxiety types we typically see on campus. The exact language to use when an IEP team, a 504 committee, or a parent pushes back, and a walkthrough of that brand new playbook. That's all inside the mastermind. But what you're about to hear is still going to change so much for you and your students. I know it will. So let's get into it. Anxiety feels like it is so hard to get on top of, doesn't it? It just feels like you have kids that show up and they're anxious and you're trying to provide accommodations, but it means it sort of gets better and then it gets worse. And it's just kind of like this roller coaster. And then sometimes you've got kids that hop on extremes in this anxiety spectrum. And then sometimes you know you have home life that's perpetuating this, or parent anxiety is exacerbating the students' anxiety. And it's just this cycle. And we're like, what else do we do? Right? How else do we solve this problem? All right. 52% increase in anxiety disorders, ages 10 through 24. Between 1990 and 2021, uh, I would bet it's probably greater now, right? It's still rising here in 2025. I still feel like we're working toward a crescendo there. Here's a really interesting piece of research that I bet you've never seen before. 100% of teachers accommodate anxiety. 100% of teachers in a meta-analysis reported accommodating anxiety in their classrooms. And 71% reported accommodating anxiety frequently. So this is just telling us this is happening. This is a real thing. Sometimes I think we feel like there's just so much. Like maybe I'm hypersensitive to it, maybe I'm looking for it and finding it because I'm looking for it. No, it is very, very prevalent in our schools. And that 92.5% of school staff provide at least one avoidance-oriented accommodation. That's almost everybody, y'all. Now, the term here, avoidance-oriented, is super important because these are the kinds of accommodations that we typically supply in a school setting. Um, and I'll show you what I mean as we get through this. But the bottom line is this we're making it worse. We're trying to help, but we're making it worse and we're creating more of a workload for ourselves. So, how do we stop doing that? Because goodness knows we do not need any more to do, right? So as I was saying, as we started, there was an article that was published, and this was the one that was shared in our mastermind masterclass, and it was talking about how schools were making anxiety worse by accommodating it. And so I really started to dive into the literature and research to see what the truth about it is. Now, before we really get into the accommodations themselves and what we need to do, what kinds of mechanisms we need to be following, and those kinds of things, I do want to give a caveat here. And as a 504 coordinator, I want to make this super clear because this is where things get kind of sticky. When you look at the OCR recommendations for 504, it says explicitly that Section 504 may require a school to provide modifications or related aids and services. And it gives all of these examples, right? Providing the opportunity to take tests alone, alternatives to large group-centered activities, allowing to make up work without penalty, excusing late arrivals and absences. And on the surface, that makes sense because we've been doing that for years in schools. We have been doing that for years and years and years. And that's just kind of the standard MO of how we handle it. But when you look down toward the bottom, it says that these might be needed throughout a student's entire educational career. That bothers me. If we assign an accommodation, let's just say for argument's sake, we assign an accommodation for anxiety through a 504 to a 10-year-old. Okay, they're in the fifth grade. And we're saying that we could reasonably expect this accommodation to follow them for eight more years until they graduate high school, I think that's insanity. Because that shows we're not making growth, right? We're not making expected growth and that we have pathologized this kid that we believe because they have some sort of an anxiety concern, it will always be there. They'll never get better. That bothers me. But I do want to call this to your attention because if you're a 504 coordinator, you're gonna have to dance around these recommendations carefully. There are ways to do it, but you're gonna have to be very careful in how you do it. We know this. We know from the literature, um, and you can see some of the citations down at the bottom. I'll have a full list for you at the end of this masterclass. Accommodations predict greater anxiety severity. So we can predict the greater the extent of the accommodations that we provide, the more anxious the student is going to remain. There's going to be more functional impairment. Why? Because they're not being challenged to grow. They're being provided those supports and they're going to be there forever, according to OCR. And so, what need do they have to grow? And because of all that, you see poor treatment outcomes. We don't see the kinds of growth that we need to see. We're not preparing these students for post-public school years, whether that's college, whether that's being able to hold down a job, going to trade school, going to the military. They have to be able to tolerate anxiety and be able to manipulate it and know what to do with it. So I think at the core of this is that it's not our job to eliminate discomfort. It is not our job to take away all of the ooky feelings that they're having when they're experiencing these anxious thoughts and feelings. Our job is to build students who can do hard things. If you agree with that, put yes in the chat because I want to see who agrees with me on that. But I think I will plant that flag and stand there forever. Our job is to build students who can do hard things. And I'm saying, yeah, lots of folks in the chat right now going, yep, yep, absolutely. It's