35. Data Tells A Story with Katie Row

Carol: You're listening to the Counselor Chat podcast, a show for school counselors looking for easy to implement strategies, how to tips, collaboration, and a little Spark of joy. I'm Carol Miller, your host. I'm a full time school counselor and the face behind counseling essentials. I'm all about creating simplified systems, data driven practices, and using creative approaches to age students. If you're looking for a little inspiration to help you make a big impact on student growth and success, you're in the right place because we're better together. Ready to chat? Let's dive in. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Counselor Chat. I am so excited. This week I have Katie Rowe, who's a middle school counselor for grades six through eight in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. And she is going to hang out with us today and talk with everybody about how data tells a story. So, Katie, do you want to hop in, say hi to everyone and maybe introduce yourself a little bit? Yes.

Katie: Thank you, Carol. I am in the St. Louis area. I've been a school counselor for 13 years. Ten of those are in the suburban area that I'm in now in St. Louis. Three of them were in a more rural area, kind of outside of the St. Louis area. And I'm very passionate about how data can tell a story because in my tenure here so far at the suburban school, I have had only one. I should say, let me back up. In the ten years that I've been in my current building, my co counselors have all been part time, and I've had a lot of overturn, turnover, I should say, in this position with my co counselors. And I've always been trying to advocate to get a full time co counselor here. My district has always been really focused on enrollment numbers and caseload, and we have about 500 students in the building. So there's often the argument that the other middle schools in the district, their caseload would be way off balance. And so because of enrollment size, we have to have a part time counselor in addition to my full time position. And I've always been trying for what feels like endlessly for the past ten years, trying to prove that regardless of numbers, that each individual soul inside of this building needs the support of a full time school counselor. And it's been kind of a tough journey with our higher administration. There's been a lot of support for the counseling role, but not quite an understanding of the counseling role. And then, of course, within the building, too. I have a great relationship with teachers, but I'm not sure that they quite understand the scope of what I'm trained and what we're capable to do. They just know that students have a lot of behavior issues, and emotional and social concerns are on the rise and mental health is on the rise. Their intent is to just kind of bring them over to the counseling office to calm down and deescalate so that they can come back and learn. But that's not always easy to do when there's a part time co counselor to share the load. So data has been something for advocacy and also just for daily student success and improving data or student performance. So I'm excited to talk about anything related to data today.

Carol: Okay. That is awesome. I think with the data, sometimes we have to. Before we even start to advocate, we really have to educate. You know, right now, for myself, I'm on a, like, there's such a mental health crisis right now with our students in school. And it's not just like where I am in New York, it is like everywhere. And when we talk about your one counselor, like one and a half counselors to 500 students, we're not even talking about other mental health team members that should be supporting you, because if we look at ratios and recommended ratios, you should have for 500 students, one school psychologist, you should have two social workers, and you should have two full time school counselors. But nobody talks about all of the pieces that are missing.

Katie: That's right.

Carol: I don't know one school that has every piece that they're supposed to have according to the numbers, right?

Katie: Absolutely. It is sad. It is sad. And I'm hoping as our culture and our political climate continues to evolve the way that it is, it's definitely evident in the young people who are coming through. And we're in a traditional school system that's been around for way too long. And we're not evolving as a school system, even though the world is and our young people are and even young teachers are coming in, and it just seems like there's a huge disconnect. It's hard to prove a point when it's a very subjective feeling to say, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm noticing more kids are having mental health concerns. People will listen and say, I'm so sorry that's happening to you. But if I can say I've done 17 suicide risk assessments in the last four days, and my responsive services in the school counseling model says that that should only be 20% of my job, then something's not right here. Help me get the support that I need. So I think that's something I'm working on. Definitely.

Carol: Exactly. And then if you tie that into you, the use of time calculators and you're tracking your time, and you could show, like those, I think you said 17. Those 17 risk assessments that I did, this is how many hours out of my day, week, month that they took. And I think those are incredible numbers to also show, right?

