The Table | The Deans' Roundtable Podcast Series

Youth Gambling in Schools: What Adults Are Missing | Saul Malek

Content note: This episode discusses gambling addiction, including Saul's own. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text.

Youth gambling now starts well before high school, and much of it doesn't look like gambling to the adults around students.

Saul Malek returns to The Table for a second conversation with Bridget Johnson. Since they last spoke, he's been in more demand with middle school audiences, and students tell him that their gambling started with the casinos in the video games they played. Prediction markets look like trading apps, betting content fills the feeds of kids who've never placed a bet, and some students message Saul to say that at fifteen, sports betting looks like the only way to make money.

Bridget keeps the conversation on what schools can act on: the messages they send, the systems they keep in place, and how they respond when a student needs support. Saul explains why the first conversation with a student who's lost money shouldn't happen in the middle of a crisis, and why it should invite the student in rather than accuse them. He also shares the three Ps he uses to tell social gambling from a problem: paying, persisting, and preventing.

They get into why gambling is still missing from so many school health programs, including the conflict a school creates when it runs a prevention assembly and then hosts casino night. For a school that hasn't started, Saul's advice is to survey students first, bring parents and advisory into the conversation, and keep the topic going through the year, around moments like the Super Bowl and March Madness.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Why gambling education now needs to start in middle school, and why some students trace their start to the casinos in video games

How prediction markets blur the line between gambling, trading, and investing for students

Why students who've never placed a bet are already being primed by what fills their feeds

How to raise gambling with coaches, teachers, and parents without making them feel judged

What the first conversation with a student who's lost money should sound like, and when to have it

The three Ps of problem gambling: paying, persisting, preventing

Why one annual assembly isn't enough, and where a school with no plan should start

This episode is supported by General Counsel Law, Kevin Plante's Boston firm. Before founding it, Kevin was general counsel at a private school. Learn more at https://www.gclaw.com/

Featured Guest: Saul Malek is a professional speaker specializing in gambling addiction prevention and education. Saul developed a gambling addiction as a college sophomore, losing money, time, relationships, and nearly his life. Since entering recovery in 2019, he has become an in demand speaker, sharing his story with schools (both K-12 and colleges and universities), athlete mental health organizations, suicide prevention groups, parent groups, popular news outlets (including New York Times, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, and Dallas Morning News). He has keynoted conferences including the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling annual conference, the Wisconsin Council on Problem Gambling annual conference, and Mental Health America Greater Dallas Adolescent Symposium. He has appeared on Dr Phil Primetime and was a TedX speaker at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

🔗 Saul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saulmalek/ ▶️ Saul's first episode on The Table: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwITFtZBWsg

Resources:

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988): https://988lifeline.org

National Problem Gambling Helpline: 1-800-GAMBLER

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Teacher Burnout and Retention: Fix the Conditions | Dr. Derek Porter

When a great teacher burns out, do we ask what's wrong with them, or what's happening around them?

Dr. Derek Porter, Assistant Head of Middle School at Greenhill School in Dallas, started asking the second question during his own burnout as a teacher. He went to every administrator he could find for thought partnership, met real empathy, and watched nothing change, which sent him back to school to study the systems educators work inside. He and Bridget Johnson get into why great professional development fades by Monday, why a boundary set once isn't a boundary, and why Derek doesn't believe leadership can be burnout proof.

Bridget brings what she's seen from the dean's chair. Adolescents are supposed to test boundaries, so adults who can't hold their own will struggle to model it, and because schools rarely debrief, people in student life mostly hear about their work when it goes wrong. When a colleague shows up late or unprepared, she pushes past the performance plan to ask what's actually happening, because the presenting problem is rarely the actual problem.

