One of the key budget items that Albemarle County Public Schools (ACPS) is asking the county to fund this year is a set of mental health professional positions called Social Emotional Learning (SEL) coaches in schools division-wide. Twenty-four of these coaches are already in place, sustained for the past three years by one-time federal grants that have now run out. The school division needs $2.6 million to hold on to the positions and add six more in a 2024-25 budget that will require an extra $13 million beyond its share of state and local revenues to cover its expenditures.
SEL coaches are meant to “help students with their feelings and relationships,” according to slides presented by ACPS in a March 11 budget work session with the county Board of Supervisors. “They teach skills like empathy and self-control, and they support students when they’re struggling emotionally.” School division officials say there’s been an increase, both locally and nationally, in the numbers of surveyed students who say they are depressed or anxious or have seriously considered attempting suicide over the past 12 months. “The bottom line is that students must have their social and emotional needs met in order to be open to learning,” said School Board member Kate Acuff.
Point of Reference
Hired by principals, Social Emotional Learning specialists arrive with diverse backgrounds—some with training in social work or counseling, others in psychology, sociology, or human services—depending on the school’s needs. A recent job posting for Journey Middle School, for instance, sought a candidate with skills in mindfulness meditation and “specialized contemplative methods of instruction.” SEL coaches are distinguished from SEL counselors in that the latter hold a state license in their field, and both differ from “traditional” school guidance counselors and school psychologists in their areas of responsibility and expertise, though there may be some overlap depending on the size of the staff at a school.
In the budget work session, Acuff noted that last year ACPS logged over 24,000 “school-based referrals” for services such as career counseling and crisis intervention, helping families access basic needs in the community, referring students to outside agencies, and supporting students and consulting with parents on how to improve student attendance. Board of Supervisors Chair Jim Andrews commented that 24,000 was “a big number, a concerning number,” but did not press further. Acuff added that 20,000 “interactions” had already been logged for this school year.
“In each school and each setting, individual experiences are going to be different,” said Western Albemarle High School SEL coach Alanah Horning, whose prior experience is in social work, in describing the referral process. “For example, I may receive a referral for a student who is grieving and needs support right now. A parent might refer their own kid, the principal might send a referral to me, or a student could refer a friend that they’re worried about, or make a self-referral. I reach out to the student and invite them to come by to talk if they’d like, but it’s never mandatory. Sometimes it’s just one meeting, other times they may need support moving forward and we keep going on a regular basis.”
Students discuss “a variety of topics” during their sessions, said Horning, “but I’d say there’s a heightened amount of anxiety and depression, those are the two big ones. Those can delve into other things like self-esteem, peer conflicts, and maintaining healthy relationships with themselves.” Horning said these issues are not necessarily linked to school. “It’s a complexity of factors, a mix of home, school, peers, past traumas, and other events that might have come up that maybe they don’t even realize have affected them.”
ACPS’ Coordinator of Mental Health and Wellness Miles Nelson pointed to student responses on two survey questions as evidence of the need for early intervention at schools. In 2022-23, 30% of 6th-8th graders and 42% of high schoolers agreed with the statement, “During the past 12 months, I have felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more weeks in a row that I stopped engaging in my usual activities,” and 9.4% and 12.6% agreed that “During the past 12 months, I have seriously considered attempting suicide.” “That trickles down into the lower grades as well, where we’re seeing more kids who have identified as self-harming in fourth and fifth grade,” said Nelson.
In elementary schools, the work focuses on helping students “self-regulate” their behavior and emotions. “We are teaching the skills to help the children to advocate for themselves—self-management skills, self-regulation skills, coping skills—so they can say, ‘I’m in charge of me, and I can solve problems,” said Murray Elementary SEL coach Deborah Rogers, a former teacher who has a management background and experience in special education. “What I do is teach them about how to recognize and manage their feelings, and give them strategies for handling anger or sadness they may be dealing with.”
School principals and counselors form “school-based intervention teams” (SBIT) to address certain problems, and an SEL coach or counselor can even be included in a disciplinary referral. “If a disciplinary action has anything to do with, for instance, anger management or something that’s going on at home, then I get looped in to help provide that insight piece,” said Horning. Though the coaches are not empowered to diagnose mental illness or create formal treatment plans for issues such as trauma or depression, they do often refer students out to community agencies like Ready Kids, Riverbend Counseling, and Region 10 in Charlottesville, and can provide lists of local therapists who might be helpful.
Boundaries
Parents are often, but not always, notified that their child is seeing an SEL coach or counselor. “Honestly it’s very gray, kind of a case-by-case situation that involves my role with safety,” said Horning. “If a student is expressing plans to end their life, then of course we’re automatically talking to parents, but 14 is the age of consent [for mental health services] in Virginia. I tell students it can be important to keep parents on the same page, but if they’re not feeling super safe with the idea of their parents knowing about it, it can remain confidential. I try to respect boundaries and involve parents when it needs to happen.”