Katie: Absolutely. We have tried to do a time task analysis as a district in the past before, and I think some counselors found that it was, in itself, too timely. It was difficult to monitor for me. I was thrilled. I loved it. I just had so much fun. It was just very eye opening for me. Even when I feel like, oh, I'm not accomplishing anything today. My to do list continues to grow, but I'm not crossing anything off the list. And it's overwhelming. Whenever I do the time task analysis, to me, it's actually more of a productive feeling. I feel better about it. Except for the extra supervision duties and tasks that are not part of the school counseling program, I try not to do them every know.

Carol: I find it's a lot easier to do that time stuff if you have a calendar and you have it on your, like, I use paper calendar still. I do have stuff in my Google calendar in terms of meetings and things like that. But my day to day calendar is on my desk, shows the days of the week, has all the times. And if I mark down, like when my groups are and my lessons are, and this are, and I have a lot of white space, a lot of blanks, but those get filled in really quickly. And when a kid comes in, I'll just put a little note in my calendar. Did this, did that. So it doesn't have to be hard. I think sometimes we stress too much that it is, but it doesn't have to be a hard process.

Katie: Right. I agree.

Carol: So tell us some more ways that you're using this data that you're collecting.

Katie: Sure. Well, a lot of it is for advocating for the program, advocating for my specific building's needs. But even during day to day production, my specific school has a really strong MTSS multi tiered system of support program that we sort of built from the ground up. We did not have anything existing over the last few years. I know PBIS was a know movement in the education world, and our staff, we followed the motions, I should say, but it was never, ever done with fidelity. And so now we're sort of taking a shift and we're still focusing on the data. That's one thing that we really did appreciate about PBIs, but we're focusing more on what tier one really means and what tier two really means and tier three. And how do we get to the referrals for the special services if we haven't mastered tiers one, two, and even three? And that's something we've learned a lot about ourselves, that we're really struggling even with the tier one. It's not always easy to, as an MTSS team, to go to a teacher and say, let's talk about your classroom management policies and protocols that can be really challenging. So we just do a lot of data support to help identify patterns and trends. I will say that new to us over the last three years. I don't know if this is in Missouri or if it was just in our district, but we had some funding due to The COVID federal funding that we had. And we have three interventionists in every building in our district, although this is the last year, so I'm not sure what will happen next year. So we have a math interventionist, a reading interventionist, and a social emotional learning interventionist. And the social emotional learning interventionist has been kind of a fun experiment because it's hard to determine the difference between a school counselor from an SEL interventionist, and it's something that's evolved over time, in my opinion. An SEL interventionist does all the glamorous and fun things that we want to do in our Missouri Comprehensive school counseling program. But we don't get to a lot of small groups, individual check ins and checkouts. Check in connects all the tier twos and tier threes that we, as counselors, love to do. So it's fun to partner and look at data. I'm not sure if SEL is kind of a universal position in buildings. I'm just not really with it outside of Missouri. Do you have anything like that in New York in your schools?

Carol: We don't have a particular person that does Sel. I do Sel lessons in our building along with our other school counselor, as well as the other school counselors in our district. And I think that's pretty, I don't know, standard across New York State, at least. I don't know of really any SEL interventionists.

