There is a sign in Jennifer Johnson's office at Monmouth-Roseville High School that pretty well summarizes the work she and fellow school counselor Cassie Tyler do every day. “Everything is figureoutable.” It needs to be.

"You wear a dozen hats a day," Johnson said, "and that doesn't even begin to cover it."

A student might walk through the door worried about grades. Another needs help finding a college. Someone else wants to explore a trade, military service, or a job. There are scholarships to chase, schedules to navigate, emotional struggles to recognize, and sometimes simply a young person who seems a little different today than yesterday. Monmouth-Roseville tries not to wait for that student to reach a crisis.

"Our school is pretty proactive instead of reactive," Johnson said.

"We're always kind of diving into data and making connections with our kids. So that way we can tell, 'Oh, this child seems off this week. What's going on?'"

Johnson and Tyler arrived at school counseling by very different routes. Tyler spent about a decade in higher education, working at Western Illinois University, Carl Sandburg College, and Illinois Central College. Along the way, she helped transfer students navigate college, worked in advancement and scholarships, and served high school students in a college-readiness program for low-income, first-generation students. Eventually, she realized she wanted to work with students earlier in the journey, so she returned to school herself, earned her counseling credentials, and landed back at Monmouth-Roseville, where she had graduated in 2011.

Johnson is also a graduate, class of 2007, and describes herself as "part Zipper, part Titan," having experienced the district's consolidation firsthand. Her first career was in child welfare, including foster care casework and adoption work. Then COVID arrived.

"I got bored during COVID," she said, "and I was like, 'I'm gonna get my master's degree.'"

That eventually brought her into school counseling, and now the two work side by side, their different experiences becoming complementary strengths. Tyler credits Johnson with taking her under her wing as she transitioned from higher education into K-12 counseling.

"She continues to mentor me, even beyond my initial first year in K12 education which has contributed to building a strong foundation for our team culture," Tyler said, "I still have tons of questions."

Johnson says Tyler returns the favor in her own way.

"Sometimes I'll get really worked up over things, and she'll just kind of give me a look," she said. "And I know the look."

Translation: probably being a little dramatic, time to scale it back.

"It goes back and forth," Tyler added.

tThey said, sometimes they need to "spiral for a minute," get everything out, process it, and move forward. But beneath the laughter is something important: the two counselors work hard to stay aligned because students deserve consistency.

"We can't have two standards," Johnson said.

Their larger counseling philosophy has that same sense of balance. Academics matter at Monmouth-Roseville, and so do college opportunities, but Johnson and Tyler are equally interested in helping students explore trades, military service, local employers, and other pathways.

"At the end of the day, we want them prepared for the real world," Johnson said. "Whatever that looks like for them."

Tyler calls it being "future focused." That doesn't mean a teenager must know precisely what he or she wants to do for the next 40 years. It means developing enough curiosity and independence to begin figuring it out.

"What do you want out of life?" Tyler asks. "How are you going to do that?"

There is another advantage Monmouth-Roseville students carry into that future. Both counselors grew up here, and both have watched the community become significantly more diverse. Tyler, who is biracial, remembers sometimes feeling disconnected from her peers as a student belonging to more than one race. Fifteen years later, she sees something very different here; students come from an array of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and many speak two, three, or even four languages.

For Johnson, that diversity is especially powerful because it exists in a rural Illinois community, where students grow up encountering different cultures and experiences from an early age rather than not experiencing it until later in life.

"I think it creates higher empathy levels for our kids," she said. "I think it creates more tolerance and understanding."

Tyler believes this valuable experience in developing empathy, tolerance and understanding gives today's students a head start in developing confidence, navigating conflict, and understanding people whose experiences differ from their own. It is preparation for a world much larger than Monmouth and Roseville, and preparing students for that world is ultimately what happens in these counseling offices, whether the immediate problem is a scholarship application, a difficult morning, or a teenager who has absolutely no idea what comes next.

Johnson and Tyler may not always know the answer when a student walks through the door. That isn't the promise. The promise is that they'll help figure it out.