In a recent episode of The Table, I talked with Sherann Alkins, a licensed independent clinical social worker and the founder of Counselor and Concierge, about an idea I have watched prove itself for two decades: student support is not a service layer bolted onto a school. Treating student support as infrastructure changes everything downstream. When counseling and student life teams are positioned as part of the fabric of a school, aligned adults build stronger, more sustainable systems, and students feel it.
Sherann has been a school counselor, an assistant principal, and a principal, and she now researches school counseling leadership and the ethical use of AI as a doctoral candidate. That arc gave her a clear view of a gap many of us know well: the people closest to students are often the furthest from the decisions that shape their days.
Key takeaways
- Student support is infrastructure, not a standalone department or program.
- Counseling and student life teams hold “hidden leadership,” and surfacing it means attending to two things: visibility and capacity.
- Sustainable change is built with people, not done to them.
- Advisory works when it is treated as a psychosocial space with real structure, not a substitute for homeroom.
- AI raises new questions about student voice, authenticity, and mental health that schools cannot ignore.
Student support is infrastructure, not a department
Sherann described being trained to see herself as a guest in the education system. Over time she rejected that framing. Counselors and social workers hold second master’s degrees and clinical licenses, and yet schools often place them in a box off to the side. Her point is direct: bring them into the fold.
The cost of the silo is practical. As a school leader, Sherann noticed that the student support data her counselors collected was not informing the school improvement data. Attendance numbers were on the table, but the barriers underneath attendance were not. That disconnect is the gap her work closes. When support data speaks the language of achievement, the through line becomes visible, and the team can act on it together.
This is also where the presenting problem is rarely the actual problem. A student getting removed from class again is the presenting issue. What is actually happening underneath usually lives in the information a counselor already holds.
The hidden leadership of counseling teams
I shine a light on student life professionals because they are the glue that holds a school together, and they rarely get the thanks. Sherann gave me language I had not used for it: hidden leadership. She means two things, visibility and capacity.
Visibility is about drawing on what counselors are trained to do and giving them a seat where decisions get made. Capacity is about not overworking them and giving them real, useful feedback. She named a quiet problem here: counselor evaluations are often built on a teacher rubric with a few words changed, which gives a highly trained professional nothing to actually grow from.
For counselors who feel positioned outside the leadership structure, her advice is concrete. Know your data and bring it to the leadership team. Set clear goals tied to school culture and achievement. If your district lacks a strong counselor rubric, the American School Counselor Association’s mindsets and standards give you a framework. Then ask for a seat at the table, because being in the room is how you shape an initiative before it rolls out, not after.
Design with people, not for them
Sherann’s tagline is “design with you, not for you,” and it lands close to home. My own master’s is in restorative practices, and the social discipline window describes working with people rather than doing things to them or for them. That is where sustainable change gets built.
What breaks down when we skip the “with”? We stop protecting student brilliance, Sherann said, and the work stops being about the people it is meant to serve. I would add that the same is true for adults. We have to start with the adults at the table, including them in a way that does not feel like things are being done to them, so they can model that same posture for students.
Advisory is a psychosocial space, not a homeroom substitute
Advisory is one of those structures schools want to do well and struggle to sustain. Sherann was blunt about why. Advisory is often thrown together or used as an alternative to homeroom, when it should be a psychosocial space that cultivates connection. That takes a real curriculum and the right facilitators.
Two honest notes from her experience. First, not every teacher should lead advisory, and that is fine. A wonderful math teacher who needs a prep period is not your advisor. Second, the goal is to build it with students until they can carry it themselves. In her schools they called it peer-to-peer, and student leaders helped develop it alongside counselors. Protect that time, because it is one of the first things to disappear when a calendar gets tight.
She named other structural conditions for belonging too: restorative circles held on a regular cadence, clear and accessible pathways to reach teachers and leaders, real parent and community engagement, and a welcoming routine so no student is simply dropped into a first day. A short orientation, a walk through the handbook, a small piece of swag, anything that lets a student walk in and think, I belong here.
AI, student voice, and what comes next
Sherann’s doctoral research looks at the ethical integration of AI into student-centered practice, and her concern centers on student voice and student mental health. When a paper no longer sounds like the student who wrote it, the conversation shifts from plagiarism to authenticity and integrity. When students ask a chatbot whether they are depressed, the stakes are higher than a citation.
Her answer is not to ban the tools. It is to teach students and families to use them while understanding what they actually are, and to rebuild the critical literacy and critical thinking that let a young person evaluate where an answer came from. Terrified yet hopeful was how she put it. That feels right.
You don’t have to do this alone
What I keep coming back to from this conversation is the relationship at the center of it. A dean’s office and a counseling office offer students different paths to help, and they are strongest when they work hand in hand rather than guarding their territory. Strong student life systems are built on that kind of trust, and trust takes time.
If this is the work in front of you, you don’t have to do this alone. That is the whole point of building it together.