From there they take on resilience that asks people to tolerate conditions that should change, early warning signs like cynicism and depersonalization, why bagels in the faculty lounge don't fix burnout, and why Derek wants schools to hold whole meetings about what they're going to stop doing. They close on retention: what made leaving make sense, what exit interviews miss, and what makes great educators want to stay.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Why "conditions win every time" when professional learning meets a busy Monday

Why boundaries and fences take maintenance, and why setting one with adults costs more than it should

How intrinsic, germane, and extraneous cognitive load shape a leader's capacity for deeper work

Why sustainability is a better goal than burnout-proof leadership

How delegating down and debriefing turn everyday work into job-embedded professional development

The early warning signs of burnout, grounded in Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter's research, including cynicism and depersonalization

Why sunsetting a program well, and honoring the people who built it, matters for retention

This episode is sponsored by Reach, a student life platform for boarding and day schools. Learn more at https://reach.cloud/

Featured Guest: Dr. Derek Porter is Assistant Head of Middle School at Greenhill School in Dallas, where he supports teaching and learning, faculty development, and student experience. He spent more than a decade as a classroom teacher and educational researcher and earned a Doctor of Education from William & Mary, where he's now collaborating to develop leadership and professional learning content through lilyPD. His insight has been featured by the Pulitzer Center.

🔗 Derek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-porter-ed-d-5a527562/

Resources:

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Duty of Care in Schools: Why Process Protects Students | Brian Murray Duty of care comes down to two questions: where is every student right now, and would your discipline process hold up if a family challenged it in court?

Brian Murray spent more than 25 years across independent, public, and international schools as a dean of students and director of student leadership, and he's candid about the moments when his process didn't hold. A student who went missing overnight turned out to be asleep at home, because a sign-out never got logged and the handoff between the duty teacher and the dorm parent never happened. Looking back at whether his schools could account for day students if there had been a fire, he puts it plainly: "I was negligent."

Bridget Johnson has sat in the same chair, which is why this conversation goes straight to what holds up under pressure. They get into an expulsion that was overturned in court on due process because the discipline process and the boarding code of conduct weren't documented, and into why student life leaders find it so hard to draw the line with a kid they've poured themselves into. Bridget's answer is the one she gives every team: process, process, process, because it won't always produce the same outcome, but you have to follow it.

They also take on what duty of care asks of a school after a mandatory report is filed, why discipline committees and duty logs have to stick to the facts, and what underfunded student life costs when families stop recommending the school. Bridget closes on the continuous thread that runs through admissions, student life, and alumni work: relationship building, which every one of those teams depends on.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why a missing-student scare usually traces back to a handoff nobody logged
• How often an adult should have eyes on each student, and why some students go a whole school day without hearing their name
• What duty of care asks of a school after a mandatory report is filed, not just before it
• How an undocumented discipline process and a missing boarding code of conduct can get an expulsion overturned on due process
• Why the hardest conversation in student life is telling a student you've invested in that this is the line
• Why discipline committees and duty logs have to deal with the facts in front of them, not feelings or rumors
• How underfunded student life shows up later in attrition and in what families tell other families

This episode is supported by General Counsel Law, Kevin Plante's Boston firm. Before founding it, Kevin was general counsel at a private school. Learn more at https://www.gclaw.com/

Featured Guest: Brian Murray has spent more than 25 years across independent, public, and international schools, including senior roles as a Dean of Students and Director of Student Leadership. He is Managing Director and Partner of Reach Student Life Management and founder and CEO of Academic Edge Inc., a consultancy that supports independent schools on student life programs, risk mitigation, and leadership development. He holds a Master of Education in Learning and Technology from Acadia University, presents at the TABS National Conference, CAIS Leadership Institute, and Round Square Conferences, and hosts the podcast Roll Call: Topics in Global Education.

🌐 Reach: https://reach.cloud/ 🔗 Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/contactbrianm/ 🎙️ Brian's podcast: Roll Call: Topics in Global Education

Resources:

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

The Readiness Gap: What Employers Screen For | Edward DuCoin

Your students will sit across a desk from someone like Edward DuCoin one day, and he'll know within minutes what school built in them and what it didn't.

Edward teaches marketing and entrepreneurship, and then, as an employer, he interviews the same kind of student he just taught. That round trip shows him the distance between how ready a graduate believes they are and what actually gets screened for in the room, and he is blunt about where the distance comes from.

