The MentalSpace School Podcast

Progress reports went home this week. If things got tense at the kitchen table, you're not alone. Parents, a few ways to make the conversation useful instead of scary: Start with curiosity. Ask 'What do you think...

There's a word that gets used too easily in school mental health: resistant. A student comes to sessions, answers in three words, doesn't open up. Somewhere along the line that becomes 'not ready for counseling,' and...

To the parent who got a call from the school this week and felt your stomach drop: That call is usually not what you think it is. When a counselor reaches out about your child's mood, or attendance, or something a...

Most student disclosures don't happen in the counselor's office. They happen to whichever adult the kid decided was safe — the third-period teacher, the coach, the paraprofessional who says good morning every day. That...

A student loses a parent in September. Week one, the building does everything right — a card, a quiet room, a check-in from the counselor. By week three, everyone has moved on. Except the kid. That gap is where school...

There is a note that shows up in student files everywhere: family declined services. Sometimes that is exactly what happened. Often it is shorthand for something more specific that nobody wrote down. A composite...

When a parent says no to counseling for their child, they are almost never saying no to counseling. They are saying one of these, and they usually do not say it out loud: What is going in his record? Fair question, and...

A crisis plan you have never rehearsed is not a plan. It is a document. Here is the honest test for any school building. A student discloses something serious to a teacher at 10:40 on a Tuesday. Can every adult in your...

Parents, let's take the awkward part first: what does this actually cost? When a school counselor suggests counseling for your child, that suggestion usually arrives with no price attached. So most families do the...

A question for principals: who is holding your holders? In most buildings there is one adult students gravitate to in a crisis. It is rarely the person on the org chart. It is the teacher whose room feels safe, or the...

Educators, you already know this student. He is not defiant. He is not skipping. He is the one in the nurse's office at 8:15 with a stomachache that is completely gone by 10, three days a week, since the second week of...

To the principals and assistant principals still in the building tonight: You absorbed a bus incident, a crying first-year teacher, a hard family call, and a district deadline, and you did it without letting any of it...

A question we get from assistant principals more than any other: what do we do when it happened online, at night, off campus? The honest answer is that the location of the phone is not the location of the harm. A group...

Fall break re-entry has a rhythm to it, and most buildings feel it on day three rather than day one. After a week off, sleep schedules slip, peer groups reshuffle, and academic demand comes back all at once. In a real...

Two-a-days are underway. Something else started at the same time, and nobody's charting it. Fall sports stack a lot onto one teenager: a body that's constantly sore, a coach's approval that starts to feel like identity...