The Question Every Educator Should Be Asking
In a recent episode of The Table, I had the pleasure of speaking with a long-time friend of the Roundtable, Dr. Brooklyn Raney, leadership researcher, educator, speaker, and author of One Trusted Adult: How to Build Strong Connections and Healthy Boundaries with Young People — now in its second edition. Brooklyn and I had just co-presented together at an ASNE workshop for student life leaders, and the energy in that room was something worth talking about.
What I appreciated most about that workshop — and what comes through so clearly in Brooklyn’s work — is the willingness to move beyond the nuts and bolts of school policy and into something more fundamental: what does it actually mean to show up for young people in a way that’s authentic, boundaried, and sustainable?
That’s the conversation we continued on the podcast, and it’s one I think every school leader, dean, advisor, and faculty member needs to be having right now.
Why This Moment Calls for a Different Kind of Conversation
When Brooklyn and I were both deans, we’d show up to professional development events hungry for the practical stuff — vaping policies, how to select advisors, what trends other schools were seeing. That instinct makes sense. When you’re in the middle of it, you want concrete answers.
But what Brooklyn has come to understand through years of research, speaking, and focus groups with students and educators across the country is that the real issue runs deeper. Schools are increasingly being asked to be everything for everyone. Community, support system, mental health provider, family stand-in — and the adults inside those schools are absorbing that pressure, often without the tools to manage it.
As Brooklyn put it in our conversation: “I don’t think we were ever offered a course called how to build authentic, productive relationships with other people’s children that promote academic growth and positive youth development while not burning out. That course was not offered.”
That gap is exactly what her research — and the second edition of her book — is designed to fill.
The Basics of What Young People Actually Need
One of the most grounding parts of our conversation was Brooklyn’s reminder that, despite everything shifting around us — the mental health crisis, the technology pressures, the debates about parent rights, the post-pandemic fallout — the core needs of young people haven’t changed.
Her BASICS model identifies those enduring needs as: belonging and membership, ability to contribute, safety and structure, independence and control, competence and mastery, and self-awareness and connection.
What changes generation to generation is the pressure placed on those needs, not the needs themselves. And when young people show up to school struggling to meet those needs, well-intentioned educators respond by doing more — making themselves more accessible, investing more emotionally, blurring more lines — without any clear framework for where the limits should be.
That’s where things start to unravel.
The ABCs: A Framework That Actually Works
The centerpiece of Brooklyn’s work is what she calls the ABCs of trusted adult relationships: Accessible, Boundaried, and Caring. It’s simple, but the implications are significant.
Being accessible means signaling to students when and how they can reach you — and being consistent about it. Being boundaried means holding those limits even when it feels uncomfortable, because boundaries aren’t walls—it’s what makes the relationship safe and sustainable. And caring means expressing genuine investment in a young person’s growth while recognizing the limits of your role.
What Brooklyn has seen in her research is that when schools celebrate the wrong version of caring — the educator who answers emails at midnight, attends every single student event, does home visits, never says no — they’re inadvertently building a model that burns people out and signals to every other educator that unsustainable is the standard.
She shared a particularly striking story: a teacher of the year, celebrated multiple years in a row, left education shortly after receiving the award. When you read the nominations, the pattern was clear. Everything celebrated was about going above and beyond in ways that no one could maintain long-term. That one educator burned out. And everyone else watched and thought: that’s the bar.
The Most Common Mistake in Student Life Work
When I asked Brooklyn what she sees most often when student life professionals struggle with boundaries, her answer was immediate: prioritizing likeability over authentic connection.
It’s a natural impulse. Educators who go into this field care deeply, and being liked by students feels like confirmation that the work is landing. But likeability and trust are not the same thing, and chasing one often undermines the other.
Brooklyn’s research — including focus groups directly with high school students — identified the top three ways educators blur boundaries and erode trust without realizing it:
- Oversharing. When adults use students as a replacement for a friend or therapist — sharing about marriages, health struggles, personal crises — students notice. And while they may engage in the moment, they ultimately lose trust in that adult’s ability to hold appropriate space.