Katie: Oh, well, that's great, then. I'm proud of Missouri. Yes, it's a wonderful opportunity. I'm not sure what will happen to that position. We have used a student survey response to gather SEL data through a platform called Panorama, and our district did invest in that, so that costs money. But it's a wonderful tool that we've been using not only to track Sel responses, student responses. They take a survey two times a year, one time in the fall, one time in the winter, and we assess them on their competencies in different areas. We pick them ahead of time, grit, growth, mindset, emotional regulation, social awareness. But they'll take a survey and then they get a score Based on whether they're doing well, they're at risk, they're clinical, and that just means that they have identified strengths in all of the areas, half of the areas, less than half, or none of the areas. And that'll help us identify who could benefit from a tier two. So that will get us to be able to pull students in, get to know them. We show them the survey and ask them. Let's talk about these responses. What things in your life may have led you here? What are you struggling with? What challenges do you have? And that is on top of the school counselor needs assessment surveys that we do at the beginning of the year when we introduce ourselves to students. And so we use a lot of data there to kind of help us pick out our tier two students. And I'll say a weakness of mine is I can identify students, make contact with them. But one thing I struggle with often is being able to follow up regularly, knowing if I'm doing a check in on somebody once a week. Sometimes I just rely on the student because things happen here so much. I just feel like all I'm doing at times is crisis counseling, and it's hard for me to really set that aside. So our SEL interventionist, fortunately, has been able to take that particular task on. So we've been supporting over 150 students so far this year who are identified in tier two for SEL support.

Carol: Now, have you collected the data of the students that you want or have wanted to see but don't have time for because that might be interesting data to collect?

Katie: Yes, we have all of that information there. This year we have a new SEL interventionist. Actually, she's branded to us this year, so I've showed her notes from the past for our 7th and 8th grade students on my caseload. 6th grade is new to all of us, so we won't have any preliminary data for that. And so I've shared that with her, and she's already taken the reins on that. So she's seen even more students than what our identifying tool has proposed to us. And the other thing that we like about that panorama platform is not only the SEL data is in there. But it partners with our student system, so it also shows us attendance rates and behavior referral rates, and it can categorize them also as advanced, proficient, at risk, or clinical. So along with our academics and our assessments, like our. We call it the MAP program, Missouri Assessment Program, our state testing, and even within our district, we do a lot of common assessments across the content areas, and that can be uploaded into the platform. So it's really just a one stop shop for all the data that we have access to. And just over the years, it's just been so beneficial to have an online platform, whether it's panorama or anything else that can be like a dashboard or just a mainstop home base where all of it can stick out at one time. If we just see a bunch of red across the board, we know that child is really struggling in a variety of areas, and we can really give them the wraparound services, not only reading and writing and math, but also what kind of social emotional concerns that they have, attendance, what's standing in their way, any kind of family supports in our building, we don't have a social worker, so that can get really foggy being able to support our families outside of our building. But hopefully we'll get there one day with more advocacy.

Carol: Is your SEl interventionist? Is that a school counselor?

Katie: No, she actually. Well, that's interesting. The person we had for the first two years, she was trained as a school counselor. She went through the program, but that was not a requirement of the job description. That's just a preference that in our particular building, something that we prioritize. But the current person, she was a social, emotional, behavioral special educator in Arizona before she came back home to Missouri. So she does not have the counseling background, but she still has a good SEB background. And cognitive behavioral therapy is just kind of a practice in her special education background that she's familiar with. So it's a great mix. It's a wonderful kind of partnership that we have.

Carol: No, I was just wondering, because I think that you said that she does small groups and stuff like that.

Katie: Yes, she does a ton of them.

Carol: I don't know. I might be fighting that in my district. I don't think I'd want a person without a counseling degree to offer or run a small group.

Katie: Yes, that is definitely something that's on our mind whenever we were hiring for the SEO interventionist. So the person we had the first two years, she did have that counseling background. In other buildings in our district, they are teachers or social workers. So that one I feel more comfortable with. But when I learned that the SEL interventionists are teachers, of course they're capable of focusing on SEL competencies. But you're right, I 100% agree with you. That background and that training in the small group counseling and counseling in general, I think is so important, and that was a priority for us. But our current SEL interventionist, even though she doesn't have the counseling training, she does have that experience and background because she only worked with small groups and social skills groups in her practice, in her education.

Carol: I guess that would be helpful, especially if she has knowledge of the CBT like that. So such great ways to really be able to have a system that you can pull all this data from and say, wow, here's where our students are lacking. Here's where the areas that we need to focus in on to maybe close some gaps and to get them where we want them to be. And now we know where our focus is to really create the groups and the programs that we need to close those gaps. Yeah, that's awesome.