Bridget Johnson keeps this one anchored in K-12, because the capacities Edward screens for (listening, speaking clearly, taking a real risk in front of people, following through when it's hard) aren't built in a senior seminar. They're built years earlier, in advisory, on teams, in residential life, and in the ordinary conversations student life leaders have every week. Edward is equally direct about AI: in his classroom it's expected, expected to be understood, and expected to be disclosed, and he treats forbidding it as the weaker choice. What we build in students before they leave us is what walks into that interview chair later.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Why the skills schools once called soft are the first thing employers now screen for

What a classroom looks like when AI is taught and disclosed instead of forbidden

Why oral presentation, listening, and articulation carry more weight in hiring than they used to

How to build a room where students can fail on purpose, and why that work belongs to student life

What Edward means when he says schools move like battleships, and what it costs students

How to answer a family asking whether a degree is still worth what it costs

Where the daily work of student life shows up in an interview chair years later

Featured Guest: Edward DuCoin is an adjunct professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at Montclair State University, a three-time Inc. Magazine 500 CEO, co-founder of Orpical Technology Solutions, and a Wharton graduate. He teaches students in the classroom and then meets them again from the other side of the interview table.

🌐 Edward's websites: https://edwardducoin.net & https://orpical.com/

🔗 Edward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardducoin/

Resources:

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Family Engagement Is a Relationship, Not a Head Count | Nitza Jimenez

What if the family your school has written off as non-responsive is actually drowning?

Family engagement usually gets measured as a head count: who came to the football game, who showed up for trunk or treat. Nitza Jimenez, a family engagement and parent communication strategist with over a decade across education and community health, says that number rewards the families who can already get to the building, and misses the ones who are trying to help their child at home and don't know how.

She works the difference between relationship-centered and compliance-based through attendance. Telling a parent to send their kid to school, with nothing relational behind it, buys no trust, and the reason the student isn't there is often a sick parent or a car that broke down. Early in her career she spent a quarter chasing a parent who booked meetings and never came, decided that parent didn't care, then called at an hour she normally wouldn't and heard the rest of it: a sick parent at home, a partner deployed, a family drowning. The second moment ran the other way, a family who answered a broken computer with "we're on the same team."

Bridget Johnson names the principle in her own voice, connection before correction, and the two of them take it where deans rarely apply it, to families. She also names the failure underneath a low number, that engagement is happening to families and not with them.

From there it gets practical. What to send families at the start of the year so they know how they fit the goal, why a first-month call to every family matters more than the words in it, why naming your own response time out loud keeps parents from guessing, and why a family survey at the beginning and end of the year puts the plan in the community's hands instead of the building's. Nitza Jimenez is direct about the skill gap behind all of it: teachers get no training in family engagement, and administrators tend to leave the work sitting on them.

Bridget adds the tip of the iceberg frame and the role play she recommends before a hard call, with light notes rather than a script. Nitza Jimenez closes with BRB, breathe, reflect, begin again, the resource she gives at the end of her workshops, applied to a parent, to a student, and to yourself after you blow up.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why measuring family engagement as participation misses the families who cannot come to the building, and what Nitza Jimenez tracks instead
• How relationship-centered communication differs from compliance-based, worked all the way through attendance
• What a "non-responsive" parent usually turns out to be carrying, and how she found out
• Why the first contact with every family should be a positive one, connection before correction applied to parents
• What early warning signs of a family communication breakdown look like, including contact that only happens when something is wrong
• Why family engagement belongs to the whole school, the nurse and the front office included, not to the classroom teacher alone
• Why families do not disclose homelessness or food insecurity right away, and the plain list that makes the question read as support rather than judgment
• How to coach an adult through a hard parent conversation: know your own triggers first, because if both of you are escalated, nobody comes down
• BRB, breathe, reflect, begin again: Nitza Jimenez's workshop resource for regulating yourself before a hard conversation with a parent

This episode is for: deans of students, student life professionals, school counselors, advisors, principals and division directors, independent and K-12 school administrators, and any educator responsible for the relationship between home and school.

