Previous research suggests high school counselors are not living up to their potential as social/emotional, academic, and postsecondary counselors. This article addresses this concern by studying how schools and districts utilize counselors. Through interviews and observations of high school counselors, administrators, and counselor educators in an urban midwestern community, I find that counselors suffer from role ambiguity and role conflict due to lack of a clear job description, overlap with similar professions, supervision by noncounseling administrators, inadequate forms of performance evaluation, and conflict between their roles as counselors and educators. This conflict leads to poor boundaries at work, with counselors receiving an overwhelming amount of noncounseling duties that reduce their time with students. High school counselors have the potential to improve student social and academic outcomes, but these obstacles of role ambiguity and role conflict reduce them to school managers rather than master’s-level trained educators with a mental health background.

先前的研究表明，高中辅导员没有发挥其作为社交/情感，学术和中学后辅导员的潜力。本文通过研究学校和地区如何利用辅导员来解决此问题。通过对城市中西部社区的高中辅导员，管理者和辅导员教育者的访谈和观察，我发现辅导员由于缺乏清晰的职位描述，与类似职业重叠，受到非咨询管理者的监督而遭受角色歧义和角色冲突的困扰，绩效评估形式不足，以及他们作为辅导员和教育工作者的角色之间存在冲突。这种冲突导致工作界限差，辅导员承担了大量的非咨询职责，从而减少了他们与学生的时间。