The stories, Douglas Morrissey said, seem inescapable. It doesn't matter where you are — at a party, in a restaurant, on an airplane — the minute someone learns you're a school counselor they immediately launch into a tale or two about just how awful their counselor was during their school days.

"Sometimes I don't even want to say what I do because I'm sick of the stories," Morrissey said with a laugh. "I get it. Mine was bad, too."

A counselor at Canajoharie High School in Montgomery County and a member of the Canajoharie Teachers Association, Morrissey said a popular stereotype exists that casts those in his line of work as people who choose to become counselors because they've lived through their own share of "drama."

So clichéd has that image become that it even served as the story line for an ABC sitcom called Miss Guided, focusing on the fictional character Becky Freeley, a woman who finally conquers her own history of orthodontia and high-school trauma and returns to her alma mater to work as a guidance counselor.

But the 400 professionals who attended the recent New York State School Counselor Association's conference in Saratoga Springs say their profession is misunderstood not only by Hollywood. Unless there's a crisis, they say, administrators seem confused about how to use the counselors in their own districts.

As a result, they are often kept busy with paperwork and data-entry assignments — tasks that don't necessarily make the most of their abilities.

"After 9/11, schools couldn't get enough of us. But we're not just here for crisis," said association president Salvatore Emanuele, a counselor at Jamaica High School in New York City and a United Federation of Teachers member.

School counselors, Emanuele said, play an instrumental role in shaping students for success — not just academically, but socially, behaviorally, and emotionally as well. For instance, they:

• help students deal with and diffuse problems brought into school from home and outside the classroom;
• act as consultants to teachers and serve as sources of institutional knowledge for administrators;
• provide academic and career guidance to students, and help them meet and overcome emotional- and mental-health challenges;
• establish and promote supportive learning environments;
• develop academic and behavioral intervention programs; and
• foster and maintain parental involvement.

Emanuele said some of the uncertainty on the part of administrators toward the job counselors perform is because their work often does not provide an instantaneous result.

"Listening," he said, "is the key tool to what we do."

Still, counselors themselves are also to blame for some of the confusion, Emanuele said, because "we don't know how to promote ourselves."

Defining the job

In order to help better define the job of school counselors, Emanuele said the association is working to get the State Education Department to accept a comprehensive model for K-12 school counseling programs in New York state.

Adopting this "doesn't cost anything" Emanuele said, noting the state's precarious economic climate. "But if we can provide something that the state sees will work, they may be willing to invest in it."

The nearly 150-page document — developed by counselors and counseling experts from across the state — serves as the "centerpiece" in the association's effort to transform its profession by offering a guide for districts to follow when it comes to building and managing school counseling programs.

"There is a lack of connection in communication about who we are and what we really do," said Deborah Hardy, a counselor at Irvington High School in Westchester County and a member of the Irvington Faculty Association.

With no statewide model for the profession, counselors are seeing their jobs defined by their individual districts.

And that fact alone, said Hardy, makes it incumbent upon counselors to become their own advocates.

Both Morrissey and Hardy say counselors should be using every resource at their disposal to spread the word about the important role they play in education. District newsletters, Web sites, and open houses are just some of the ways that can be done, they said.

Staff development days, meanwhile, provide the perfect opportunity for counselors to reach out to other school faculty on how they can complement their jobs.

Don't be modest, either, Morrissey said: "Brag about your department's achievements."

And, while public relations is essential in changing the perception of what school counselors do, Morrissey said, there are encouraging signs the profession's image is improving:

That ABC sitcom, Miss Guided? It was canceled by the network after just seven episodes.

— Matt Smith