The grant, part of a federal initiative to bolster student access to mental health support in schools nationwide, will fund Rutgers’ School Counseling Prevention to Intervention project, designed to address the shortage of qualified school counselors. The program will fund full tuition for 30 school counselors to be trained through Rutgers’ master’s program and deployed in the New Brunswick, Rahway, Franklin Township, and Neptune school districts. These districts, among the state’s fastest-growing and most diverse, struggle to meet the recommended student-to-school-counselor ratio of 250 to 1; New Jersey’s current ratio stands at 308 to 1, according to the
American School Counselor Association
.
The program, led by Dr. Ian Levy and Dr. Kathy Shoemaker of Rutgers GSE, will begin training its first cohort in 2025, emphasizing recruitment from underrepresented backgrounds within the local communities, Rutgers alumni, and minority-serving institutions. The curriculum is expected to prioritize culturally responsive practices, trauma-informed care, and other evidence-based mental health interventions, critical in supporting ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations.
“The lack of school counseling potentially compromises youth’s development and wellness,” said Dr. Levy. “This project will expand essential preventative and responsive mental health services by actively reducing student-to-school-counselor ratios in some of the region’s fastest-growing and most ethnically diverse school districts.”
In addition to traditional school counseling skills, the program will introduce course modules in areas such as social and emotional learning, racial justice, and creative arts therapies, designed to prepare counselors for the complex needs of today’s students. Counseling professionals and education consultants will support the development of these modules, which also incorporate theories of advocacy and trauma-sensitive practices in educational settings.
“This can serve as a very important national model for proactively creating – and implementing – strategies that prepare young people to be their best selves,” said Christopher Span, dean of Rutgers GSE.
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here.
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