On the Front Lines of Student Mental Health

n the 10 years that Marissa Kimmel, GED ’16, has been a school counselor, her calendar has always been booked with student appointments. But in the last few years, the walk-ins have increased significantly.

It feels like a constant flow almost every day at the public high school in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where she works, and her colleagues at other institutions report similar upticks. “I’ll have one or two student walk-ins on a good day who are looking for help with emotional regulation,” she said. “But on a busy day, we can easily have 10.”

“Sometimes I am in the middle of meeting one student, and I’ll have three who walk in who are upset,” she added.

Most of the issues relate to interpersonal skills or anxiety. “It just seems even things like making friends and keeping friends are really hard. They have a difficult time handling conflict,” said Kimmel. “Being able to organize themselves and figure out what to do has gotten worse since COVID.”

One at a time, she helps them figure out a plan for coping with their stress. “I ask students what they do for fun or how they relax outside of school and extracurriculars. ‘What kind of pressure are you putting on yourself? What are your coping strategies?’” she said. When appropriate, she refers the students to therapy.

America’s schoolchildren are experiencing a mental health crisis. According to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, 40 percent of high school students “report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” while an astonishing 20 percent have seriously contemplated taking their lives.

Younger children are not spared. The CDC shows that nearly 11 percent of children between the ages of 3 and 7 suffer from anxiety, and 4 percent have depression. Causes range from the ill effects of social media to leftover trauma from the pandemic. World events, including wars and the cost of living, also play a role.

As more kids suffer, they are seeking out help at school. According to 2024 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 58 percent of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking school-based mental health services.

Enter school counselors.

The Heart of the School

In general, school counselors are well-positioned to spot and address mental health issues early. “We see these problems first because we are there every day,” said Kimmel. “They often come to talk to us before they talk to other people about what is going on in their lives.”

“School counselors are the heart of any school,” explained Diana Wildermuth, who spent 15 years as a school counselor and now is director of school counseling for both programs at Penn GSE. “They have an understanding of everything going on, from the very top with the administration to the students and the community. When a kid has a problem, the parent often calls the school counselor first.”

“The biggest challenge is the tension between the rise in student mental health needs and the overwhelming and expanded responsibilities of school counselors since the pandemic,” added Advanced Senior Lecturer Marsha Richardson, director of the SMHC program. “While data suggests that there are positive trends towards recovery post-pandemic, there’s been an increase in cases of depression, anxiety, and a general feeling of hopelessness. School counselors today are asked to address barriers to learning that include chronic social-emotional issues.”

“A lot of other school counselors who went to other programs don’t have the mental health training and the programs we have,” said Adam West, GED ’19, who is one of two school counselors for over 500 students at a public school in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, Delaware’s largest. Indeed, part of Penn GSE’s curriculum includes classes on addiction, human sexuality, and trauma, topics not usually covered for those training to be school counselors.

“Our program evolves as we note changes in the systems that impact children and adolescents,” said Richardson. “During the next academic cycle, we are looking at enhancing our core foundational training with a module on grief and/or psychopharmacology, as we know many children are now prescribed psychotropic medication.”

Students preparing to be school counselors and licensed therapists are often grouped together in classes, explained Wildermuth. “The students get to learn from one another, from their internships and backgrounds, and they learn how to collaborate and consult with one another.”

This work has been ongoing at Penn GSE for a long time. The SMHC program, for example, will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year and hopes to welcome back its two decades of alums to campus for a reunion.

One-on-One Counseling

Part of that might be that students now know her and feel more comfortable seeking out her help. However, the need is also rising. “Childhoods are changing,” she said. “There are all these big world events now, and everyone has access to every single headline. That means anxiety is higher.”

Her school has allowed her to focus on student mental health by limiting her administrative responsibilities from the start.

Some of the one-on-one work is even more intensive.

West, who oversees third- through fifth-graders, said a regular part of his job has become conducting suicide-threat assessments. “There are more of them taking place in elementary school,” he said. “We will do one, and there are usually two or three more that come right around the corner.”

He said that every now and then he encounters a serious situation, but most of the time he finds that students are using outsized language to express their feelings and concerns. “I make sure the students know that if they do need help, someone will come in and help them,” he said. “It’s also important to bring families into the conversation, and a lot of times that can foster a relationship with the parents that can be healthy later.”

