{"id":740130,"date":"2026-07-03T03:31:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T03:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/740130\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T03:31:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T03:31:42","slug":"unregulated-school-mental-health-programs-are-endangering-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/740130\/","title":{"rendered":"Unregulated School Mental-Health Programs Are Endangering Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, police in Albemarle County, Virginia, charged a social-and-emotional-learning coach at Hollymead Elementary School with 11 felony counts<\/a> of sexual abuse\u2014seven of them aggravated sexual battery\u2014involving at least four children. The district had opened an investigation into the coach, Michael Swiney, in January, and quietly placed him on administrative leave\u2014but told parents nothing<\/a> until his recent arrest.<\/p>\n

Parents packed a community meeting on June 10, demanding to know why they hadn\u2019t been warned, and many learned only then that Swiney had been pulling their children from class<\/a> for one-on-one sessions. Parents\u2019 prior complaints to Principal Joe McCauley had apparently gone unanswered. One parent reported that Swiney had allegedly locked her son in his office until a teacher intervened. A week after Swiney\u2019s arrest, the district still could not identify which children he\u2019d met with. McCauley pledged to notify parents of any child with a record of having seen Swiney, but the district has no established protocols<\/a> for mental-health staff engagement, and he conceded that many other students may have met with Swiney without it being recorded.<\/p>\n

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Swiney\u2019s case is not an isolated failure<\/a>. It\u2019s the result of trying to deliver mental-health programs and services through the education system, which isn\u2019t designed, qualified, or regulated to do so. School-based mental health puts children in the hands of unlicensed staff with no appropriate regulatory oversight, answerable to no clinical licensing board, and with no enforceable standards of care or rules that inform parents their children are being \u201cseen\u201d behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

Most American parents are probably unaware that school-based mental-health programs are not staffed with licensed professionals. Swiney was not a licensed clinician, psychologist, or counselor, but he had all the trappings of someone with behavioral-health authority: the title (\u201cSEL coach\u201d), a district-wide program (\u201cSEL\u201d), a private office, and enough power to pull students from class for unrecorded closed-door sessions. Albemarle described<\/a> its social-emotional staff to a local paper in 2024, stating that while SEL \u201ccounselors\u201d are licensed<\/a> by the state department of education, SEL \u201ccoaches\u201d are not. Principals hire SEL coaches with any background\u2014no clinical or mental-health credentials required. One district job posting<\/a> sought skills in \u201cmindfulness meditation\u201d and \u201cspecialized contemplative methods of instruction.\u201d Even Hollymead teachers said<\/a> they hadn\u2019t realized Swiney had no mental-health license.<\/p>\n

Unregulated mental-health services delivered by schools are now the most common mental-health services received by youth. According to one school board member<\/a>, Albemarle is \u201cthe biggest [mental-health service] provider\u201d for children in the county. That\u2019s happened through an extensive referral pipeline of SEL programs, mental-health programs, school support staff of SEL coaches, mental-health support specialists, coordinators, counselors, social workers, and school psychologists. A child is referred to such staff for \u201cmental health\u201d support by a teacher, principal, or friend and then invited to \u201ccome by to talk\u201d in one-on-one sessions that a parent might never know happened. In Virginia, a new bill<\/a> would require mandatory universal mental-health screening in grades six through 12, which will expand this pipeline of referrals to all children, who\u2019ll get routinely screened by such staff.<\/p>\n

School mental-health programs seldom articulate clear rules on what families are told, leaving notification vague or absent. Where the law is clear, it\u2019s often misread by districts, whether intentionally or not, and rarely in parents\u2019 favor. When Albemarle parents questioned why a grown man had been alone with their seven-year-olds, they were told that district policy \u201cdoesn\u2019t forbid employees from being alone with students,\u201d and that not doing so was merely \u201can unwritten rule<\/a>.\u201d Telling parents was a \u201cgeneral rule of thumb,\u201d one coordinator said<\/a>: if a staffer had met a child \u201cmore than twice,\u201d someone should probably inform the parents. Whether to involve parents at all, one coach offered, was \u201cvery gray.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not. Keeping parents uninformed rests on a faulty claim about state law. One Albemarle coach, referencing Section 54.1-2969<\/a>, told a local paper that the age of consent<\/a> for mental-health services in Virginia is 14\u2014so a student could keep his sessions from his parents. Section 54.1-2969 says no such thing. A minor is deemed \u201can adult\u201d only for the purpose of consenting to outpatient treatment<\/a> delivered by licensed clinicians, who can withhold records from a parent only when disclosure would cause \u201csubstantial harm<\/a>.\u201d The law doesn\u2019t establish a general age of consent<\/a> for school \u201cmental health services,\u201d nor does it grant minors additional confidentiality privileges. A minor\u2019s right to consent to outpatient care does not mean an unlicensed, school-employed \u201ccoach\u201d can privately deliver pseudo-screening and treatment and not tell the parents.<\/p>\n

