The problems with school counseling

I was a clinical supervisor of school counselors for six years. Here are my thoughts:

This article wasn’t easy for me to write. I needed to eat a large slice of humble pie to put it together. I was a clinical supervisor for school counselors for six years. I always believed in integrating mental health services into educational settings. I naively thought if the students and staff got more mental health support, things would be better, easier and safer. Now, I’m not so sure.

For clarity, I’m not talking about social emotional learning, or SEL. For anyone who knows what SEL really is, they understand that it’s harmful. SEL programs teach kids to believe in identity politics and adopt victim mentality. It promotes explicit sexual content, and SEL surveys are a great way for schools to farm data and send to the state without parents realizing it.

I’m talking about school counseling centers popping up on public school campuses. Many of them are government funded. Democrats announced that they wanted to add funding to school mental health programs. Joe Biden posted on X on January 14, 2025 via @POTUS, “I’ve never felt there was a difference between a physical injury and a mental illness. It’s all health. Plain and simple. That’s why we invested in helping schools train and hire more mental health professionals; and launched 988, the nationwide suicide & crisis Lifeline”. However, it’s not just Democrats, this topic is bipartisan and some Republicans also want to increase spending on school mental health services. Both political parties want to help children with their mental health, especially since it’s a fact that there is mental health crisis among our youth, what many of them don’t realize is school counselors are often making children worse.

Post on X via Joe Biden about investing in more mental health services in schools and launching a ‘crisis lifeline’ from January 14, 2025.

As someone with ten years of experience on school campuses, with six of them as a supervisor, I want to share my concerns with ongoing school based counseling centers and why this model is not as great as it sounds.

To be clear, I do believe there is a place for counselors in schools. However, I no longer believe we should have mental health clinics with weekly counseling sessions on school grounds in mainstream schools. When a student is recognized as needing extra support, referrals should be made and the families should be responsible for the mental health treatment of their child, outside of school hours. School counselors should be utilized for crisis intervention, behavioral interventions, case management and be a part of a multi-disciplinary school staff. Their role should end there.

Why does school based counseling seem so wonderful? The biggest “perk” is the easy access to kids. How wonderful, the patients (students) are right there and can get their counseling without inconveniencing parents and counselors deal with fewer no-shows. However, the problem with that is, the parents aren’t involved. Either the parents can not be involved due to clash of school hours and work schedules, or the parents have a great excuse not to be involved because they don’t even have to drive their child to an office or pay for sessions. Anyone who understands child psychology treatment understands that the most effective way to treat a child is to include the family. A counselor cannot effectively assess, diagnose, and treat a child effectively without speaking to a parent. (see my article on the many specific reasons parental involvement is essential to therapy) While this idea has been well established in the counseling profession, it is now consistently overlooked for convenience. Most children don’t need a pseudo-parent (ie a counselor), they need their parents.

As a supervisor of school counselors from 2011-2016 in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, it was like pulling teeth to get a hold of parents. They were busy at work, disengaged from their children, or were simply uninterested in talking to the counselors. Plus, it’s easy for counselors to put off outreach since their days were full. I had to remind the people I supervised daily to carve out time for parent calls. Sadly, it was rare when a parent took initiative to speak to the counselor that they signed the consent form for. Instead, parents expected me and my team to “fix” their child while they were busy. Anyone with common sense knows that’s impossible, even the best counselor cannot fix a child without engaging with the adults who take care of him/her.

When I was in working full-time in California schools back in 2016, it was rare that we saw a child without parental consent. Only when we had concerns for safety did we make that exception. It was done sparingly in as few sessions as possible and lots of effort was made to involve parents. However, fast forward to 2025, the world has changed dramatically and it’s normal for children to be seen by a counselor for an entire school year without parents ever knowing about it. California Law Health & Safety Code § 124260 allows for children ages 12 and up to be seen without parental consent. Several other states have a similar law. Unlike most of the 20 years I’ve practiced (since 1999), now it is commonplace for counselors to intentionally keep major secrets from parents and look at non-abusive parents as “unsafe”. In California, AB665 passed in 2023, which takes this even further. AB665 allows for kids twelve and up to consent to their own residential treatment. In other words, a school counselor can send a student to a group home or inpatient treatment center without parental consent and the parent has no say. No allegations of abuse are needed for this to occur. This is a major assault on parental rights and a recipe for disaster in families with tumultuous relationships.

The other major concern about widened school counseling is school counselors tend to be unskilled and indoctrinated to be far-leftist activists. They are almost always inexperienced and unlicensed. I was on campus to oversee the interns, but this setup is rare and usually these unlicensed counselors have little oversight. Courage is a Habit exposed the American School Counseling Association, ASCA, the organization that trains school counselors for being ideologically captured and incompetent. Plus, the graduate schools are incredibly biased towards leftist agendas, which are anti-therapeutic. These institutions believe in immediate affirmation of trans identities, they believe in assisting minors in abortions or getting birth control pills without parental consent. These practices have ideological clashes with many parents, but more importantly, they have psychological and health considerations that parents of minors should be informed of. The more counselors are in schools, the more emboldened they will be to take over psychological and medical decisions for parents, without consent. These models of treatment take responsibility away from parents and outsource it. However, when there are physical and emotional consequences, these counselors bear no responsibility.

This is an image from the ASCA magazine promoting affirmation of transgenderism for elementary school students. The caption says “Discussions about transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive students typically focus on high school students, but we can’t ignore our youngest students.”

If we continue in this direction, I foresee more students will become neurotic, over-therapized, over-medicalized radical leftist activists who believe they are victims and hate their parents. That’s not exactly the beacon of mental health we envision. Let’s take a pause and reconsider how many school mental health clinics we really want to fund.

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger is a licensed clinical social worker from California. She completed her MSW in 1999 from New York University. She has a variety of experience in schools, group homes, hospitals and community-based organizations. She has dedicated herself to educate parents and embolden other mental health professionals to challenge the ideological capture of her profession.

For more detailed information on how to empower yourself as a parent and navigate the mental health field, see the Parents' Guide to Mental Health. Pamela is the author of A Practical Response to Gender Distress.

Coming Spring of 2025, A new children’s book about self-acceptance: Froggy Girl.