Anchors of Support: Listening When Students Need Us Most

How simply showing up can provide safety, healing, and hope for students navigating trauma.

by: Josh Godinez

"In the wake of national tragedies like 9/11, the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the emotional toll of ongoing immigration challenges, natural disasters, and the relentless barrage of anger, distrust and finger pointing, I have witnessed students carry invisible burdens far heavier than any textbook. 

As a former teacher, school counselor and now a school administrator, I’ve sat with students and families who were unsure of what tomorrow would bring. In those moments—marked by grief, uncertainty, or fear—it wasn’t answers they needed. It was presence. It was trust. It was knowing someone genuinely saw and heard them.

Time and again, I’ve seen how simply being there creates safety and opens the door to healing. Presence doesn’t require answers or advice—just the willingness to show up without trying to fix. In moments of heightened emotion, it’s compassion that helps ground those feelings. Listening, validating, and creating space for their truth builds trust. School counselors do this every day, quietly anchoring students through storms they never asked to weather, helping them transform pain into growth and uncertainty into understanding.

We all have the power to be that anchor. Be present, patient, and real. Show up without the pressure to fix. Sometimes, healing begins with a single moment of feeling heard and validated. In these trying times, the greatest gift isn’t having the right words—it’s having the courage to sit with the tsunami of emotion or the weight of silence, to truly listen, and to be fully present."

-Josh Godinez, MAEd

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WATCH: It Takes A Village - Building Networks of Support

Students arrive at school with all of life’s complexities in tow, but so do their parents. Josh Godinez, school counselor and education leader, knows that support must go beyond students to create any real change. If we focus only on what’s happening for kids, we risk missing the struggles adults bring into the classroom environment—struggles that directly shape what those students carry.

For Josh, the school building is just one part of the solution. It’s counselors, teachers, and administrators stepping up for youth, but there are other needs—often silent—that belong to parents and caregivers, too. When adults are stretched thin, isolated, or lacking support, that tension shows up in their kids’ lives at school. If a family is hurting, the student sits with that in every lesson and lunch break.

The real measure of a healthy school? Whether the wider community steps in for families, not just students. That means building systems where:

• Parents and guardians are connected to practical resources—housing, food, job assistance.

• Schools are partnered up with local organizations who can fill gaps when kids or their parents need help.

• There’s no assumption that care stops with the school day; the “village” wraps support around everyone in it, adults included.

You can’t ignore what families carry. As Josh asks, “Are we really doing a good job as a society in making sure that we’re providing?” Students and their parents need each other—and they both need a village at their backs.

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Transcript:

"One thing about society is, I feel like we all come into it with different levels of opportunity, based on the way that we've been able to grow up—our access to resources, our access to emotional support, and social-emotional learning.

And for those that aren't as fortunate to have a well-rounded package, what are we doing out there in the community to make sure that they have those supports?

Very often what you find is everybody's so busy, and rightfully so, in helping to create support systems. But what avenues do we have to make sure that all of those support systems are well connected and know of each other, so that we're able to work as a complementary system in partnership to make sure that we are supporting everybody?

I think we in schools really work to be problem solvers, whether it's the administrator, the counselor, the teacher, the school social worker, or the school psychologist.

But we can only control what is within our locus of control, which is the school counseling building and anybody that we are able to connect to our schools. I think what I would really like to see is that communities develop even more resources and that are well partnered with our schools, because it really does take a village to raise a child, and it really does take a village to make sure that families have support.

We have students out there that have needs, but we also have a lot of adults and parents out there that have needs. And are we really doing a good job as a society in making sure that we're providing?"

-Josh Godinez