Minnesota schools under stress as they try to serve students’ mental health needs

Minnesota schools are confronting a student mental health crisis with a fragile patchwork system — and without much of the federal money that was supposed to help fix it.

The state received just two of the grants Congress approved after the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting to expand school-based mental health care. Pandemic relief funding that temporarily paid for counselors, social workers and psychologists is also running out. And with Minnesota ranking near the bottom nationally for counselor access, many schools are managing growing needs with shrinking resources.

Minnesota students had already reported greater mental distress on statewide surveys coming out of the pandemic. The urgency to address those issues has sharpened further in the wake of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, where the community’s grief has renewed questions about whether schools across the state have the safety nets students need.

“The goal of a school counselor is to be preventative in nature,” said Carolyn Berger, advocacy chair for the Minnesota School Counselor Association and a teaching associate professor at the University of Minnesota. “Without enough counselors, we’re not able to do that work. We end up just reacting — crisis counseling or putting out fires.”

Minnesota’s average student-to-counselor ratio is 558 to 1 — more than twice the American School Counselor Association’s national recommendation of 250 to 1 and among the worst in the country. Elementary and middle schools carry the heaviest loads, with some counselors responsible for more than 1,000 students.

Counselors are trained to guide students through academic, social-emotional and career development. They can also teach coping skills and identify early warning signs of crisis, and then refer students to social workers or psychologists who provide more specialized services.

But counselors say large caseloads make it impossible to provide that full range of support.

“There are days when it feels like we don’t have enough time to get anything done,” she said. “Sometimes it’s two hours with one student who needs help regulating. That means other kids don’t get preventative services.”

After the Uvalde massacre — when a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers — Congress approved a $1 billion package aimed at expanding school-based mental health services. The U.S. Department of Education used the money to launch two competitive grant programs.

One was designed to help districts hire new mental health professionals; the other supported partnerships between universities and schools to train future counselors and social workers.

Minnesota received just two awards — one to Rochester Public Schools and another to the U, which partnered with St. Paul Public Schools. It’s unclear how many Minnesota districts applied for the money.

Rochester used its five-year, $1.9 million grant to launch the School-Based Mental Health Scholars Program. It paid partial tuition for teachers and community members earning master’s degrees in social work in exchange for serving local students.

“We’re not fully staffed, and the needs aren’t decreasing,” Grimsrud said.

While federal dollars have come and gone, Minnesota’s backbone for school-based mental health care is a state program created long before Uvalde or COVID.

A Minnesota Department of Human Services program, approved by the Legislature in 2007, pays community mental health providers to work inside schools. The money, a total of $20.5 million for the 2026 fiscal year, bypasses school districts entirely to preserve a firewall between academic and medical records — a structure that families requested from the start.

“School counselors don’t provide mental health treatment,” said Sue Abderholden, former executive director of NAMI Minnesota. “They play an important role, but they’re not therapists.”

The program now operates in about 80% of districts and 65% of school buildings, but demand far exceeds supply. Waiting lists often form by November, Abderholden said.

“Federal grants come and go,” Abderholden said. “You apply, you might get them, and then they end. It makes it hard to build lasting infrastructure.”

Rep. Cheryl Youakim, DFL–Hopkins, chairs the House Education Policy Committee and helped create a program in 2023 to designate $10 million over two years for school counselors, social workers, psychologists and nurses.

The goal, she said, was to give districts stable money as federal COVID aid ended. Lawmakers also allowed schools to use the funds to keep existing staff when other grants ran out.

“We wanted schools to be able to use the funds to keep their current staffing,” Youakim said, “not lose people because of a grant ending.”

In the Fridley school district, Assistant Superintendent Rochelle Cox said the district used much of its COVID funding to hire school social workers — positions it hadn’t been able to afford before.

When the federal relief dollars ran out, Fridley kept its social workers but trimmed elsewhere.

“We’ve had to shrink our administrative services,” Cox said. “We reduced after-school programs, which was tough, but we’ve tried to keep supports in place during the school day first.”

Even with those adjustments, caseloads are rising.

“Although we know every student can use mental-health support, it’s always our hope to reduce caseloads,” Cox said. “Anytime we can be proactive, that’s the gold star.”

Berger said the only lasting fix is a sustained state investment in counseling positions, not another short-term grant.

“The answer isn’t Washington,” she said. “It’s Minnesota investing fully in what we already know works.”

Grimsrud said the demands are only increasing.