School counselors say policymakers, the general public, and even some in the broader school community do not fully understand the role counselors play in students’ success in school and beyond, concludes the American School Counselor Association’s State of the Profession 2025 report.
A majority of counselors said students (73%), administrators (65%), and school staff (64%) understand their role at least adequately, according to the report, which draws from a survey of a nationally representative sample of more than 6,000 school counselors conducted in October 2025.
However, district staff (45%), families (31%), school board members (24%), state policymakers (14%), and the general public (8%) were less likely to at least adequately understand the role of counselors, the respondents said in the report published in February.
Schools are dealing with an increase in student behavioral, social-emotional, and mental health concerns, as well as a decrease in student academic achievement—challenges that school counselors say they are well-positioned to help address.
But because of the lack of understanding about their jobs, school counselors are often pulled in to take on other tasks that steal time away from the responsibilities they are trained for, according to the report.
It’s “truly negatively impacting [us] and student outcomes,” said Danielle Crankfield, a school counselor at Crofton High School in Crofton, Md., and the 2026 School Counselor of the Year.
“When people don’t understand what we do, then you have [school] boards that want to spend less money on school counseling, you have state [legislatures] that make decisions without considering counselors but pass mandates or laws that take away from the work we need to do,” Crankfield said.
The top challenges school counselors face
School counselors’ top priorities typically focus around providing students with academic planning and support, opportunities to develop social skills, career and college advice, and outreach to parents or caregivers. But counselors often get pulled in other directions, the report notes.
That’s when the misperceptions of the job manifest in the top three challenges most cited by school counselors in the report: being assigned inappropriate duties (59%), managing high caseloads/number of students (54%), and closing opportunity and achievement gaps (49%).
School counselors spend about 72% of their time on direct and indirect student services, which is below the American School Counselor Association recommendation of 80%, according to the report.
Direct student services includes instruction (such as around social-emotional learning), counseling, and postsecondary advising, and indirect services includes consulting with teachers or school leaders to resolve student problems, according to the report. When it comes to “inappropriate duties,” school counselors most often cited coordinating 504 plans, coordinating testing, subbing, and handling discipline.
The American School Counselor Association’s recommended student-to-counselor ratio is 250:1, but 75% of school counselors are responsible for more than 250 students, the report found. About 11% of school counselors are responsible for more than 550 students. This ratio is a “critical indicator” of whether school counselors can effectively deliver counseling services and meet student needs, the report said.
These challenges are consequences of schools being understaffed and underfunded, educators and school counselors said.
For Richard Tench, a school counselor at St. Albans High School in St. Albans, W.Va., the report underscores the complexity of the K-12 “spider web.”
“If you’re going to pull one part of that web, it’s going to shift everything else,” he said.
Schools in general are also facing greater challenges and more of them, said Jon Martz, the principal of Sutherlin High School in Sutherlin, Ore.
“The principalship expectations have changed greatly from [just] being an instructional leader,” Martz said. “I’m also having to deal with a lot of different challenges that we never used to see in public education.”
The greater expectations might have led school leaders to pass off responsibilities to other school staff, including school counselors, he said. For instance, he used to collaborate with his school counselor to map out the master schedule, but now that responsibility has fallen solely on his counselor because Martz has to deal with other added responsibilities.
How school leaders can support their counselors
These challenges were also the top three most cited in 2020, the first year the American School Counselor Association started surveying the field.
“These trends underscore the need for continued advocacy, administrative support, and systemic alignment that empowers school counselors to focus their time where students benefit most,” according to the report.
“It’s a heavy lift to ask school counselors to advocate for themselves to be understood,” Crankfield said. “However, if we don’t do that, then we’re continuously stuck in a loop of doing things that we shouldn’t be doing. So we have to make it up in our minds to advocate [for ourselves] so we get the support to do things that will help the kids.”
Still, there are ways administrators can support their counselors through these challenges, Crankfield, Martz, and Tench said. Below are their recommendations:
- Meet with your counselors often. Set goals and expectations. Check in on those goals and what’s helping and harming student success.
- Give counselors time during staff meetings to discuss their work and how it connects with and supports what teachers are doing.
- Familiarize yourself with the school counseling model program if the state has one, and if it doesn’t, use the American School Counselor Association’s resources.
- Figure out what non-school-counseling tasks they’re doing and if those should be moved to other staff members or if more staff should be added (if funding allows).