Featured Guest: Nitza Jimenez is a family engagement and parent communication strategist with over a decade of experience across education and community health. She helps schools strengthen family engagement through relationship-centered communication, trust building, and partnerships between families and educators. Her work includes auditing where engagement is breaking down, retraining teacher and staff mindsets, building an engagement roadmap for each community, and running teacher trainings alongside occasional family-facing workshops.

Resources:

Connect with Nitza Jimenez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitza-danielle/

Kinected Coaching, Nitza Jimenez's practice: https://kinected-coaching.kit.com/home

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Restorative Practice Across 64 Nationalities | Alistair Goold What happens to belonging when almost nobody in the building is from the country they live in?

Alistair Goold has spent 19 years as an international educator across three continents, and he says restorative practice changed shape in every one of them. In Scotland's inner-city schools, affective statements were his superpower, because for some kids that was the only positive language they heard all day. In the Middle East, he found that neglect takes a different form at the other end of the wealth spectrum. In Kenya, where he teaches now, he describes a traditional and punitive approach and real pressure on schools.

Bridget Johnson and Alistair go straight to the part most schools skip: culture change is slow, and it usually gets led from the middle. He walks through six years of it, circles in one grade level, then every grade level, then team meetings, then a whole-staff circle in the first week back and a line in the strategic focus areas. He's blunt that training is the beginning and not the finish line, and that leaders who claim restorative without acting it damage this work more than the skeptics do. When a staff member pushed back that it was the soft option, his answer was "show me a better way."

Bridget names the myth in her own voice, that restorative practice means the absence of consequences, and lays out what she tells the schools she works with about consistency: the process has to look the same every time even though the outcome will not. From there the conversation turns to third culture kids, whose identity, as Alistair frames it, rests on relationships rather than geography, which makes the school itself the culture they belong to. It ends where a dean can actually start on Monday, with the circle.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why culture change is a slow burn led from the middle, and what six years of it actually looked like
• How to answer "restorative practice means no consequences" without softening the practice, using high accountability and high support
• What third culture kids are, and why Alistair Goold frames their identity as resting on relationships rather than geography
• Why a school that draws students from everywhere becomes the culture they belong to, and what that asks of the adults
• How consistency of process holds a restorative approach together when the outcome is different every time
• Why the North American lens on belonging and identity is one lens, and what happens when international schools import it wholesale
• Why he brings training to schools rather than asking schools to fly staff out to him
• The lowest-hanging fruit for a dean this week: the circle, including the whole-staff circles he designed for the first week back

This episode is for: deans of students, student life professionals, boarding and residential life leaders, independent and international school administrators, counselors, advisors, and restorative practices practitioners.

Featured Guest: Alistair Goold is the founder of Restorative360 and a social science teacher and grade level leader at an international school in Kenya where 64 nationalities are represented. He has spent 19 years as an international educator across three continents, is fully trained and licensed with the International Institute for Restorative Practices, and sits on the European Forum for Restorative Justice's Register of Restorative Trainers and Consultants and its education working group. He completed his master's in restorative practices in 2024, and his academic work has been published in On the Horizon and the International Journal of Restorative Justice.

Resources:

Alistairs LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alistairgoold Restorative360: https://restorative360.com/ European Forum for Restorative Justice, education section and monthly webinars: https://www.euforumrj.org/

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Addiction Proofing Your School: What's Changed | Kriya Lendzion Content note: this conversation includes candid discussion of addiction and recovery, overdose, suicide, and sexual assault, including Kriya's own experience. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text.

What if the substance use policy in your student handbook was written for a supply that no longer exists?

Kriya Lendzion has spent more than 30 years as a licensed addictions clinician, prevention specialist, and school counselor, and she opens with her own story: a New England boarding school kid reaching for ways to feel comfortable in her skin, surrounded by adults who cared but didn't know how to intervene. She and Bridget Johnson work through what has actually changed in what students can get their hands on, why staff development is the entry point for everything else, and what it means to addiction proof a school.

