To best serve specific communities or populations, social workers must often focus their training and study into a single concentration. For those driven to help students, many choose to become school social workers and apply their efforts in academic settings. As principal support systems for educators, administrators, and above all, students, school social workers play a vital role in ensuring appropriate academic and social development.
To gain a greater understanding of how these kinds of social workers operate on a day-to-day basis, Lauren Gutierrez, LCSW, Board Certified Supervisor and career school social worker, founded the Social Work Scrapbook channel on YouTube. Dedicated to shining a light on the roles and responsibilities of school social workers, Gutierrez says, “As a first-generation college student, I am proud to have a career that allows me to be the person I needed in the past. It is so important to share my journey and the impact that I have been able to make in the school system.” She has developed a large following for her insightful and informative videos, and in this article, she helps to illuminate the expectations and practices of school social workers as we explore their roles, history, and continued impact.
Social Work Services in Schools
The school Social Work Association of America (SSWAA), which acts as the leading advocate for school social workers across the country, outlines the expectations of the role. Centrally, the SSWAA details that school social workers must be “trained mental health professionals who can assist with mental health concerns, behavioral concerns, positive behavioral support, academic, and classroom support, consultation with teachers, parents, and administrators, as well as provide individual and group counseling or therapy.”
By operating within these parameters, school social workers support schools’ academic missions, students’ academic success, and faculty effectiveness. As the SSWAA notes, school social workers help to connect different parties to best benefit the development of students. In these positions, school social workers bring together families, school personnel, and students to offer a robust additional foundation that promotes academic and social progress.
Services that school social workers practice include:
- Assessment: To get a better idea of how students perform academically, socially, and behaviorally, school social workers often must provide diagnostic services. In this capacity, social workers must meet individually with the student, the student’s parents, and faculty and sometimes may even need to make a home visit in order to understand how the student’s living situation may be affecting their development.
- Behavioral, Social, and Academic History: Especially for children who have disabilities, it’s imperative that school social workers actively prepare, monitor, and add onto students’ behavioral, social, and academic history. These resources will be vital for future educators and educators who aim to provide the most effective support to students with disabilities.
- Counseling: One of the hallmark functions of the school social worker, administering counseling services helps students navigate difficult and often complex situations. School social workers offer counseling to individual students, groups dealing with shared issues, and families. Separately, in instances where child abuse or neglect is suspected, counseling services can help shine a light on what students need to improve their lives.
- Crisis Intervention: School social workers must occasionally provide crisis intervention support. This kind of assistance can take on many forms. From conflict resolution and anger management to sudden counseling services, school social workers must be prepared to help students understand and develop social interaction tools to ensure their personal and academic progress. In this capacity, when students encounter some kind of crisis, it ultimately rests on the school social worker to respond quickly and compassionately.
- Assisting Parents: To best ensure the progress and development of students in the classroom, school social workers sometimes must engage with parents and families to establish foundational support. For families with low income, health problems, disabilities, or other social or economic barriers, school social workers can help them identify and make use of community, state, and school resources. These can alleviate many of the pressures of ensuring that students develop academically and socially.
- Faculty and Staff Training: One of the most important responsibilities for school social workers is acting as a liaison to school faculty. As advocates for students of all backgrounds, school social workers offer faculty and staff resources to better grapple with external factors that ultimately affect a student’s development. These factors can be social, cultural, economic, and medical, and school social workers act as educators when training faculty on how best to engage with students who need support.
History of School Social Work
At the turn of the twentieth century, with the advent and popularization of public schooling, educators and administrators found that some of their students needed additional assistance both in and out of the classroom. Because the field of psychology, specifically child psychology, was also in its early stages, school social workers were seen as helpful mediators for students who presented social or behavioral problems. According to Randy A. Fisher in the scholarly article History and Development of School Social Work within Professional Organizations, social workers originally integrated into school systems in 1906. These early school social workers would coalesce to become the National Association of Visiting Teachers and Home Visitors in 1919.