He said his favorite class at Penn GSE, a trauma-based therapy class, prepared him for this role. “That class set me up for so much of what is going on in the schools,” he said. “I can recognize trauma really quickly now and be like, ‘OK, this is something that needs addressing with a therapist.’”

School counselors don’t only work with children. And those who work with adults often find they have adult-sized problems.

She said there was one woman in her program who seemed checked out, but she found a way to build a better rapport with her and help her complete some of the necessary tasks to graduate. “Other people were writing her off, but I wasn’t,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I was doing all I can.”

Finley talked about this confidence-building experience in her internship-based course, where she and six or seven other students explored their fieldwork. “It’s a time for us to express what is going on at our sites, what we are seeing, and our professors also jump in and provide support,” she said. “Sometimes people will bring in a specific case, and we will all brainstorm what to do.”

Penn GSE requires all students preparing to become school counselors complete a total of either 700 (SMHC) or 800 (Professional Counseling) hours of fieldwork across both years of their training to meet graduation eligibility. (Pennsylvania requires 420 hours for its school counselor certification.)

“It’s a much more hands-on experience,” said Wildermuth. “Our students need to have an understanding of what the job looks like by getting this real-world experience.”

Group Lessons

“Group lessons are a good way to not just prevent things, but also to look and see what kids are experiencing with mental health concerns,” said Wildermuth.

School counselors are the ones creating and teaching these lessons, and at Penn GSE, they learned how to do so.

Eiger remembers her second-year Penn GSE internship, when she got to write a small-group plan for kids whose parents had gotten divorced. “I wrote the plan and talked it through with my professors,” she said. “I got to implement it, and I gained a lot of confidence from knowing how to do that.”

Now, at her school, she teaches a SEL class that kids take “the same way they take art or music,” she said. The class covers topics ranging from empathy to social skills. “We talk about what it feels like to belong and how can you help other people feel that way?” she said. “They name how things feel, and they look at how their actions impact others.”

She has seen the lessons pay off. The other day she saw middle schoolers starting to fight and then saw them pause and start saying how they were feeling. “That was very cool to see,” she said.

West has also been teaching classes in his school that focus on self-regulating emotions. “We do these goofy things where they notice their emotions in their body and do these weird deep-breathing exercises,” he said. “I do see this generation doing a good job of being able to name what is going on for them now—whether it’s anxiety, depression, anger, or sadness. They are able to pinpoint it.”

“They are aware they are anxious, so then we talk about it, and then we set up a plan to address it,” he said.

Encouraging Digital Literacy

Many Penn GSE graduates have led the way in their schools to try to address these issues. “School counselors absolutely should be teaching digital literacy,” said Wildermuth. “It is a part of the role of the school counselor as defined by the American School Counselor Association, and it definitely has an impact on kids.”

Kimmel has helped her school enforce the Screen Smart Initiative, where students put their phones in a “parking lot” because they are banned in the classroom. “It has helped a lot this year because students can get a text message from a parent or friend, or see something that upsets them on social media during the day and they will come down to my office upset,” she said. “With less access to their phones during class, these types of moments have been less frequent.”

Eiger runs education programs where she teaches her students’ parents how technology impacts child development and mental health. In fifth grade, she helps run a full unit on navigating the digital world that dives into internet safety, navigating group chats, and how social media impacts their brains. “We talk about things like, ‘Why do I feel good when I see that notification?’ or ‘Why do I find myself continually opening up a social media app?’” she said. “We want them to be a little more thoughtful once they have access to the phones.”

Learning Self-Care

In the second year of the Professional Counseling program, students are required to complete a self-care assignment where they actually practice doing a rejuvenating or relaxing activity that they can continue into their careers.

Part of the assignment is to talk about what self-care is and how it varies per person. Then, the students are required to implement a self-care plan and check in later in the semester to mark their progress and see if they were able to maintain it.

“We need them to learn how to put boundaries up and manage their own personal stuff,” said Wildermuth. “Because it’s like anything else, when we’re stressed, we may not be as helpful to others as we can be.” For example, students have implemented a cooking plan to try a new recipe every Sunday, trained for a marathon, and even taken up knitting.

“At first, they are like, ‘Why are you giving this assignment to us?’” said Wildermuth. “I smile and say, ‘Trust the process, you will see.’”