- Outward sharing. Students deeply value confidentiality. When they sense that their conversations, struggles, or progress might be shared beyond that moment — with other parents, colleagues, or on social media — they pull back. The example Brooklyn shared of a student running into a parent at a grocery store who’d been told about their academic struggles by a teacher? That student felt exposed, not cared for.
- Playing pretend. When adults slip into the role of friend, therapist, or parent — even subtly, even with the best intentions — students recognize it. And they feel the discomfort of an adult who hasn’t acknowledged the actual limits of their role.
These aren’t egregious ethical violations. They’re the slow erosion that happens when we don’t have a clear language for what healthy connection looks like — and that’s exactly the gap Brooklyn’s framework is designed to address.
Boundary Work Is Teamwork
One of the most important points Brooklyn made — and one that I think gets overlooked in individual professional development conversations — is that boundaries only work when a whole school community holds them together.
If one educator responds to student emails on weekends and another doesn’t, the one who doesn’t becomes “the mean one.” If a school leader doesn’t have explicit policies that set clear time boundaries for staff, well-meaning educators fill that vacuum with overextension. As Brooklyn said, “boundary work is teamwork.”
This has real implications for how schools design policy. It means that setting limits around communication hours, establishing clear protocols for what advisors are and aren’t responsible for, and being explicit with students about what they can expect from the adults at school — these aren’t bureaucratic exercises. They’re the infrastructure that makes sustainable relationships possible.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Brooklyn shared a beautiful example of a school that created a “One Trusted Adult Identification Day.” During an all-school meeting, students watch a short video explaining what a trusted adult is — accessible, boundaried, and caring — and then write note cards to as many adults on campus as they’d like to identify as trusted adults in their lives. The student wellness director compiles the data, ensuring every student has someone, and uses it throughout the year when students are struggling.
What I love about this — and what I noted to Brooklyn during our conversation — is that it works both ways. You learn which students feel connected, yes. But you also learn which adults aren’t being named. That’s equally important information. Is a particular faculty member too rigid? Too distanced? That data opens up a different kind of leadership conversation.
Brooklyn also recommends a practical self-assessment she calls the ABC audit: a reflection on how and when you signal accessibility, what limits exist around that, and how you express care — and what limits exist there too. She suggests writing your job description not for yourself, but for your successor. What would you want them to know about doing this work sustainably? That shift in perspective often clarifies where habits have outpaced intention.
Staff Well-Being Is Student Well-Being
The through line of everything Brooklyn and I discussed — in the workshop and on the podcast — is that you cannot separate staff well-being from student well-being. They are the same conversation.
When leaders model the ABCs with their own teams, they set the tone for how faculty and staff show up for students. When schools build policies that protect educator time and energy, they’re also building the conditions for trust to grow in classrooms, advisory rooms, and hallways.
Brooklyn shared a story from a school leader who, while learning to skate for a charity event, built a connection with a chronically absent student who turned out to be a strong skater. That relationship, born out of the leader doing something for her own joy, opened a door that years of formal intervention strategies hadn’t.
Self-care isn’t just pedicures and bubble baths. It’s also skating lessons. It’s having a life outside of school that makes you more fully human — and therefore more genuinely connectable — to the young people in your care.
Where to Start
If you’re a student life professional, teacher, or school leader wondering where to begin, Brooklyn’s recommendation is clear: start with the ABC assessment. Ask yourself honestly — in what ways am I accessible? Are there ways I’m overextending that have become habits? In what ways do I express care, and are there limits I haven’t set that I need to?
And then write that job description for your successor. Not for you — for them. What do you want them to know about doing this work in a way that lasts?
That question alone has a way of clarifying things quickly.
To learn more about Dr. Brooklyn Raney’s work, explore her framework, take the boundaries quiz, or access free downloadable resources for your school community, visit onetrustedadult.com. Her second edition of One Trusted Adult is available now.
What would it look like at your school to celebrate educators who are accessible, boundaried, and caring — not just those who give everything they have? That’s the culture shift Brooklyn is talking about. And it starts with a single conversation.