Kriya is blunt that today's products are engineered, packaged, and delivered in ways the adults around students were never trained to recognize, and she argues this can't sit with the health center alone. Her policy case is just as direct: state what the policy is for, review it every single year, ground it in science and care rather than prohibition, and protect the student who comes forward.

The through line will be familiar to anyone in this work. The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem, and Kriya's example is the depression and suicidality workup where nobody thinks to ask about a student's THC use.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• What "teen whispering" looks like in the room, starting with asking what a student already knows before the adult talks
• Why "inflicting help" shuts down the conversation you were trying to have
• How the supply has changed in potency, packaging, and availability
• Why every adult on campus needs this knowledge, not just the health center
• What a strong substance use policy names, and why annual review is the step most schools skip
• Why amnesty and safe-haven provisions decide whether a student tells a counselor the truth
• What no-tolerance policies produce, and what a wraparound response looks like instead

Featured Guest: Kriya Lendzion has spent more than 30 years earning a reputation as a teen whisperer. She has worked as a middle school, high school, and college counselor, and she is a licensed addictions clinician and prevention specialist who has delivered drug and alcohol education to thousands of students and staff development to tens of thousands of educators around the world. She works directly with schools, staff, and parents, and partners with Soundcheck Prevention on larger, system-level engagements.

Resources:

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988, 24/7): https://988lifeline.org

SAMHSA National Helpline, free and confidential treatment referral (1-800-662-4357, 24/7): https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline

Kriya Lendzion: https://www.kriyalendzion.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kriyacounselor/

Soundcheck Prevention: https://soundcheckprevention.org/

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

Student Life Assessment Program: https://deansroundtable.org/k-12-student-life-assessment-program-independent-school-evaluation/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Beyond Generational Labels in Schools | Dr. Unnatti Jain

The friction between the adults in your building probably isn't generational. Underneath it, you'll usually find role clarity, workload, or norms nobody ever agreed on.

Bridget Johnson opens this one with the skeptical question: how much of what we call a generational difference is really age, career stage, personality, or circumstance? Dr. Unnatti Jain, a speaker, coach, and behavioral change specialist who studies generational difference, says the answer is all of the above, which is why she works from four lenses at once: generation, age, career stage, and culture. Her own position is blunt, that generational difference should never be used as a lens to view or judge people.

The research gives leaders reason to hold the labels loosely. Large reviews find that differences between generations in job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intentions, and work values are often small and inconsistent, because age, historical period, and birth cohort are intertwined. What replaces the label is a diagnostic move: when a staff conflict looks generational, it's frequently a role clarity problem, a workload problem, or a set of communication norms nobody ever set. Dr. Jain also names what Gen Z educators need as they move into teaching, advising, and coaching, and why adult belonging is the piece schools keep skipping.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• The four lenses every read of a staff conflict needs: generation, age, career stage, and culture
• What the research actually shows about generational differences at work, and why it is smaller and less consistent than the discourse suggests
• Where generational tension really shows up in schools, from response times and meeting etiquette to work hours and parent communication
• How to tell a genuine performance issue from a different way of working
• What Gen Z educators need from a supervisor, and why feedback norms belong in onboarding rather than in the aftermath
• What adult belonging looks like in practice, and why it is the precondition for student belonging
• The first step for a leader whose team is already in tension: acknowledge it without assigning blame

Featured Guest: Dr. Unnatti Jain is a speaker, coach, and behavioral change specialist whose work explores generational differences and how they affect relationships, communication, leadership, and collaboration. She keynotes on generational difference and belonging, and works with schools through a gap analysis process that moves from assessment and staff survey to tools and strategy built alongside leadership. She has launched a Generational Diversity Training Program for leaders and a Workforce Readiness Academy for early-career staff.

Connect with Dr. Unnatti Jain: https://www.unnattijain.com/

Resources:

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

Student Life Assessment Program: https://deansroundtable.org/k-12-student-life-assessment-program-independent-school-evaluation/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Why Women Leaders Struggle to Delegate | Rebecca Malotke-Meslin

Your head of school notices you are drowning and says, "You need to delegate more." That is the whole instruction. So why is it so hard to do?