Katie: Absolutely. I will say another something just popped into my head as we're talking about this, but we also have something in my office called a Zen zone. That's something that was really important to me because I was noticing in my early years here that students would come down and they wouldn't necessarily want to talk. They just needed to get out of their classroom or get out of an environment or Just step away for a minute, and it would just be this kind of awkward, like, well, if you're not here to talk, then what are we doing? Okay, have a good day. So eventually, we created what we were calling the Zen zone. And it's not really a lobby, so to speak. It's just more of a walk in area before you get to our independent offices. But it's something that has really actually helped me with my time management, because anytime I have a student come or want to come to see me, but not necessarily talk, they just need that break. Then they just fill out the Google form. We get an alert through our email, and then we can release them. We have an online hall pass system. And so students, we had set up some universal. So now students know what the safety protocols are, and they can just come in, they say, hi, they set the timer, and after about eight to ten minutes of calming activities or just quiet time, then they just head back to class. And it has saved me a ton of time because I feel less obligated to directly contact each individual student who needs that immediate support. It's a little less responsive service time. So I think that has been really beneficial to free up my opportunities to do these check ins, to participate in small group counseling sessions and really focus on the tier two help.

Carol: Have you found that your Zenden has actually helped to decrease behavioral referrals?

Katie: The data is not really consistent. I'm not really sure how to even track something like that. That's been tough. I'm genuinely curious in that, though. Most of our buildings discipline referrals are actually tardies, so we have a lot of other issues going on. Absolutely. But it's hard to say that that has been a direct cause for a decrease in behavioral problems and referrals. We do have students who come, I will call them our regulars, and almost always they aren't here to just set the timer and Zen out. Almost always they are seeking something. And I'm sure that anybody can envision a student who would do that in their own buildiNg. So they are the ones who tend to get the most referrals and they are the ones who come here the most.

Carol: Does that really surprise you?

Katie: No, not at all. No.

Carol: Okay. So in your wisdom that you have, if you were to share some of your knowledge with a newer counselor or someone who maybe hasn't been using any data before, and they said, oh, I want to start doing something, but I'm just not sure what to do. What would you tell them?

Katie: I would say to start with what you know. And what you know is your instinct is when you talk to kids is when you build relationships with them. I use a Google form. We use the Google Suite. That's just standard in our district. So I use it as much as possible. And every single time that a student leaves my office, I fill out, for my sake only for my memory aid notes, I will fill out. I guess I'll document my chat with them, and it'll say whether it was self referred, student referred, teacher referred, parent referred, or whether I initiated it for a check in. And so I'll check all of those boxes, whether they're seeking a break or whether they're wanting to talk about something and then the nature of what they're wanting to discuss. And so I'll track all of that data. It just helps me be able to see patterns, to see repetitive names come up. And if nothing else, it's not data to share with anybody but myself. And it just helps me be able to better understand my students, their needs, how I'm responding to them, how their peers might be responding to them, how I am responding to their peers, to help respond to them. But it's very overwhelming being a new person coming into this field, because your expectation is to be able to counsel and to build relationships with children. And yet there's so much school stuff, school system that just gets in the way that it can be. Sometimes it just makes you wonder, is this the right place for me? And of course it is the right place for you. It's just figuring out how to manage it all piece by piece so that you don't feel like you're burning out way too fast. Because the school system in 2023 is unintentionally designed for us to feel the burnout. And that's something that is always going to be difficult. So just start small and start with what you know, start with your instinct.

Carol: But I think that basic piece of data that you were just describing, like the little Google form, having the kids come down, that little extra piece of, are they self referred? Were they sent down? And really the reason why they're with mean, there's so much that you could do with that data from creating a small group, or you could even see based on the semester, like the first semester they came in and they came in 15 times. And the second semester, because I've had kids that have done, oh, yeah. And then the second quarter they were only there for five, and by the third quarter, they're down for three. You can almost see how the services that you've provided them, they're becoming more resilient. They're gaining some skills, whether it's regulation or problem solving. So I think that's really important information, too.

Katie: Yes. And one year when I was tracking all of this, I noticed that the parent referral, I had a very low percentage rate of parents asking me to chat with their child. And so that got me thinking, why is that? Is there a lack of knowledge in the community of what a school counselor does? Is it that our parents are not involved? What's really going on in our parent population? And so it was something very small and minor, but it was easy for me to do, and I decided to just do a monthly newsletter coming directly from me to just a mass email to our parents. And I'm very fortunate that I am in a school district where parents do have access to email very quickly. They have access to their phone numbers very quickly. Not a lot of them do. In my rural district, the parents, just the nature of the high rate of poverty. They had go phones, and so every 30 days they'd have a brand new phone number. And forget email. It was just impossible to get in touch with parents. But then fast forward to this district. We're very lucky that we have parent involvement. So I was able to reach out with a parent newsletter, and the more that I was sending that out, the more my parent referrals were coming in to me. And I felt like that was a direct result of the data that I was looking at that was helping me to increase my outreach beyond the walls of the school.

Carol: That would be such great data to share with a principal, too, because if you wanted parent outreach, you could put together like a parent university or something like that, or your principal could have the PTA. Your organization provides some stuff for parents. I know our PTA who's always looking for information like that of what programs that they can put together for parents and things. So that would be another great way to use that data to have others help you.

Katie: Yes, absolutely. And one day I will get a lot of support and cheering on for a part time counselor turning into a full time co counselor. So maybe the parents can help.

Carol: Right. But I do think that all the data and showing how many kids, like how many kids you missed and how many parents are looking for this information and the types of problems that your kids need help with and the things that your teachers are struggling with, and I think all of that lends itself to, hey, this is what we need, and this is how it can help. And if you provide it to me, just think of what you can allow me to do to help you, to help our school, to help our district, to really change things as a whole in the right direction.

Katie: Right? Absolutely.

Carol: This has been really interesting. Is there anything else that you want to share about data?

Katie: Right now I'm working on a side project. It's not really going to be super groundbreaking, but it's just something I'm trying out. In the district that we're at, our counselors are paid on the same pay scale as the teachers. But in the state of Missouri, which I believe is pretty universal across America, the average master's degree for school counseling takes about 55 credit hours. However, for teachers to have their initial teaching certificate in Missouri, they're only required to have a bachelor's degree. And if they want to bump themselves up the pay scale, they can seek out a master's degree, typically funded by our district and in part, but that is an average of 30 credit hours. And so we're getting paid the same rate as somebody with a 30 degree master's or a 30 credit hour master's degree. On top of we don't get a plan, period, we don't get duty free lunch. We have more assigned supervision duties than our average teacher lot. I'm not sure if a lot of districts do this or a lot of states have this, but we have a local education agent representative that's required to attend every single IEP meeting and the LEA representative at the IEP meeting. Their intention or their role is to be the ultimate decision makers. Whether it's for district resources that the student could be provided or if a team can't come to a consensus, then the LEA will be the person that just makes the final decision. And that is such a huge responsibility, especially from a counselor perspective. If we don't have special education law or education law in general, we don't have that training and knowledge and background. There's a lot of responsibilities placed on school counselors that reflect administration roles or principal roles, yet we're getting compensated as our equal colleagues in the teacher realm. And so it's a very difficult disconnect. So I have done some data collecting just within the district of all the counselors we have, and hopefully the data will tell a story that we can either get paid more or is that going to be better for the district to hire administrative interns who can be the 504 case managers, the master schedulers, the LEA representatives at IEP meetings, the people who can do the review of existing data for a request for an IEP test? All of these things do not have to be the school counselor. It just tends to fall onto our plate just because, as one administrator once told me, well, who else would do it? Which is a good question, but that's not my problem to answer.