Rogers at Murray said that when an SBIT meeting is called, parents are included. “Sometimes meetings are staff driven, sometimes they are parent initiated, but we always loop parents in so we have their input, and they understand the plans and strategies we are working on,” she said. “The parents are normally very supportive—I’ve never had a parent that wasn’t supportive of us trying to work on a few areas that we think a child needs some help in.” Rogers said that her notes about student support efforts are recorded in an electronic file so they can follow the student on up through high school.
Coordinator Nelson said he’d want to know if his own kids were struggling. “The general rule of thumb is that if any [mental health staff person] has seen a kid more than twice outside the classroom, they should be contacting the parents,” said Nelson, “because that’s going to be a key piece. It’s not something that we try to hide. Parents also have the right at any time to decline services too, if, for example, if they don’t want [their child] to meet with a specific counselor, but I would say that we very rarely see that because of the relationships that these SEL counselors build with parents as well as students.”
Outside of the school realm, therapists who treat adult patients must abide by a confidentiality code that requires them to avoid seeing patients who have external social or professional connections with each other or with the therapist—a conflict of interest problem called “dual relationships.” By contrast, in a school setting a single SEL counselor may counsel hundreds of interrelated students and staff, and may also serve in other roles within the school community such as administering student assessments or coaching a team.
“When I was a school counselor, I was also a soccer coach, so I had that dual relationship,” said Nelson. “Sometimes it was beneficial because I’d worked very closely with a parent who would then have the kid on my team, and that was very supportive. Then for professionality, there were some times when I had my soccer coach hat on, and I would not have been the best fit for that school counselor role, so that kid would meet with a different school counselor. So, we’re always evaluating those professional boundaries to evaluate how to best support a student.”
Recipe for Success
The school division’s budget proposal calls for a guideline of one SEL counselor per 750 students, with a minimum of one per school and more as needed. An analysis of school need, as evidenced by climate surveys, discipline rates, and absenteeism data, indicated that Woodbrook Elementary, Journey Middle, and the three main high schools would each receive more than one counselor.
The division ties mental health to academic achievement and thus to its overarching mission of equity, but what metrics will measure the success of the SEL program? School Board member Rebecca Berlin (White Hall) did not respond to a request for comment on this question, but Allison Spillman (At-Large) referenced a set of short- and long-term goals in the division’s budget proposal. The desired outcomes include decreases in the number of out-of-school suspensions and students requiring SEL instruction, improved academic performance and reduced absenteeism among students receiving SEL support, and an increase in the self-reported well-being of students over the next five years.
“Some of the goals that we’ve set for outcomes for the SEL positions in the budget are tied to discipline,” said Nelson. “For example, are we seeing a drop in our discipline referrals based on kids being able to regulate their emotions more? Another piece is, do we have a system to identify trusted adults in schools, does every kid have a trusted adult?” Nelson also pointed to a peer nomination system where students can anonymously nominate for intervention a peer who is being bullied. “Over the last 14 years we’ve seen a slow, slow decline in students being nominated for being bullied, so how can we continue to support that decline?”
“From a therapeutic standpoint, it can be hard to determine success,” said Horning. “My whole goal is to be here for students, and what they get from it is what they get from it. I think students’ insight into how they’re feeling is very, very important, even if it’s hard to check in with yourself and understand, ‘Am I feeling sad, or am I feeling better?’ But I think student surveys are more beneficial than adults trying to [judge] what they think is getting better. So maybe [a way to measure success is to] add a question on the survey asking if the sadness is more manageable, versus just are you feeling sad.”
While most of the annual ACPS climate survey questions refer specifically to how students feel about their school environment (in terms of instruction, engagement, safety, etc.), the student mental health section of questions does not refer to school at all—e.g., “How often over the last two weeks were you bothered by feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge?” The non-environment-specific nature of the questions may make it more difficult for SEL staff to pinpoint actionable changes inside school buildings that would improve students’ mental health.
Beyond any specific measures, however, the school division views the SEL program as successful because students use the services, and officials take pride in ACPS’ role as the preeminent provider.
“What we have found is that anytime we offer more counseling, it immediately gets soaked up by the students,” said Superintendent Matt Haas at the budget work session. “I know from our data that we are the number one place where students will interact with a counselor—we even allow students to do tele-counseling in a private space during the school day to meet with their own [external] counselors. It’s very hard for them to get services through any of the local agencies, whereas at school they know they have reliable access to mental health counselors. We’re uniquely situated to serve these kinds of needs for students.”
“With these SEL coaches and our mental health services, we’re the biggest provider of mental health services for children in Albemarle County,” added board member Acuff.
