Login
When Albemarle County Public Schools created staff positions in 2021 to help children manage stress, resolve conflicts and regulate their emotions, the district gave the 24 employees hired to fill those jobs regular access to students.
The transition from off-site learning during the COVID-19 pandemic to a classroom context created struggles for some children. So the Virginia school district used federal coronavirus relief funds to hire these social-emotional learning (SEL) coaches to support students.
Now the district is phasing out the program, and its Superintendent Matthew Haas has resigned.
The upheaval follows the arrest of Michael Swiney, 37, a former SEL coach at Hollymead Elementary School, accused of sexually abusing students.
Swiney, indicted June 1, turned himself in two days later. He faces 11 felony charges, including seven counts of aggravated sexual battery, three counts of taking indecent liberties with a child and one count of attempted aggravated sexual battery.
According to the Albemarle County Police Department, the investigation began in January after a child reported inappropriate sexual contact involving a school staff member.
Investigators later identified three additional juvenile victims who reported unwanted sexual contact between August 2024 and January 2026.
The case is ongoing.
Albemarle County Public Schools has acknowledged some of its procedural shortcomings.
Jason Grant, Ph.D., the chief communications officer at Albemarle County Public Schools, told The Defender:
“Investigation into the allegations against Mr. Swiney highlighted the need for more explicit policies and consistent practices regarding adult interactions with students, parental notification of unplanned meetings with students, and documentation of support services provided to students.
“The School Board has taken action to address the most immediate issues to protect students and staff from being in potentially compromising situations.”
All SEL coach positions will be eliminated by the end of the 2027-2028 school year, Grant said, adding that this was planned in 2024.
All SEL coaches were told they must obtain licensure necessary to become mental health support specialists instead — with endorsements as school counselors or social workers — or their positions would no longer be available, according to Grant.
The school district’s turmoil has escalated a dialogue that extends beyond Albemarle County. As schools take on a larger role in addressing children’s emotional and behavioral needs, who should provide that support and what safeguards should govern their access to students?
Remove mental health from the education system, critics say
Some critics of SEL and other psychological models argue that schools should not be providing menta health services in the first place.
Sheila Matthews, CEO and co-founder of AbleChild, said she believes elementary schools should concentrate on “reading, writing, and arithmetic, not on how children are feeling.”
“The alternative is clear: remove mental health from the education system and refocus on tutoring and skill-building,” she said. “No outside organization should be embedded within our schools.”
Matthews argued that school-based mental health referrals can interfere with parental authority and contribute to psychiatric overdiagnoses and medication use among children.
She pointed to U.S. Food and Drug Administration warnings about the increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior among adolescents taking antidepressants.
“Parents did not vote to bring mental health programs into schools,” Matthews said. “When a school labels a child and refers them for outside services, parents often have little recourse to challenge that label or the recommended drugs.”
In the U.S., elementary schools finance mental healthcare through a mix of federal grants, Medicaid and state and local funding.
Medicaid provides billions of dollars to school districts each year for eligible physical, mental and behavioral health services. Schools and districts can also receive federal grants to hire and train mental health professionals.
In 2025, the U.S. Department of Education awarded more than $208 million through two school-based mental health programs to increase the number of qualified providers, particularly in high-need districts.
However, funding varies by state and district, meaning access to school-based mental healthcare is not the same across the country.
Attorney John Klar said this discrepancy can lead to poor-quality mental health in some school districts.
“The administrative state increasingly compromises healthcare by replacing professionals, including nurses and doctors, with lower-paid, less qualified staff,” he said. “Our children cannot afford doing the same with their mental health. Either do it right or don’t do it at all.”
Attorney Greg Glaser similarly argued that school-based programs can create uncertainty about professional accountability and parental rights.
“When you treat government schools as quasi-medical facilities, you create a pipeline where children are intercepted by unaccountable, unlicensed staff under the guise of ‘mental health,’” Glaser said.
