Oklahoma mental health help for students losing funding
Through guitar lessons and group music sessions, Leticia Castro helped students in her small, rural district in western Oklahoma build confidence and form deeper relationships with their peers. Over a semester, she taught 60 students in kindergarten through 12th grade how to express their emotions and encourage others through music.
“By the end of the semester, my groups were supporting each other,” Castro said. “Maybe somebody had a hard day, and the other students would jump up and say, ‘Tell us about it, we’re here to listen to you.’”
Although Castro said her services helped students and reduced the burden on teachers and administrators, she will not return to the district for the upcoming school year. Castro was one of 300 counselors and mental health professionals hired through Oklahoma’s Counselor Corps program. Funding for the successful program is running out, leading some school districts to reduce or eliminate mental health services for students.
The state Department of Education under former Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister funded the grant program with $35.7 million in coronavirus relief funds. Grants covered half of the salaries and benefits of school counselors between 2021 and 2024 in response to learning loss and mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Counselor Corps program provided more counselors to help students
Since the program began in 2021, the state has improved its counselor-to-student ratio from one counselor per 411 students to one counselor per 378 students. Oklahoma is still above the American School Counselor Association’s recommended ratio of one counselor per 250 students. The association said increasing the number of counselors available to students can increase standardized testing scores, reduce absenteeism, and improve postsecondary results.
El Reno Public Schools, which serves more than 2,900 students, added three counselors at its elementary schools through the Counselor Corps.
Mary Stiles is the counselor for 400 first and second-grade students at Rose Witcher Elementary School. She leads lessons on lunchroom manners, friendship, respect and positive thinking in every class, coordinates with teachers and administration to address common issues in the school and meets with higher-need students in small groups to work through grief, build social skills and address needs that may not be met in a traditional classroom setting.
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In her classroom, Stiles created a care closet stocked with extra clothes and hair brushes for students, many of whom are from low-income families.
“If students come to school with dirty clothes or messy hair, we’re not going to make fun of them,” Stiles said. “I’m going to brush their hair and make sure they’re taken care of. They can’t learn if their needs aren’t being met.”
Julie Huber, the associate superintendent and director of federal programs, said the counselors added through the Counselor Corps grant received 100% positive feedback from the staff and families.
“They see growth in the students,” Huber said. “Whether it be in the classroom or the office secretary noticing that students aren’t coming in as often with issues. They’re learning coping skills and they can stay in class.”
To find out how districts are handling the sunset of the program funding, Oklahoma Watch sent survey questions to 196 superintendents of school districts that received funding from the Counselor Corps. Fifty-two responded.
Several superintendents said the program reduced the financial burden on their districts while helping them meet their students’ needs. Many also expressed disappointment and frustration that the program was ending.
‘A lot of students are just thrown behind screens, and it shows’
Although the Counselor Corps grant began in response to the pandemic, district officials say the counselors are still needed.
Superintendents and counselors said social isolation and excessive technology use have left students, especially at the elementary level, without the social and emotional skills they need to succeed in the classroom.
In El Reno, Stiles said she has to rebuild social skills, like having one-on-one conversations, regulating emotions and reducing aggression and reactivity.
“A lot of students are just thrown behind screens, and it shows,” Stiles said. “These students need help. Those things aren’t just embedded into you, they just need to be taught.”
In addition to behavioral issues, districts are also struggling to keep up with their students’ mental health.
Lisa Souza, an administrator at Santa Fe South Charter Schools, said her district prioritized mental health services, something many families in her district could not afford. Before the Counselor Corps funding, Souza said, the district’s resources were stretched thin among teachers and staff. The grant allowed them to hire two full-time counselors and a mental health coordinator.
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“We’ve had student deaths, we’ve had teacher deaths, we’ve had parent deaths,” Souza said. “We have half-a-dozen of these crises a year where we’ve called in our counselors to go sit at a site to work with students and with families.”
Souza said her district plans to retain the counselors and has spent the past three years preparing to absorb the salaries into the district’s general fund.
“We could probably add another counselor and still not have the capacity we need,” Souza said. “The need is there and will likely stay there. It’s just a huge blessing to have somebody to refer to instead of having to rely on outside crisis teams to come in.”
In Allen Public Schools, Superintendent Jeff Hiatt used Counselor Corps funding to create a full-time position for an elementary counselor. He said teachers and administrators needed help addressing increasing behavioral issues among young students.
“We thought it was just a little wave coming through, but it’s only getting worse,” Hiatt said. “Social-emotional learning kind of gets a bad rap, but there’s a lot of emotional problems with kids and it’s driving teachers out of the workforce.”