The group’s numbers and overall level of involvement in both private and public school systems would increase until the 1930s when the onset of the Great Depression would destabilize public education systems across the country. In the early stages of the Great Depression, funding was largely cut as many sectors of American society struggled to cope with these new and severe economic hardships. As the decade continued, New Deal policies would restore that funding and subsequently reinstate new opportunities to school social workers.
While the group name would eventually condense into the National Association of School Social Workers (NASSW) in 1945, the objectives would remain largely consistent:
- To outline the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of social workers operating within school spaces
- To plan and implement social work programs that would benefit students, faculty, and families
- To bolster the levels of training that faculty and staff would need to promote academic progress for all students
To help accomplish these goals, the social workers involved in the organization would gather data, conduct surveys, and publish reports. While this organization would help legitimize the profession and call many aspiring school social workers to action, it would ultimately give way to the larger and broader National Association of Social Workers (NASW). Throughout much of the mid- to late-twentieth century, the NASW would promote many of the objectives laid out by the NASSW.
By the mid-1990s, the School Social Work Association of America (SSWAA) would form to better navigate the specific responsibilities that school social workers must adhere to. Importantly, as educators and lawmakers established protections for students with disabilities and special needs, school social workers would adopt another significant set of responsibilities to support those students. And as schools would begin to hire more social workers to help students with diverse needs from diverse backgrounds, the number of school social worker positions across the country would rise rapidly.
Role of Social Workers in School Settings
School social workers prove their importance in a variety of areas. Because students across backgrounds and age levels need different levels of support, school social workers intervene to ensure that students can more directly navigate issues that occur both in and out of school settings. These issues include:
Bullying
As one of the most common problems facing students across the country, cases of bullying can be found in practically every school system. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), approximately 22% of students between the ages of 12 and 18 reported that they had been bullied in the previous school year. As the NCES made clear, this figure has dipped from 28% from a similar report a decade prior. Still, for more than a fifth of all school students, bullying remains a very real and dangerous reality.
With the introduction of new technologies and social media in the last two decades and with the added increase in remote learning, cyberbullying has also become more commonplace. As the NCES found in 2019, approximately 16% of high school students reported that they had been victims of cyberbullying.
With these issues continuing to afflict school systems across the nation, school social workers are uniquely poised to find proactive, effective, and compassionate solutions. On a community level, school social workers can intervene by building school-wide anti-bullying campaigns that make victims of bullying feel safe coming forward. Additionally, school social workers can help educators and faculty develop appropriate rules for bullying. Lastly, through individual counseling services, school social workers can help victims of bullying navigate their experiences. Bullying can wreak substantial psychological damage, so it’s important for victims to have access to trained mental health professionals within the school system.
Truancy
A major problem for schools in the United States is motivating students to have a high attendance record. For a variety of reasons, a high rate of students across age groups cut class and collect unexcused absences. According to a 2017 scholarly article published in Children and Youth Services Review, researchers found that truancy rates were approximately 11.1% as recently as 2014. In their findings, they also discovered that a higher truancy rate could be linked to some destructive behaviors. Specifically, they stated that “truancy was significantly correlated with alcohol and marijuana use, fighting, the propensity to take risks, and lower academic engagement and school grades.”
While this research shines a light on how behavioral factors can influence a higher truancy rate, the Department of Education has also reported other socioeconomic reasons that help explain chronic absenteeism. Government researchers found that more than 7 million students, or 16% of the student population, were absent for more than 15 days of school in the 2015-2016 academic year. The DoE states that “many students experience tremendous adversity in their lives – including poverty, health challenges, community violence, and difficult family circumstances – that make it difficult for them to take advantage of the opportunity to learn at school.”
School social workers can offer a wide range of services that can help curb high truancy rates in both macro and micro levels. From a school-wide perspective, school social workers must monitor attendance rates for the school. By casting a comprehensive net, school social workers can identify quickly when students gather several unexcused absences. In these instances, social workers can begin to work individually with the student, their families, and school faculty to understand better the reasons for their chronic absenteeism. School social workers can then apply counseling services, educational resources, and intervention practices to support students who may be showing signs of frequent unexcused absences.