important, right? And this is something that we've kind of overlooked in all of the accommodating and things that we've been doing for students. Accommodations typically provide short-term relief versus long-term maintenance. Not only are we not teaching kids how to overcome, but we're also not teaching kids how to maintain their gains once they have them. And avoidance, which is the primary mechanism of the accommodations we tend to give in schools, provides that immediate anxiety reduction, but it prevents the student from learning they can handle it. Every time we let students avoid something, we teach them, yeah, you're right. You can't do this. That is the message that we are giving them every time we apply one of those. This will be nothing new to you, but you know the amygdala learns from our behavior, the danger center of the brain, right? The fight, flight, freeze, fawn center. When adults help students escape from situations, it tells the amygdala, yeah, this must be dangerous. This must be bad. We needed rescuing. When students are able to face those fears and survive through them, the brain learns, oh, that was a false alarm. We can handle this. That's how we train the cognitive side of this for students to understand that they can handle it. Sorry, if you see my thing moving around, I'm moving my chat out of the way. The amygdala doesn't learn from what you think, it learns from what you do. So every time we provide an avoidance-based accommodation, and I'm hammering this point hard because this is so ingrained in us in schools that we've we've really got to have a stern wake-up call. Every accommodation, if it's avoidance-based, steals the opportunity to build grit, which is the number one predictor of achievement in the research, to build self-efficacy, believing that I can handle hard things, experiencing mastery and really believing that growth mindset, understanding that struggle leads to growth. Or building an identity shift from I'm the anxious kid to I'm a brave kid that sometimes feels anxious and can still do hard things. That's an important part of growing up and learning. We have been not intentionally, but we have been teaching kids that their limitations are fixed. Just like I was talking about with OCR. Maybe these accommodations should last throughout their educational career. I don't think that's a good idea. That their feelings should dictate their behavior. How many kids do you have on your campus right now who believe that? Because those are often the kids that are flipping desks. Those are often the kids that you're having to go fish out from underneath furniture and out of cubbies and out of hallways because they believe their feelings should dictate their behavior. And you've probably had a few with those kinds of behaviors where when parents show up or when you meet to have an IEP meeting, someone says, Well, they're really anxious. Have you ever experienced that? Yeah. We've also been inadvertently teaching students that they need external rescue, that they don't have what it takes to be able to rely on themselves. They need outside supports. And that success really comes from avoiding difficulty. If we can just give them the easy road, that kind of success feels good. That's the kind of success they should seek. And all of those ideas are fundamentally opposite of what we want to be teaching in schools, which is we want to teach them learned effectiveness, not learned helplessness. And when we pacify, when we coddle, that's what happens. So to start, there is a one question assessment that you can use to determine where you sit with regard to accommodations. Let's say you've got some kids on your campus that already have accommodations assigned to them through 504, through some sort of student support, through an IEP, something like that. Here's the one question you can ask to know how you feel about these accommodations. Does it help the student do the thing or avoid the thing? It's as simple as that. Does it help them do it or does it help them avoid it? And I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably 75% of the accommodations you see, if not more, help the student avoid the thing. Because we tend to on school campuses accommodate for comfort. Both the student's comfort and our own comfort. We don't want to have to invest all this time and energy and helping students learn how to do the thing because that takes longer. Right? We don't have that kind of time. We don't have enough people. And so we tend to shy away from that and we prevent teaching them how to do the thing. We just let them avoid it. It's unfortunate. Here are some of the unhelpful accommodations you've probably seen on your campus. I think we've all seen them. Skipping presentations or substitute written reports. Unlimited safe pass to the counselor. Maybe you may not have an unlimited safe pass, but I bet you've had a few where you've been like, hey, just send them to me if they need me. Hey, tell your teacher you need to come see me if you start feeling some kind of way. Have you ever done that? We've all done it. Me too. I'm not exempt from this. So please do not think that I'm lecturing. Excuses from group work. Reducing the workload without building it back up. I'm thinking about all my kids who have extended time for assignments for everything, extended time for all tests. And we never build a plan back in. I have kids that have been lingering in extended time for years on my campus, and I'm in elementary school. Extended time for perfectionists, call or text parent during the school day. Now we may not write that in as an official accommodation, but you and I both know these are happening a lot on our campuses. And I'm going to take a hit right here. I'm going to be honest with you because I always try to be in everything that we do in the mastermind. This is an excerpt from our anxiety playbook. If you've seen it in our mastermind library, and it has accommodations, a