One Counselor Can't Carry a School Alone

This article was written by Meghan Ward, Implementation Specialist at The Positivity Project. Meghan is a former six-year classroom teacher and two-time Teacher of the Year, she went on to serve as a literacy specialist, school-wide coach, and ultimately principal of a Syracuse charter school that earned P2 Green Shield recognition in 2024.

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What a conversation with one counselor reminded me about who’s really responsible for student wellbeing

I’ve spent a lot of time in schools, and there’s a particular look I’ve learned to recognize on a counselor’s face. It’s the look of someone who cares enormously and is stretched impossibly thin — one person, hundreds of students, and an unspoken expectation that they are the safety net beneath every kid who is struggling.

If you’re a counselor, you know that look. You may have caught it in the mirror.

I saw it again recently during a debrief at one of our Partner Schools. I was sitting with one of their counselors — I’ll call her Kate — walking through what The Positivity Project is, and just as importantly, what it isn’t. We were a few minutes in when something shifted in the room. Something clicked for her. I’ll be honest: from that point on, we were BFFs.

Here’s what I’d said, more or less.

You’re one person. The work isn’t built for one person.

The thing I love about P2 is that it isn’t a program that lives in one office. It’s every member of the school setting taking a piece of the puzzle. The teacher in the third-grade classroom, the coach on the field, the front-office staff who greet kids every morning, the principal, the parent at pickup — everyone holds a piece.

I don’t mean that as a feel-good metaphor. P2 is actually built that way. There’s a tailored implementation checklist for nearly every role in a building — principal, classroom teacher, counselor, social worker, school psychologist, special education, PE, art, music, after-school staff, and more. Each role gets its own piece, sized to what that person can realistically own. The counselor’s piece is real and it matters. But it was never meant to be the whole puzzle.

Because here’s the reality I named out loud, the one Kate was living every day: You’re one counselor. You’re inundated. You have so much that’s expected of you.

We have quietly asked one role to shoulder something that was never meant to rest on one set of shoulders. Student wellbeing is not a caseload. It’s a culture. And cultures aren’t built by a single person working harder — they’re built by a whole community sharing the same language, the same expectations, and the same simple belief that we are responsible for one another.

That’s what The Positivity Project actually does in a building. It distributes the responsibility. The 24 character strengths give every adult in the school — not just the counselor — a common vocabulary for naming what they see in kids and in each other. That shared language is the whole point: when every adult is using the same words, the counselor stops being the last line of defense and becomes one important part of a system that’s holding students up together.

The fear I always brace for — and why it didn’t show up

Whenever I introduce something new to a counselor, I brace for the same unspoken question: Is this one more thing on my plate?

It’s a fair question. Counselors have been handed plenty of “solutions” that turned out to be more work. So I pay close attention to where that fear shows up — and where it lifts.

With Kate, it lifted when we got to the tier 3 resources. She didn’t read them as one more thing to manage. She looked at them and saw small groups she was already running and kids she was already meeting with one-on-one — and tools she could actually use with them next week.

That tracks with how P2 builds the counselor materials. They’re meant to fit the work counselors already do: strengths-based small groups, individual check-ins, getting ahead of a problem instead of cleaning it up after. It doesn’t ask the counselor to take on more. It asks the rest of the building to carry its share, and gives the counselor better tools for the part that actually needs her.

And it’s not just Kate. Alex Norton, a counselor in Ohio whose building is five years into P2, describes the same thing happening with her staff — she calls it “not just another program teachers have to implement,” but something that’s become part of who the school is. When it works, it stops feeling like an initiative and starts feeling like the way the building runs.

By the end of the conversation, Kate was already working out loud how she’d fold P2 into what she had going. 

What this conversation keeps teaching me

I keep coming back to this one because it’s not unusual. The counselors who get excited about P2 almost never get excited about a feature. They get excited because someone finally said out loud that they don’t have to hold all of it themselves — and then showed them why that’s actually true here.

That’s what distributed responsibility actually looks like. A lot of schools have basically been counting on the counselor to keep up with everything, and it doesn’t work — there aren’t enough hours, and often there is only one of them. When the whole staff shares the load, that changes. The counselor still does the hard cases and the real counseling. She’s just not also expected to be the school’s entire conscience on top of it.

Eva Martinez, the principal at Discovery Elementary in California, describes a building where “our counselor, PE teacher, RBT, and school psychologist utilize P2 resources within Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions.” Six years in, her school’s chronic absenteeism has dropped from 17.7% to 5.5%. That’s what it looks like when the work is genuinely shared — the counselor isn’t the program. She’s one part of a building that all speaks the same language.

If you’re the one counselor reading this

I see you. The weight is real, and caring this much is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t done it.

But you were never supposed to be the whole net. You’re supposed to be one essential part of a school full of adults who all share an Other People Mindset and act on it, every day — each carrying their own piece. That’s not a lighter version of your job. It’s the version of your job that’s actually sustainable — and it’s better for kids, too.

If that’s the conversation you’ve been waiting to have, I’d love to be the one to have it with you.

Want to take a look at P2’s curriculum? Sign up for free lessons, or schedule time with Dominic Frisina, Director of Instructional Services, who can walk you through our resources.