Covid-Battered Schools Starved for Counselors to Aid Students

A mental health crisis in schools exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to reexamine the pipeline to train the thousands of counselors and psychologists needed to fill the demand.

“In an ideal world, a school would have a school counselor, a school psychologist, and a school social worker,” said Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, the director of policy and advocacy at the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP).

“The demand for all school mental health services is off the charts,” she said. “But it was increasing before the pandemic. It’s not that once we move a little bit further ...