A high school without a counselor? Not unusual in rural America

Youth Center in Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania, Centre County
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2018

The general dearth of assistance for young people in rural communities is illustrated by this story by WITF radio in Central Pennsylvania.  The headline is "With no social worker, this rural Pa. school district turned to teaching emotions in class." 

 

More Distant View of Mountaintop Youth Center
Sign above door of Youth Center:  "Safe Space"

Zesiger is the superintendent of Moshannon Valley School District in rural Clearfield County, Pa., where more than half of its students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. He said many of them face stress and trauma at home.

“We have a lot of students who are residing with grandparents or other family members. We have a lot of single family homes. We have a lot of homes with an incarcerated parent or an addicted parent,” Zesiger said. “All of those things just continue to add up.”

He had hoped hiring a social worker would help – there’s state and federal COVID-19 relief money to pay for one. But filling the job opening hasn’t been easy.

The shortage of mental health professionals is nationwide. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry considers a ratio of 47 child and adolescent psychiatrists for every 100,000 children to be “sufficient.” It estimates, in reality, there are 14 child and adolescent psychiatrists per 100,000 kids.

“It’s been two years now we’ve advertised regularly through a contracted service,” Zesiger said. “There is such a great need for social workers across the state, that they kind of have their pick of where they go and what they make. Being a small rural district, we’re just not equipped to compete with some of those larger districts.”

In the absence of a licensed social worker, Moshannon Valley started asking teachers to spend more classroom time on something new: social-emotional learning.

The Moshannon Valley School District is in central Pennsylvania, and Clearfield County is just west of Centre County where I took these photos in Snow Shoe, population 765, in October 2018.