Hi! I’m currently in the beginning of my Master’s. Right now, it’s for school counseling, but I’m considering switching it to mental health counseling. It’s still early enough in my course progression that I haven’t taken a school counseling-specific course.

For the past five years I’ve worked in the elementary school (K-4th) of one of the top 30 public school districts in New York State as a teacher aide. Generally, I provide 1:1 or 2:1 support for specific students. Two years of that was spent in our ABA classrooms, two in a mainstream class, and one as a floater/sub aide. The kids who have gravitated towards me have been the ones dealing with anxiety, depression, and bullying. These are not the to whom students I’m assigned, but they are the ones who’ve influenced me to go into counseling. I’ve been rated as “Highly Effective” and teachers consistently say I’m one of the best aides they’ve ever worked with.

Like so many others in the education field, I’m tired of seeing the administration fail kids who have mental/behavioral health concerns. I know I want to go into child/adolescent mental health. I chose school counseling over mental health counseling because of the benefits of working in a school - excellent healthcare, great retirement plans, union representation…etc. But I’m not so sure I really want to spend the rest of my working life in a school environment. It’s primarily how admin don’t care about children that aren’t receiving services (MTSS in our district is a joke) and they don’t care about the needs of the staff.

[Skip this paragraph if you want, it’s more on why I’m considering the career shift.] We had a huge change in administration at my school this year. The principal was not granted tenure. The interim guy seems good, though. The assistant principal (who is the direct supervisor of aides) left after getting her PhD, and the person they hired has never been an assistant principal before (could be good in some cases, but inexperience is the last thing my school needs), and the superintendent is retiring at the end of the school year. Since the AP left (who was very fond of me) I’ve been treated absolutely horribly. A whole deal, involving lawyers, happened with HR because they didn’t want to provide temporary disability accommodation after I returned from a major surgery. That HR lady engaged in behavior that could be considered intimidation/retaliation and I actually cried (thank god I had my union rep with me), which had never happened at any job before. I got placed in a classroom staffed by simply nasty people (it’s a big deal for me to call someone that) who practice unethical ABA (a whole other issue) and I came home crying after just my first day there (I’d already spent time in the room as a floater). It’s not like I can say that I don’t want to work in the room; that’s not the sort of thing admin cares about. They moved me there because a student elopes, and I can’t say I blame him. My only way out of that room would be invoking the aforementioned disability accommodation, but even that’s temporary and they’ll just put me back as soon as it ends. I’ve already decided I’m leaving the current school.

Right now, I’m looking at jobs with agencies in the community, and although what I’m qualified for isn’t a huge range, I think I might like it better. A huge factor is that the jobs outside of schools pay nearly twice what the school jobs pay. I didn’t even make $20k last year.

What I’m here to ask is, to both mental health and school counselors, what is the best part of your job? What’s the worst part? What’s the most frustrating? For school counselors, if you considered mental health counseling, why did you pick school counseling over that?