From School Counselor to LPC……….in Texas

The year is 2020 and everything has been flipped upside down, the world has shut down and everything has changed. At the time I am in my second year as a high school counselor after teaching elementary for eleven years. If you know anything about high school counseling there is a great deal of transcripts and everything non-counseling duties involved. We are sent to work from home and figure out how to graduate all of our students. It was a process! My students took it hard, like most! No prom, no senior events, graduation ceremony was not the same and it took a toll on everyone. Students were struggling, all of a sudden they had no safe place, no friends, no counselor to go see. The emails, the video conferences just did not replace the interactions that we need to. We came back the next school year with so many uncertainties and so many feelings. The amount of student crises the following year were too much and I knew that I could not be a school counselor forever. There was too much of a need for the emotional and social support in our students, the transcripts and scheduling could not take over. I had always been curious about going back to school for my LPC but wasn’t sure if it was going to work out. At the time I did not have the support from my husband to go back to school, take the test and do the 3000 supervised hours. Much like everyone’s COVID experience that too changed. After an exhausting divorce, a handful of graduate classes, and a grueling National Counselor Examination I made it! I am now a Licensed Professional Counselor and in a new position where I help meet the needs of students on a high school campus! I am so grateful that I did it but by no means was it an easy task and wished I had more clarity of the process.

I recently completed my twentieth year in education and graduated my eight high school class in the stadium where I received my bachelors! A full circle and now I am ready for the next chapter! I am ready to help other school counselors go through the LPC journey. I am ready to help answer all the questions I had and help avoid all the crying and confusion I went through. It is possible and there is hope in school counseling. So follow along as I do my best to break down how you can go from a school counselor to a LPC and how you can do both!

Vivi