Chuck Small spends his workdays doing anything from meeting with his students to responding to suicide referrals; and it’s a job he says is “never boring and never the same from day to day.”  

Small is a counselor at Enloe High School, and started working there in 2011 after obtaining a Master’s degree in counseling from NC State in the spring semester. 

Yet for Small, his current occupation is vastly different from what he did throughout the first half of his career. Prior to graduate school, Small spent more than 20 years in journalism, working everywhere from his college newspaper to the copy desk of The News & Observer. 

Small said he developed an interest in journalism at an early age, after his initial career plans didn’t quite pan out the way he thought. 

“When I was in middle school and early high school I thought I wanted to be a comic book artist,” Small said. “I thought I had some artistic talent and I tried out and drew some comic strips for the school newspaper and quickly found out that they didn’t share my opinion of my artistic skills.” 

Despite the lack of interest in his artwork, Small said that the editors of the paper did enjoy his writing, and that they would accept stories from him. 

“It was interesting because I had never thought of myself as a writer at the time, but when they said they liked my writing I said ‘OK I’ll try that,’” Small said. 

From there, Small went to the Indiana University for his undergraduate education where he double-majored in English and journalism and worked at the school newspaper. Small had attended a journalism conference there while he was in high school. 

Small said that even in the 1980s while he was in college, he wanted to do something in high schools. 

Thad Ogburn, the Metro Editor of  The N&O, worked with Small for many years. He said that counseling was a perfect fit for Small when he did switch careers. 

“It was a little bit of a surprise because I know he had certainly enjoyed journalism and he had had a variety of jobs, but he also had really enjoyed working with young people,” Ogburn said.

Small said he took as many education classes as he could and student taught his senior year. However, he said he had reservations nonetheless. 

“I had done student teaching and although I enjoyed it, I felt like I was too close in age to the kids that I was teaching,” Small said. “I was 22 and my students were 17. I needed to grow up more and have a bigger age gap between us before going into the high schools.”

Instead, Small said he decided to go straight into journalism, and got a job on the copy desk at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in 1985. He also interned there for two summers in college. 

Then in 1987, Small got a call about an opening on the copy desk of the South Bend Tribune.

“It was a difficult decision for me because I liked Fort Wayne a lot, but the salary I was making was barely allowing me to pay my student loans and I was afraid I might default,” Small said. 

When South Bend offered him an increase in his salary, Small went to his boss at Fort Wayne to see if they could match it. When they denied his request, he went to South Bend and stayed there until 1993. 

Small moved to Raleigh in October 1993, after meeting his now husband Tom, and got a job as a Copy Editor at the N&O. He continued working there for 15 years. 

Ogburn said that in addition to Small’s work as a copy editor, he also initiated several journalism programs which were geared toward the Triangle’s youth. 

“One of them was called Nando Next and it was for high school students to write movie reviews or music reviews,” Ogburn said. “For a while we even had our own Nando Next page fairly regularly in the paper that would have content that students from local high schools had put together.” 

Ogburn said Small also initiated Journalism Day, an annual event where The N&O uses the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill for a series of programs designed for high school newspaper and yearbook staffs to come and learn from members of The N&O staff. 

“Chuck really put that together with some people from the journalism school and he was always coordinating it,” Ogburn said.

In 2008, the N&O had its first run of buyouts. Small said that he felt uncertain about staying at the paper when one of his coworkers, Suzanne Brown, previously the Arts & Entertainment Editor, accepted a buyout. 

“I was stunned that they took her up on it,” Small said. “I thought they were going to say we can’t afford to lose you. I thought, if they’re going to do that for her, they’re probably going to do that for anyone.” 

Small left the N&O during the second round of buyouts in October 2008, saying his last day was exactly 15 years after his first. After teaching a news writing class at UNC-CH for a semester, he started graduate school at NC State in May 2009. After graduating in May 2011, Small said he started working full time at Enloe in the fall of that year.

“It was no big surprise to me when I knew that he was going to leave journalism that he went into counseling,” Ogburn said. 

When comparing counseling to journalism, he said that both require flexibility and can change on a day to day basis. 

“It’s a high school and anything can and will happen that requires you to throw out the rule book,” Small said. 

Some tasks require immediate attention. Small said that when he receives a suicide referral, everything else on his agenda gets pushed aside so he can meet with the student connected to the referral. He also said he leads Signs of Suicide classes every year. 

Other tasks are unusual, but also rewarding. Small recently said he wrote over 50 letters of recommendation for his students in the same day, to which he said he’s grateful for his journalism experience. 

“Chuck’s real easy to work with,” Ogburn said. “He is somebody who really cared about students and about helping them and so this is a good fit for him.” 

Small said that in both fields, having a set of communication skills is crucial. 

“The biggest thing I think is most important is to be soft-skilled,” Small said. “Basic things like communication skills. The ability to express yourself in both written and spoken form intelligently. The ability to criticize in a constructive way and to accept constructive criticism. The ability to carry on a conversation. If you understand how they work in one job, then you can probably figure out how they will work in another.”