Carol: That's why they get paid the big bucks. If you want to pay me, I'll.

Katie: Do it all for you. That's fine. So I'm currently taking data in hopes of being able to advocate in front of our new superintendent this year and perhaps one day in front of the school board. So we'll see how that goes. I'll keep you updated. I'm really excited about it.

Carol: Maybe some of the data that you can collect is from other school districts of how they handle their pay scales in terms of counselors. I have been a part of districts myself where there was stipends for school counselors. In New York, we're on a pay scale, but ours goes by the credits that you have in your masters. It's a step system. So on one side and then down the scale is your years of service. And so the multiplication tables where those two points come together, that's your something. Like. It sounds like you guys in Missouri need something like that, right?

Katie: We do have something similar to that, but instead of credit hours, it's just by the degree itself. So it's your bachelor's know and years experience. So it sounds like it's very similar. Just rather than the credit hours, it's by degree, which, now that you mentioned it, that could even be beneficial for us because we do have more. School counselors have more credits than principals in Missouri, principals, to get their initial principal certificate, their master's degree is approximately 30 to 33 credit hours. But they're not on the teacher paid scale. I should say that they have their own elevated scale.

Carol: I know around here, some districts might move, like, every 15 credits. Some move every three, some move every six. Some there's like some magical combination of all of those. But if you have more credits, you are going to earn more money, which over the long span can be quite substantial.

Katie: Yes, I'm all for it. Yeah.

Carol: So you need to collect that data, my friend.

Katie: Yes, I do. I'm on.

Carol: And now just a little sidebar here. And for people listening, you can go and look up salaries, at least in New York. We have a thing called See through New York. Like SCe. Like I see you see through New York. And it has really all the government salaries and contracts and things like that. So you could go in and say, hey, for this district, I want to pull out their teacher contract or their whatever contract, and I want to take a look at it so I can see the different pay scales and see what they offer in terms of benefits and all that stuff. So it's out there. So you could do some little behind the scenes type stuff, too, with comparing the districts.

Katie: Yes. And all of this is very much behind the scenes, I should say. I'm not really, well, advertising this right now. I do. However, we have a specific person in our central office who's the Student services director and counseling falls under student services, but also so does nursing and so does our ESOL teaching staff and everybody else. So he is aware of this, and he is an advocate, but know so overwhelmed that he doesn't even know what to do with data once it's presented to him. So that's my next challenge. I have the data. I have a story to tell. But now what do I do with it moving forward? That's my next adventure. I'll see what that will be.

Carol: Sometimes when you collect the data, you have to be able to know what you're doing with it and how to use it, right?

Katie: Absolutely.

Carol: You got a little bit of a task.

Katie: I do. It is quite a big task, and I'm just fascinated in general with the history of school counseling, the profession, and how far it's come over the past over 100 years. It just has been really fascinating. I've forced myself to learn more about it while doing this side project, and it just blows my mind how it's new, but not really at the same time. It's over 100 years old. It started as vocational guidance, and then in the 1930s, it evolved into pupil services. Human and pupil services is something that I read. And all this I found on the ASkA website. They have some really interesting documents about the history of the school counseling role. And then in 1952, that's when ASCA was established and created, which seems kind of like ahead of its time for the 50s. It's a lot that I've learning. I've been learning. And truthfully, if you really do take a deep dive into the history of the school counseling profession, the value of child mental health and pupil mental health is something that has always been sought out and evolving over time. And so to me, being relatively young in 2023, it just makes me wonder, why are we still stuck here? Why are we here when in 19 hundreds, the, these evolutionary events have been happening in the school counseling world, but here we are. I just feel like we're kind of stuck. So I hope.

