Stuck on the fourth floor

Something called “Counseling” occupied a fourth-floor warren of my aging high school in suburban St. Louis. Whenever I was on that floor -- which wasn’t often, as it had a depressing, “attic-y” kind of feel -- I might see an adult or two emerge from those offices, but I could only guess at what they did.

I learned a little more during my junior year, when Mr. P., my patrician English teacher (who, I discovered at about that moment, doubled as one of those mysterious counselors) sat me down for my “College Conference” and announced where I should go to school.

“University of Rochester!”

In the end, I didn’t follow his advice, although I’m sure the University of Rochester is a fine place (albeit a trifle chilly). No, I went instead to sunny Southern California -- “for the surfing,” as I recall; though when I arrived I realized the area around the school had no water to speak of, merely miles of desert and craggy mountains that revealed their outlines only when the smog began to clear.

As Bogey put it in Casablanca: “I was misinformed.”

I tell this story to show how far the field of school counseling and mental health services has come since I was in school. Certainly, the defects in my high school counseling program are obvious now, with the most blatant being…. well, I didn’t even know what counselors did! That’s how marginalized they were from the core mission of the school.

Unfortunately, as I show in my March cover story on school mental health, the work of counselors, school psychologists, and social workers is still too often relegated to a kind of ancillary status in the school. But that’s changing. In places like Harrisburg, Pa., the schools aren’t just trying to help students with specific behavioral problems (an important job, to be sure) but also addressing the emotional and behavioral health needs of all students.

It shouldn’t be an either/or proposition: either provide services to students with serious problems or serve the whole school, says Howard Adelman, co-director of the Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA. Instead, schools must adopt a “comprehensive, multifaceted, and cohesive approach that can effectively address barriers to learning,” says the center publication Mental Health in Schools: Much More Than Services for a Few. “To do less is to make values such as 'We want all children to succeed' and 'No child left behind' simply rhetorical statements.”

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor