Counseling Clarity

By Rachel Crowell

September 2024

Stephen Sharp, a certified school counselor, has always enjoyed telling jokes. “It’s part of my personality,” he says. Rather than checking his humor at the doors of Landisville Middle School, he brings his funny side to work.

As a middle school counselor in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Sharp finds humor to be a welcome workplace companion. It’s useful “therapeutically, as a tool to build connections and shift or reframe perspective,” he says. “Particularly, when working with youth, a little self-deprecating humor can help in the power imbalance that can occur in both schools and therapeutic partnerships.”

All jokes aside, Sharp’s decision to become a school counselor was rooted in a serious realization. It came to him when he was working as a mental health counselor for Philhaven (now WellSpan Philhaven), which focuses on mental and behavioral health. In the hospital system, he conducted assessments for in-patient and partial hospitalization admissions and provided emergency room crisis counseling.

Sharp noticed an alarming trend: He was observing what was the worst day of someone’s life at least eight or nine times a day. Hearing those patients’ stories led him to think, “Geez, if someone would have stepped in a little sooner, kids could be helped before reaching the point of crisis.” In a lightbulb moment, he realized, “Maybe I could be one of those people.”

Once he started exploring that career avenue, Sharp says he fell in love with school counseling. However, to make that leap, he needed additional training. At that point, he had a bachelor’s degree in archaeology and religion with a minor in philosophy from Lycoming College. He went back to school, earning his master’s degree in school counseling from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. (The archaeology degree, Sharp says, actually helped him with counseling, by allowing him to understand patterns of behavior and identify the broader systemic structures that impact people’s lives.)

Sharp’s work focuses on digital technology, social justice and crisis response. He’s a nationally certified school suicide prevention specialist. He also co-authored 50+ Tech Tools for School Counselors: How to Be More Engaging, Efficient, and Effective.

Since transitioning to school counseling, Sharp has engaged in much more varied work than he did in a hospital setting. “Crisis work is really intense,” he says. “It’s high-paced. Your goal is just really to gather a plan for stabilization.” That doesn’t leave much room for long-term therapeutic relationship building.

In contrast, as a school counselor, “You’re with them for the long-haul,” which includes supporting kids “through all the best circumstances and sometimes really challenging circumstances,” he says.

Community Engagement for Suicide Prevention

Sharp’s social justice and racial equity work deeply intersects with his continued suicide prevention efforts. He co-leads a working group focused on suicide prevention in Black youth, who are at an increased risk of death by suicide. That working group recently received a Transformation Transfer Initiative Grant and is now partnering with Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Sharp points to the congressional report “Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America,” which was published by the Congressional Black Caucus’ Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health in 2019. The report shows how the rate for Black youth suicide has been increasing faster than any other racial/ethnic group and is double that of their white peers. “Even with more recent data, we find that we should still be ringing the alarm when it comes to Black youth suicide,” says Sharp, a board member for the American School Counselor Association.

Sharp’s working group has a plan for busting through those staggering statistics in what he calls “the most important work when it comes to suicide prevention.” The plan, he says, is to hold community meetings in Pennsylvania “to connect with our Black youth and their families, to hear their voices, provide them with information and resources, and to create a stronger network of two-way communication to understand how we can all collaboratively come together to do suicide prevention work.”

The community engagement approach is a drastic pivot from the status quo. “Suicide prevention work, historically, has been kind of monolithic” and top-down, Sharp says. It has involved providing instructions to people who are in crisis and their families about what to do.

Instead, for Sharp and his colleagues, the goal is to create a back-and-forth exchange with people and communities that are at a high risk of being affected by suicide — brainstorming together about solutions, support strategies and interventions that might help.

Navigating Digital Technology

Students’ lives are increasingly affected by digital technology and the social systems embedded in that landscape. School counselors, Sharp says, will be better equipped to help students if they develop a basic understanding of the technologies their students interact with. Through hands-on engagement with those digital tools, counselors can understand how technology use can both benefit students and create difficulties in students’ daily lives.

“Particularly as we get into a world that can be sculpted, molded, drafted and designed by generative AI (artificial intelligence) and AI technology, we need to understand that technology has just, in fact, been designed by humans,” Sharp says. As a result, such technology is imperfect. “It may carry many of the same biases, flaws and faults that human systems do.”

It’s also critical that school counselors familiarize themselves with potential mental health issues that could stem from or be exacerbated by kids’ social media use. Potential risks are highlighted in U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent call for putting a warning label on social media platforms.

While there can be an adjustment period for using any new technology, Sharp encourages other school counselors to explore the tools their students are using. “Do not be afraid to use digital technology like AI and social media,” he says. He works with other counselors to “demystify technology that they use or could have access to.”

When used properly, digital technology can be transformative, Sharp says. “For some students, it’s going to be one of their best tools to connect with other people [they identify with], to be recognized, to have a voice and to have a chance to have autonomy.”

Instead of trying to dictate for students what their relationships with technology should look like, Sharp encourages counselors to approach the issue with a collaborative mindset. For instance, he sometimes shows students how they can use tools within different digital applications to help themselves in a crisis. In these lessons, he highlights how “they can speak for themselves or support themselves in a digital world.”

It’s also key that counselors consider who’s being left out of technology conversations. Sharp is involved with Counselors for Computing, a professional development program of the National Center for Women in Information Technology. “We work with counselors across the country to build in their understanding of systemic barriers to education and opportunity, technology and the future world of work,” he says. “We’re trying to work with different tech partners to understand some of the barriers and opportunities when it comes to both young women and students of color” in technology careers.

A Welcoming Environment for Everyone

The principles of social justice and racial equity are foundational to Sharp’s work. Fundamentally, he strives to build strong connections with students, among students and within his school’s community. He also advocates for early identification of students’ behavioral health needs so they can be connected to relevant resources. Previously, his school district piloted the use of a new behavioral health screening tool. It was so successful that it’s now being implemented in other states.

Creating a welcoming environment for all students requires more than “supporting just the brains that are atop our students’ necks,” Sharp says. Instead, educators need to consider that “students are really the product of some broader systems that have happened both within the walls of our school and beyond, and both in present day and historically,” he says. Much work needs to be done to “transform those systems to be opportunities for all students, regardless of their race or gender or sexuality,” he adds.

Sometimes Sharp helps bridge that gap by educating teachers about bias and advocating for students’ needs when they may be experiencing the effects of bias. Sharp also works to “make meaningful relationships and connections with other partners outside the school, like different community agencies, to make sure that we as a school system have as many different resources [as possible] to meet our students where they’re at,” he says.

Despite the importance of ensuring that all students feel welcomed and accepted at school, opposition exists. There has been pushback in this type of work historically — since the days of one-room schoolhouses, Sharp says. He encourages “taking the long view” and understanding that progress on these issues won’t be linear.

In some situations, it’s possible to navigate this criticism by talking with people. “We have the chance to have some really critical, important conversations about opportunity and belonging that focus on the benefits for students,” he says. However, he notes that the political climate is such that there are “different states where it can be very challenging to administer” programs focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

“I wish that counselors across the nation were unencumbered in their ability to support students,” Sharp says. However, he acknowledges that for all students, “making sure that they have someone who’s going to be able to meet and greet them there, and treat them with dignity, and also focus on their personal development ... can be lifesaving.”

DISCLAIMER

Opinions expressed and statements made in this magazine by the article authors or those quoted within articles do not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors or policies of the American Counseling Association.