Mental health is a regulated health profession with state-level governing boards statutorily empowered to protect the health, welfare, and safety of the public from unqualified providers. But with school-based services, families and children lose the protection of well-established standards of care, scope-of-practice limitations, confidentiality, mandatory record-keeping, and patient and parent access to treatment records. Regulatory boards also have clear enforcement powers to process complaints, initiate investigations with subpoena powers, hold administrative hearings, and issue disciplinary orders for violations. Those safeguards don\u2019t apply to school staff, whatever their title\u2014SEL coach, coordinator, school counselor, social worker, or even school psychologist. Virginia statute<\/a> expressly excludes government employees from the licensure and regulatory provisions applicable to behavioral-health providers, and with it, excludes children and families from the safeguards of a regulated health profession.<\/p>\n

That no meeting records exist also exposes the lack of qualified supervision of school programs, a key safeguard of regulated providers. Swiney, like all Albermarle\u2019s SEL coaches, reported to a principal<\/a>. That principal, an administrator with no mental-health qualifications, does not know which students Swiney met with, when, and for what purpose. Masters-level licensed counselors in Virginia, by contrast, undergo at least 21 months<\/a> of practice under qualified supervision before practicing independently.<\/p>\n

Safeguards of regulated health professions extend beyond record-keeping and supervision; they include legally imposed professional boundaries. In Virginia, a mental-health professional can be disciplined or lose his license for entering into a \u201cdual relationship<\/a>\u201d with a client\u2014counseling someone with whom the provider has a personal or social connection. That prohibition exists to preserve professional distance and protect independent judgment. It prevents exploitative personal relationships\u2014sometimes sexual\u2014that licensing boards punish most harshly.<\/p>\n

Dual-relationship prohibitions are grounded in recognition of the well-documented phenomena of sexual and erotic transference<\/a>\u2014when a patient unconsciously redirects onto the therapist certain emotions, attachments, and expectations. For some patients, the therapeutic relationship activates romantic attraction. One study<\/a> finds at least one-third of patients disclose developing a romantic or sexual attraction to their therapist. Countertransference<\/a> also occurs: therapists develop their own emotional and erotic feelings toward patients. These dangers affect grown adult patients; they would be even more potent for early youth and adolescents.<\/p>\n

School mental-health services are often in direct conflict, deliberately, with licensed providers\u2019 regulated conduct. Albemarle\u2019s mental-health coordinator acknowledged that dual-relationship rules<\/a> don\u2019t apply in schools. A single SEL coach may counsel hundreds of interrelated students and come to know their personal details: family dynamics, student-to-student relationships, and personal challenges. The American School Counselor Association<\/a> (ASCA) treats this outreach and relationship-building as best practice: becoming a child\u2019s \u201ctrusted adult\u201d is part of doing the job well and better enables a school counselor to support the child. ASCA literature instructs counselors<\/a> to be visible, friendly and accessible in hallways, invite new students to lunch gatherings, and leave handwritten notes for struggling students. None of these practices would be acceptable for a licensed counselor.<\/p>\n

No documentation, no notification protocol, and no standards of care or supervision: this is not an administrative oversight but a feature of the structural design of school-based mental health. What Virginia wants to build in its schools is the appearance of a mental-health system, but without the benefits of one. Universal screening will flag more children, which will require more staff, hired from any background and empowered to become a child\u2019s \u201ctrusted adult.\u201d How many more families will someday have to ask: Why was I not told?<\/p>\n

Chris Evans<\/a> is an attorney, education policy analyst, and a parent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, police in Albemarle County, Virginia, charged a social-and-emotional-learning coach at Hollymead Elementary School with 11…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740131,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-740130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}