Confidentiality
School social workers must often engage with students as individual counselors. To best encourage students to share the details of their lives in order to find the most effective support, it’s important for school social workers to underscore how their sessions will remain confidential. This means that personal information will, for the most part, remain protected. Students will be much more likely to open up and share details that could lead to more direct support when they feel like they can trust their counselor.
Still, this level of confidentiality does have its limits. Understandably, as outlined by the SSWAA, school social workers are mandated reporters, nullifying confidentiality, when the student suggests they are harming themselves or others. By definitions, disclosure in these instances is necessary by law and social workers can be held liable if they don’t report what they know to the appropriate authorities.
Educational Outcomes
While it is ultimately the responsibility of teachers to determine their classes’ academic goals, school social workers can help students on an individual level. In this capacity, school social workers aim to help both students and faculty in hitting their benchmarks. While they are able to support students of all backgrounds and learning levels, school social workers are particularly effective in helping students with disabilities or special needs receive the personalized academic support they need.
According to research collected by the Regional Educational Laboratory Program, a governmental agency that aims to improve learning outcomes for students, high schools with social workers on staff were more likely to see higher graduation rates among seniors. Primarily, the reason that social workers were able to increase these rates can be found in the way they are able to apply a contextual lens to a student’s academic performance. By supporting them individually and through school-wide policies and initiatives, school social workers help students progress toward graduation and improve teachers’ ability secure their educational outcomes.
Behavioral Health
As crisis intervention practitioners and counselors, school social workers offer a breadth of services to ensure that students can make progress socially and behaviorally. In the context of behavioral health, school social workers intervene when students present problems or issues, create development goals, monitor student social and academic progress, and provide one-on-one counseling. Through these measures, students are given greater access to social tools they would otherwise not be able to develop more effectively.
Through the mental health services that school social workers are able to provide, students are also more likely to progress in their behavioral and emotional skills. By providing mental health assessments, training for educators, and behavior management assistance to teachers, school social workers can guide students toward healthier coping mechanisms and expressions.
Pandemic
While school social workers have traditionally been able to support student development best on physical campuses, the COVID-19 global pandemic has presented several new complex issues that educators, faculty, administrators, and social workers must negotiate. In a world where remote learning is becoming more commonplace and in some cases unavoidable, school social workers must refocus their efforts surrounding cyberbullying, attendance, engagement with learning materials, and mental health.
The pandemic has presented a range of unique complications to the learning process for students across age levels. As counselors trusted by students, school social workers have been able to bridge some of this gap through remote sessions. By providing mental health support and trauma-informed care to students, school social worker positions have become more important than ever. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) has laid out the significance of social workers in such an unprecedented moment. As COVID-19 has destabilized many already vulnerable families and children, school social workers must continue to find and create tailored ways to help students in a variety of areas outside of school, including but not limited to:
- Housing
- Healthcare
- Food security
- Mental health
- Physical safety
Additionally, as students have been able to go back to school physically, school social workers have played a crucial role, stepping into more recognizable support roles to guide students and teachers through difficult and confusing transitions, as well as processing challenges we’re facing communally for the first time.
The Future of School Social Workers
As roles and expectations have expanded since the introduction of school social workers to school systems more than a century ago, careers and job placements in school social work has only continued to grow in importance. Supporting students, teachers, families, and the community at large, school social workers must wear many hats in and outside of school. With school systems across the country increasingly recognizing the importance of school social workers, it’s never been a better time to enter the field.
However, the need for resources to guide you through this process is not scaling with the growth of the industry and subsequent staffing. For instance, there is no definition in the Texas Education Code for school social work services, as is the case in many major education systems. A proposed bill for the issue stated, “Adding social work services to schools and school districts allows teachers and administrators to focus on their work yet still provides valuable assistance and support to students.”
Check out our school social work program guide to find the program that suits you best. Additionally, our child welfare social work program guide details how social workers can support children more directly outside of the classroom. From this exhaustive guide, which unpacks the different kinds of courses and projects you’ll complete as a student, you’ll gain an advanced understanding of what it takes to become a successful school social worker and develop a career with immeasurable impact.