In this episode, Bridget Johnson talks with Rebecca Malotke-Meslin, founder of Pleasantly Aggressive Coaching and Consulting, about why delegation is rarely a time-management problem and almost always something deeper. Rebecca connects the resistance to socialization and perfectionism: women are praised for figuring it out alone, asking for help feels like admitting failure, and the people we hand work to get held to an impossible standard. Bridget names how the quiet internal refrain (Am I good enough? What will people think of me?) does its damage without ever being spoken.

The conversation moves from a practical, staged approach to delegation, starting with what to eliminate before anything is handed off, into the systems around it: inclusive leadership training and succession planning. Rebecca is direct that the informal "tap on the shoulder" pipeline rewards the loudest, most confident voices, and shares her view that those are too often the men in the room. Her alternative is a system of proactive career conversations, equitable access to developmental work, and in-house leadership development that becomes a retention and recruitment tool. These are Rebecca's views on women in leadership and equity, offered to peers who already know the terrain.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why "just delegate more" fails as advice, and what a real, staged process looks like
• How perfectionism and socialization make offloading work feel like personal failure
• Why the first step in delegation is deciding what to eliminate entirely
• How to delegate by outcome, and set check-ins that support instead of micromanage
• Why not delegating robs your team of the chance to grow into future leaders
• How the informal "tap on the shoulder" quietly shapes who gets developed
• How to start building an equitable succession plan when your school has none

Featured Guest: Rebecca Malotke-Meslin is the founder of Pleasantly Aggressive Coaching and Consulting and co-host of the Confidently You: Women in Leadership podcast. After more than twenty years across sales, marketing, communications, and school leadership, including roughly fifteen years in admissions across three independent schools, she now coaches early and mid-career women in schools and nonprofits on delegation, boundaries, difficult conversations, and equitable leadership development.

🌐 pleasantlyaggressive.com | Podcast: Confidently You: Women in Leadership

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.

Student Support as Infrastructure: Hidden Leadership | Sherann Alkins

What if your counseling team isn't a service sitting next to the school, but the infrastructure the whole school depends on?

In this episode, Bridget Johnson talks with Sherann Alkins, LICSW, CAGS, founder of Counselor and Concierge and a 20-plus-year school counselor, assistant principal, and principal, about treating student support as central infrastructure rather than a department or program. Sherann names the hidden leadership of these teams as two things, visibility and capacity, and explains why their data has to connect to achievement instead of staying siloed.

Bridget and Sherann, who share a restorative-practices foundation, get specific about building trust across adults, giving counselors a seat at the leadership table, designing with people rather than doing things to them, and making advisory a true psychosocial space. They close on the harder questions Sherann now researches about AI, student voice, and student mental health. It's a conversation for anyone building strong student life systems and tired of doing it alone.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Why student support is central school infrastructure, not a standalone service

What "hidden leadership" means, and how visibility and capacity unlock a counseling team

How to make student support data translate to achievement, not just attendance

Why counselors and deans belong on the leadership team, and how to claim that seat

What "design with you, not for you" protects, and what breaks when schools skip the "with"

Why advisory falls short, and what makes it a real psychosocial space

What ethical AI integration demands when student voice and mental health are at stake

Featured Guest: Sherann Alkins, LICSW, CAGS, is the founder of Counselor and Concierge and a former school counselor, assistant principal, and principal with more than two decades in student support, school culture, and leadership. A Doctor of Social Work candidate at USC, she researches school counseling leadership, trust and belonging, and the ethical integration of AI into student-centered practice.

Connect with Sherann: @counselorandconcierge across all platforms

Visit the Deans' Roundtable: https://deansroundtable.org

Community: https://bit.ly/drt-community-profile

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deans-roundtable

Email: [email protected]

The Table Podcast Series: Where student life professionals and K-12 educational leaders connect, learn, share, and grow together.