Earlier this month, police in Albemarle County, Virginia, charged a social-and-emotional-learning coach at Hollymead Elementary School with 11 felony counts of sexual abuse—seven of them aggravated sexual battery—involving at least four children. The district had opened an investigation into the coach, Michael Swiney, in January, and quietly placed him on administrative leave—but told parents nothing until his recent arrest.
Parents packed a community meeting on June 10, demanding to know why they hadn’t been warned, and many learned only then that Swiney had been pulling their children from class for one-on-one sessions. Parents’ prior complaints to Principal Joe McCauley had apparently gone unanswered. One parent reported that Swiney had allegedly locked her son in his office until a teacher intervened. A week after Swiney’s arrest, the district still could not identify which children he’d met with. McCauley pledged to notify parents of any child with a record of having seen Swiney, but the district has no established protocols for mental-health staff engagement, and he conceded that many other students may have met with Swiney without it being recorded.
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Swiney’s case is not an isolated failure. It’s the result of trying to deliver mental-health programs and services through the education system, which isn’t designed, qualified, or regulated to do so. School-based mental health puts children in the hands of unlicensed staff with no appropriate regulatory oversight, answerable to no clinical licensing board, and with no enforceable standards of care or rules that inform parents their children are being “seen” behind closed doors.
Most American parents are probably unaware that school-based mental-health programs are not staffed with licensed professionals. Swiney was not a licensed clinician, psychologist, or counselor, but he had all the trappings of someone with behavioral-health authority: the title (“SEL coach”), a district-wide program (“SEL”), a private office, and enough power to pull students from class for unrecorded closed-door sessions. Albemarle described its social-emotional staff to a local paper in 2024, stating that while SEL “counselors” are licensed by the state department of education, SEL “coaches” are not. Principals hire SEL coaches with any background—no clinical or mental-health credentials required. One district job posting sought skills in “mindfulness meditation” and “specialized contemplative methods of instruction.” Even Hollymead teachers said they hadn’t realized Swiney had no mental-health license.
Unregulated mental-health services delivered by schools are now the most common mental-health services received by youth. According to one school board member, Albemarle is “the biggest [mental-health service] provider” for children in the county. That’s happened through an extensive referral pipeline of SEL programs, mental-health programs, school support staff of SEL coaches, mental-health support specialists, coordinators, counselors, social workers, and school psychologists. A child is referred to such staff for “mental health” support by a teacher, principal, or friend and then invited to “come by to talk” in one-on-one sessions that a parent might never know happened. In Virginia, a new bill would require mandatory universal mental-health screening in grades six through 12, which will expand this pipeline of referrals to all children, who’ll get routinely screened by such staff.
School mental-health programs seldom articulate clear rules on what families are told, leaving notification vague or absent. Where the law is clear, it’s often misread by districts, whether intentionally or not, and rarely in parents’ favor. When Albemarle parents questioned why a grown man had been alone with their seven-year-olds, they were told that district policy “doesn’t forbid employees from being alone with students,” and that not doing so was merely “an unwritten rule.” Telling parents was a “general rule of thumb,” one coordinator said: if a staffer had met a child “more than twice,” someone should probably inform the parents. Whether to involve parents at all, one coach offered, was “very gray.”
It’s not. Keeping parents uninformed rests on a faulty claim about state law. One Albemarle coach, referencing Section 54.1-2969, told a local paper that the age of consent for mental-health services in Virginia is 14—so a student could keep his sessions from his parents. Section 54.1-2969 says no such thing. A minor is deemed “an adult” only for the purpose of consenting to outpatient treatment delivered by licensed clinicians, who can withhold records from a parent only when disclosure would cause “substantial harm.” The law doesn’t establish a general age of consent for school “mental health services,” nor does it grant minors additional confidentiality privileges. A minor’s right to consent to outpatient care does not mean an unlicensed, school-employed “coach” can privately deliver pseudo-screening and treatment and not tell the parents.
Mental health is a regulated health profession with state-level governing boards statutorily empowered to protect the health, welfare, and safety of the public from unqualified providers. But with school-based services, families and children lose the protection of well-established standards of care, scope-of-practice limitations, confidentiality, mandatory record-keeping, and patient and parent access to treatment records. Regulatory boards also have clear enforcement powers to process complaints, initiate investigations with subpoena powers, hold administrative hearings, and issue disciplinary orders for violations. Those safeguards don’t apply to school staff, whatever their title—SEL coach, coordinator, school counselor, social worker, or even school psychologist. Virginia statute expressly excludes government employees from the licensure and regulatory provisions applicable to behavioral-health providers, and with it, excludes children and families from the safeguards of a regulated health profession.
That no meeting records exist also exposes the lack of qualified supervision of school programs, a key safeguard of regulated providers. Swiney, like all Albermarle’s SEL coaches, reported to a principal. That principal, an administrator with no mental-health qualifications, does not know which students Swiney met with, when, and for what purpose. Masters-level licensed counselors in Virginia, by contrast, undergo at least 21 months of practice under qualified supervision before practicing independently.
Safeguards of regulated health professions extend beyond record-keeping and supervision; they include legally imposed professional boundaries. In Virginia, a mental-health professional can be disciplined or lose his license for entering into a “dual relationship” with a client—counseling someone with whom the provider has a personal or social connection. That prohibition exists to preserve professional distance and protect independent judgment. It prevents exploitative personal relationships—sometimes sexual—that licensing boards punish most harshly.
Dual-relationship prohibitions are grounded in recognition of the well-documented phenomena of sexual and erotic transference—when a patient unconsciously redirects onto the therapist certain emotions, attachments, and expectations. For some patients, the therapeutic relationship activates romantic attraction. One study finds at least one-third of patients disclose developing a romantic or sexual attraction to their therapist. Countertransference also occurs: therapists develop their own emotional and erotic feelings toward patients. These dangers affect grown adult patients; they would be even more potent for early youth and adolescents.
School mental-health services are often in direct conflict, deliberately, with licensed providers’ regulated conduct. Albemarle’s mental-health coordinator acknowledged that dual-relationship rules don’t apply in schools. A single SEL coach may counsel hundreds of interrelated students and come to know their personal details: family dynamics, student-to-student relationships, and personal challenges. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) treats this outreach and relationship-building as best practice: becoming a child’s “trusted adult” is part of doing the job well and better enables a school counselor to support the child. ASCA literature instructs counselors to be visible, friendly and accessible in hallways, invite new students to lunch gatherings, and leave handwritten notes for struggling students. None of these practices would be acceptable for a licensed counselor.
No documentation, no notification protocol, and no standards of care or supervision: this is not an administrative oversight but a feature of the structural design of school-based mental health. What Virginia wants to build in its schools is the appearance of a mental-health system, but without the benefits of one. Universal screening will flag more children, which will require more staff, hired from any background and empowered to become a child’s “trusted adult.” How many more families will someday have to ask: Why was I not told?