He said one-on-one meetings become particularly concerning when schools lack clear standards for documentation, parental notification and professional boundaries.
“The systemic lack of professional standards and licensing for these so-called ‘coaches’ and ‘specialists’ is a feature, not a bug, of a system designed to circumvent traditional boundaries,” he said.
Advocates say schools uniquely positioned to help
Advocates argue that schools are uniquely positioned to identify problems early on in children.
Sharon A. Hoover, Ph.D., senior strategic adviser for global school mental health at Boston Children’s Hospital, faculty member in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and professor emerita at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said school interventions are critical in targeting struggling students.
“For decades, one of the central reasons for advancing school mental health has been that schools are where children are, and they provide an opportunity to identify needs earlier and dramatically reduce barriers to receiving appropriate support,” Hoover said.
She said the allegations in Albemarle warrant investigation into safeguarding, supervision, documentation, communication with families and district policies, calling the case “deeply disturbing.”
But she cautioned against drawing a broader conclusion that the failures are intrinsic.
School mental health encompasses a continuum ranging from promotion and prevention to early intervention and treatment, Hoover said. School psychologists, counselors, social workers, nurses and community mental health clinicians may work in schools, with qualifications and licensing requirements varying by profession and state.
Many school-based clinicians, she said, are independently licensed mental health professionals.
At the same time, schools also employ paraprofessionals and other personnel who are not mental health clinicians but who provide mentoring, behavioral support, prevention programming and social-emotional assistance.
“That is not inherently inappropriate,” Hoover said.
The critical considerations, she said, are whether employees operate within their training and scope, whether supervision and protections are adequate, and whether students and families understand what services are being provided.
“There are, of course, legitimate and important policy questions about how school mental health services should be structured,” she said. She cited credentialing, scope of practice, supervision, informed consent, parent notification, confidentiality, documentation and security for one-on-one interactions.
This article was funded by critical thinkers like you.
The Defender is 100% reader-supported. No corporate sponsors. No paywalls. Our writers and editors rely on you to fund stories like this that mainstream media won’t write.
Remove mental healthcare from schools — or improve the system?
The ongoing dialogue arrives at a time when schools face competing demands: academic achievement, student safety, behavioral problems and growing worries about youth mental health.
The American Civil Liberties Union reported that millions of students attend schools with police but without counselors, nurses, psychologists or social workers. Its analysis argues that schools should redirect resources toward additional student-support professionals.
Other studies point to strong relationships with supportive school leaders and engaged parents to improve overall student well-being. Research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2025 found that positive teacher relationships are linked to greater life satisfaction, belonging and lower anxiety.
Meanwhile, states have experimented with alternative approaches.
Texas Senate Bill 763, enacted in 2023, authorized public schools and charter schools to employ or accept chaplains as volunteers to provide student support and services. The legislation was promoted as another option for schools seeking additional personnel to support students.
For critics such as Matthews, the proliferation of these programs represents an unacceptable expansion of government influence over children.
For Hoover, the answer is not to remove mental health from schools but to improve the system. She said there is a substantial evidence base supporting well-implemented school mental health programs.
“That does not mean the field should be immune from scrutiny — quite the opposite,” Hoover said. “We should continually strengthen standards, quality, accountability, family partnership, and safeguards.”
Related articles in The Defender
- ‘So Many Pitfalls’: Feds Push School-Based Health Centers as Critics Sound Alarm Over Lack of Parental Consent
- Exclusive: How ADHD Became ‘Gateway Diagnosis’ That Led to Drug Cocktails for Millions of Children
- BREAKING: HHS Releases Surgeon General’s Warning on Screen Time for Kids
- Watch: He’s Getting Junk Food Out of Military Bases — and Says We Can Do the Same in Schools and Hospitals
- Journal Faces Lawsuit Over Discredited Study Used by GSK to Market Dangerous Antidepressant to Teens
- Family Investigated for Keeping Teen Home After School-Based Health Center Gave Bag of Unlabeled Zoloft to 17-Year-Old
