For six weeks, students have faced a vacant Student Support Services (SSS) office. This is a special place on the Akins campus where students have sought various forms of help from a licensed clinical social worker since 2008.
The SSS office has been vacant since the end of last school year when the previous counselor left Akins to move to Houston.
Akins is the only high school in the Austin school district to employ a campus-based social worker focused on helping students with their mental health and helping them meet some other physical needs, including clothing, food, and school supplies.
For many students, SSS, which also utilized social work interns from the University of Texas, serves as a refuge for them to get the help they need to be successful at school.
A senior who has received help from the SSS in previous years, said they want to see the SSS position filled quickly because there are many students with unmet needs right now.
“I know there’s a lot of people that will have weekly meetups with them or daily, and then there’s also a lot of people that their first resort is (the SSS counselors). They helped many people” said a senior who asked to remain anonymous.
Principal Michael Herbin said the administration is working to hire a new SSS counselor as soon as possible. However, he said it has been a difficult position to fill because of the challenging nature of the job.
“We have the job posted. We’ve gone through the interview process, and we’ve recommended a few people for the job,” Herbin said.
Three different people were recommended for the job since May, but for one reason or another, once the job was offered, they weren’t able to accept it, Herbin said.
“You have to do the interviews, you have to submit the recommendation, then (Human Resources) has to process it,” he said. “And so by the time you do your first interview to the time that someone gets hired, it can take up to a month.”
Despite this currently being a problem, many students may not be aware of the lack of a counselor, and with no sign on the door to indicate the lack of social workers, a few students have gone to find the room empty, left to resolve their issues on their own.
“I know I’ve had my moments where I was, like, freaking out and all that stuff, and I needed to talk to the social workers or something like that, but there was no one there. Yeah, I had to just tough it out,” another senior said.
Students have said that it has been a difficult time at Akins to not have an SSS counselor as they have already dealt with school safety concerns and the stress of starting a new school year.
Although academy counselors are also trained to help students facing social and emotional crises, they have many other responsibilities, including dealing with student schedules and making sure students are on track to graduate. These other responsibilities can reduce their availability to work with students who need mental health counseling, making them imperfect replacements for the SSS counselors.
“I feel like the counselors, yes, you can talk to them about it, but they won’t know as much that the SSS does, because they’re social services,” a senior said. “They know more of those things, while the counselors are mostly there for our academics and stuff. So I think we can help with the minimum, but they can’t reach the same point that the SSS did.”
Dr. Margarita Moreno, who is the campus head counselor, said academic counselors are not able to provide the level of support to students that the SSS office has provided in the past.
“We need student support services. We need a counselor that just works on social-emotional needs for students,” she said. “They do a variety of things that we don’t have access to. They do the clothes and they do food cards. They do Thanksgiving turkeys, they do an incredible amount of extra things that go above just the support that academic counselors can offer.”
Jaime Garcia, Arts and Humanities Academy Counselor, also said that the SSS offers students more opportunities than the academy counselors can.
“I think that just the space that the SSS offered was a place for a student to go and quietly sit and have a moment to take a break. The SSS office offered students a quiet place, which I loved for them.”
Despite the lack of a full-time social worker dedicated to students’ social-emotional and physical needs, administrators encourage students to seek out help from their academic counselors and other support staff on campus.
“They should come to us,” Garcia said. “And if their counselor is not available, they need to seek out another counselor, one that’s here on campus. And we will do our best to accommodate their needs.”
As for the students who find themselves still needing support outside of their academy counselor, Akins does still have a few other resources for support, including the Communities in Schools staff, the Expect Respect counselor, and the Restorative Justice coordinator.
Despite the setbacks in finding a qualified social worker to take on the position, Herbin said he remains hopeful that someone will be able to fill the role within a month.
“It’s more important for me to have the right person than it is to just fill it with anyone,” Herbin said.