Carol: Yes, I agree with you. It's just like, I know in New York State, we had an official title change from guidance counselor. Counselor in the was like 1972. And you would think, in how many years is that, like a year's time that it would stick. I know that PE teachers in New York, they were originally called gym teachers, but I can remember during my career as a school counselor when I worked at the high school, our PE teacher came in one day and said, nope, we are no longer gym teachers. We are PE teachers. This is the reason why we want to use the updated language and poof. It's like nobody here in New York would dare say gym teacher anymore. It's like PE. But yet we can't get everyone on the same wavelength to say school counselor. There's still a lot of guidance counselors.

Katie: Yes, there is. And, you know, sometimes I try to stay away from pop culture and television because I just have this anxiety over anytime a school counselor is portrayed fictionally on a TV show, they're always called a guidance counselor. And that just drives me nuts. And they're always just so bland and just portrayed as somebody who's dumb or somebody who doesn't care, and it just drives me nuts. But that's a tangent that I went on. I agree, though. There's a huge difference between what was seen as a guidance counselOr, which was just very vocationally focused and career workforce focused, to now a school counselor is whole body, whole human focused. And I just think we're kind of stuck in a time we just need to get back on board.

Carol: Yes, because we do offer guidance. I will say that we do offer guidance, but it's not what we're trained for. We are trained to really be counselors and to deal with all the other stuff goes along with it. So we are mental health providers.

Katie: That's right.

Carol: So, my friends listening to this, if you're still using guidance counselor, please check out the history of all the reasons why. I have probably eight gazillion blog posts on it, as well as rants in the Facebook groups as to why using the term school counselor is so important, but it really is.

Katie: It really.

Carol: Well, Katie, this has been really great. I've had a lot of fun talking with you, and I love just hearing how different people do different things. And I think this will be helpful for some of our counselors that are listening, that are saying, I want to do this, I want to use the data. I just don't know 100% what data to use or what to collect or.

Katie: How to get started.

Carol: Yeah, it's just start somewhere.

Katie: That's right. And I would be happy to help anybody they want to reach out to me. I do love helping people, as anybody in this profession does. So don't hesitate to reach out to me. I'd love to help you.

Carol: Is there any contact information that you want to give people? Sure.

Katie: Get in touch with you. I'm not really a great social media guru. I use it more for my personal use. I have an adorable niece, and so if you find me on social media, that's pretty much all you'll learn about me is my beautiful nieces and nephews. But I am on Instagram. I am in the Facebook group. I have an email address. I'd be happy to send that to you, Carol, to put on the podcast, to put that in there?

Carol: Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes. Anything that you want to send me, just do that. And then I will make sure my friends that are listening that I will include that in the show notes so that if you want to talk to Katie or send her a little shout out or whatever. You can do that.

Katie: Yes, please. Thank you.

Carol: So, Katie, once again, thank you so much for spending this time with us and sharing all the things that you do and sharing a little bit about your program and some of the little things that you're trying to really work on.

Katie: Right?

Carol: Because kudos to you for all of that.

Katie: Thank you. And thanks for inviting me to this discussion. I love it. I'm passionate about educating people. So thank you for sharing all of this with us and for giving us this opportunity.

Carol: And, friends, if you're listening and you have a story that you want to share with us, please get in touch with me. I would love to have you on the podcast, share your story, share a little bit about what you do as a school counselor, some maybe cool programs or things that you're working on because others want to hear it, too. We always like to hear about what other people are doing and sharing because that sparks our ideas for our own program. And I think when we can share this information with each other, it just makes us better counselors. And that's, I think, what we're all striving for. So that's it. That's all I have to say anyway.

Katie: Thank you.

Carol: Thank you, thank you. And for friends listening, thank you so much. Until next time, have a great week. Thanks for listening to today's episode of Counselor Chat. All of the links I talked about can be found in the show notes and@counselingessentials.org forward slash podcasts. Be sure to hit, follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And if you would be so kind to leave a review, I'd really appreciate it. Want to connect? Send me a DM on Facebook or Instagram at counseling essentials until next time.

Carol: Can't wait till we chat. Bye for now. Bye.