What happens to counselors once the Counselor Corps funding is gone? School districts make sacrifices
Hiatt said he needed to keep the full-time elementary counselor to ensure his students and staff got the support they needed. Before the Counselor Corps, his school district had one counselor for all 500 students in the district from kindergarten through 12th grade.
“When you’re spread too thin, you can’t do a real good job,” Hiatt said. “You’re just kind of putting out fires. This allowed her to focus on her end, and there’s no way she’d go back and do all the elementary things. We created a job that we have to have now.”
To maintain this position, however, Hiatt said his small school district had to make significant budget cuts elsewhere. He said the district consolidated small, 12 or 13-student elementary classes into 27-student classes and reduced elective offerings.
Twenty-nine of the 52 responding districts said they would not reduce counseling services, but like Allen Public Schools, some districts sacrificed staff and programs to support their counselors’ salaries.
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Three superintendents said they reduced staffing or will not replace retiring staff. Seven superintendents said they would pay for the counselors’ salaries out of their districts’ general fund, but expressed concerns about their ability to support their staff and student programming in the long run.
Six of the 52 responding districts reported that they would contract with outside mental health agencies, but superintendents noted that this meant it would take longer for students to access referrals and support services. Additionally, these counselors cannot maintain the same level of communication with staff, students and families as a full-time counselor.
Not all districts that chose to keep their counselors had to make significant cuts elsewhere. Four superintendents said their districts applied for additional state and federal grants to offset the costs of counselors, and some districts said recent growth in their student population allowed them to take on the full salaries of counselors.
Chuck McCauley, superintendent of Bartlesville Public Schools, said his district could retain all three counselors it hired through the program largely because of the 300-student increase in his district between 2019 and 2024.
“If our enrollment hadn’t increased, this is not something we would be talking about,” McCauley said. “It would be really challenging to keep those positions. If we had kept them, we most likely would have reduced staffing elsewhere, which would have made the teacher-student ratio worse.”
McCauley said although most of the district’s funds come from the state, four successful bond issues over the past nine years have given the district much-needed revenue for purchasing instructional materials and technology.
“If we didn’t have that resource, then we would be halving the full general fund,” McCauley said. “Having that support and student growth has helped us survive. But there are districts where enrollment is not growing, and they’re still facing the same issues that we are. We just have a little bit more resources than they do.”
Of the survey results, 23 respondents said their districts reduced counseling services. Sixteen said their districts laid off counselors or moved them into teaching positions. Seven made their counseling positions part-time.
In Leticia Castro’s district, one of the two mental health professionals added through the Counselor Corps is returning for the next year. Castro’s contract was not renewed.
Castro said that although she was glad the district was able to retain some mental health support, a single counselor could not provide the same depth and variety of care the district had supported this past year. Castro, who said she saw the greatest progress when working with young students or students with developmental disabilities, said reducing staffing meant a significant population of the school would not receive the same level of care.
“It was nice to provide another option,” Castro said. “It’s nice to have someone embedded in the school community, but no person can serve everyone. There’s a whole population of students that will not be seen.”
Oklahoma legislators have attempted to preserve the Counselor Corps program
Hofmeister first proposed the Counselor Corps program in 2018 when she requested a $58 million addition to the department’s budget to hire more counselors. The program did not receive funding until 2021 when coronavirus relief funds became available to the state.
Although the coronavirus relief-funded Counselor Corps was only intended to last for three years, some have tried to preserve the grant program.
In 2023, Rep. Meloyde Blancett, D- Tulsa, and Sen. Dewayne Pemberton, R- Muskogee, sponsored House Bill 2827, which would have established a similar grant program to support school nurses, counselors and mental health professionals. The bill passed the Oklahoma State House and was approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee, but it never came to a vote in the chamber.
Lawmakers did include an additional $240 million for schools through the funding formula in 2023. These funds give greater flexibility to school districts, but Castro said many districts do not prioritize mental health like they do teacher pay, instructional materials or new facilities.
“If there’s extra funds, people are really enthusiastic about mental health,” Castro said. “But it’s not being put as a top priority.”
Castro said the decision not to fund a similar grant program was disappointing but not a surprise. In her experience, mental health supports are often the first to be affected by budget cuts.
“Administrators know we’re lifting a little bit of weight from the school and from the teachers,” Castro said. “But I think sometimes their hands are tied. They’re disappointed theyhave to put funds and priorities in a different area first.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
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