classroom strategies for anxiety. Look how many of these are escape-based. Quiet space, preferential seating, flexible breaks, modified homework load. There are lots of escape-based accommodations in this list. So this has all been revised. You're going to get an all-new playbook today. That's going to be better, more thoroughly research aligned, more vetted. But I'm showing this to make the point of we've all done it. Right? We have all done it. And I don't want to sit from this place and be holier than that. Well, I mean, I knew this all along. No, we do what we have with what we have in the moment, right? We act on our best information. And now we have better information. And so we're moving forward and we're going to learn and we're going to grow together. We're going to make things better. So here are just some examples of some things we're talking about. Allowing students to skip presentations confirms to them you can't do public speaking. You'll never be able to speak in front of people. It teaches them they're incapable, right? Which is not what we want. We don't want to do that. We don't want to give them these passes where they can leave to take a break or leave to see the counselor. Because it teaches the student to run anytime they start feeling anxious feelings. It teaches them they can't handle discomfort. Or giving students excuses from group work or excuses from big social settings like lunch or big um assemblies and things like that confirms for them social situations are too dangerous for you. You're not made for those. Your peers are not safe. That's what they learn. There are some other examples too, um, reducing workloads without building back toward that full load teaches them they're incapable. Extended time enables compulsive behavior. I don't know if you have anybody on your campus that has compulsive behaviors, but I can tell you one of the worst things in the world that you can do for compulsions is to support them because they are really hard to get rid of. And then it's things like parent contact during the school day. Mom needs me. I've had kids that have told me that. Have you? I have to stay home, my mom needs me. There's lots going on. I have to protect her, I have to keep her safe. These are all things that kids will say. So here's how we tell if an accommodation is a good accommodation or a not so good accommodation. First, is the anxiety improving or worsening? Over time, when we look at it, it's okay if we put it in place and it wasn't the best. Can we look at it when we meet again and say, is this improving or is it worsening? If it's worsening, let's do something different. Right? Is the student more capable because of the accommodation or are they more dependent? And can we reduce the support or do we need more? This is going to give you a really good litmus test on your next 504s, your next IEP meetings, whether you need to keep accommodations in place or whether you need to remove them. So when you Got to work on Monday. Glance quickly at your 504s and your IEPs. Circle every single avoidance accommodation. All the accommodations that allow them to avoid something. That's going to be your starting list. That's just going to kind of get you to the starting blocks of what it is you're about to look at over the next probably year or so. So now you know the things that we have been doing with the best of intentions on our campuses, the safe passes, extended time, escape routes, they've been working against our students and against us. Now remember Charlie, the fourth grader who couldn't walk through the front doors without getting sick? Here's what ended up happening with him. Instead of giving him the side door, the late arrival, and the cozy corner in my office, we built a graduated plan. We started with him standing near the front curb with me, not even walking toward the building. Then we walked to the door, then through it, then to his classroom with just a quick check-in. It took us about six weeks, but by the end of it, Charlie was walking into that building on his own, not without anxiety, but through it, because he learned he could handle it. Y'all, that's the play. And that's exactly the kind of work we walk you through step by step inside my School for School Counselors Mastermind. What you heard today was just a piece of this masterclass. The full session goes way deeper into graduated challenge plans for academic anxiety, social anxiety, perfectionism, and separation anxiety, plus the exact language to use when parents or committees push back. And that brand new anxiety playbook that I mentioned is sitting in the Mastermind library right now, ready for you to download and have on your desk tomorrow morning. Here's what I want you to know. You could join the mastermind for just a month. You could come in, watch the rest of the masterclass, grab the playbook, and explore everything else we've got. The resource library, the community, the monthly masterclasses. And if it's not for you, you can cancel whenever you want to. No pressure, no hoops. But I do think that once you're in there, you're gonna want to stick around. So head to schoolforschoolcounselors.com slash mastermind to check out all the details. And one more thing before I go. If this episode challenged you and if it made you think differently about how you're supporting your anxious students, would you do me a favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts? Because apparently sharing peer-reviewed research and evidence-based practice is tragic. So I'm gonna need some of y'all to get in there and balance things out for me. Just go to Apple Podcasts, search School for School Counselors, and leave an honest review. And bonus points if your title is better than tragic. Although, honestly, that bar is pretty low. All right, my friend. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, keep doing hard things and keep helping your students do them too. Take care.