Expanding rural access: UM debuts online school counseling program

MISSOULA – This year, the University of Montana school counseling program made a big, strategic change: It switched from traditional, in-person instruction to a fully online master’s degree, making it the only accredited online school counseling program in the state. 

Already, the first cohort of online pupils doubled that of last year’s face-to-face students. 

The move to online instruction allows master’s students like Francine Stiffarm to access the program without uprooting her personal and professional life in Dodson, where she works as a financial literacy and entrepreneurship educator at Dodson Public Schools.

“That’s what made it possible for me – the fact that it went online. As educators, you don’t want to step away from your role,” Stiffarm said. “I’m able to balance work and my personal life.”

Stiffarm, an enrolled member of the Nakoda and Aaniiih tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, was born and raised in Dodson and formerly attended the majority Native American school where she now works. Her three children are students there, too. Stiffarm has deep, expansive roots in her community and wanted to better serve it by obtaining professional mental health skills through a school counseling master’s degree. 

“I am very invested in this community,” Stiffarm said.

Siffarm’s school and most of its neighboring institutions are without a single licensed school counselor, she said. This is a common figure throughout Montana, where nearly 24% of schools do not have a licensed counselor, according to the 2023 Montana Critical Quality Educator Report. 

The lack of mental health professionals exacerbates the state’s grim mental health statistics. According to Center for Disease Control data, Montana has the highest suicide rate nationally, with nearly 29 deaths per 100,000 compared to the national rate of 14 per 100,000. For Montana youth, suicide is the leading cause of death for ages 15-24.

“In my 12 years of teaching here, we’ve lost more students than we should have,” Stiffarm said. “I see the lack of mental health resources we have in our rural, teeny, tiny town.”

Through UM’s online school counseling program, Stiffarm is learning how to address issues like substance abuse, intergenerational trauma and other mental health struggles among youth in a school setting.

“One of my goals is to make a meaningful difference by fostering a supportive and inclusive environment for these students,” Stiffarm said. “A big part of my driving force behind this is I have a passion for helping students succeed academically, socially and emotionally.” 

School counselors have a broad purview that varies across grade level and school needs, but they generally provide safety, security and resources to a school community, including students, teachers and parents. 

“School counselors attend to students’ academic success, career readiness and social-emotional development – which is everything,” said Veronica Johnson, the UM Department of Counseling chair and professor. 

Despite the program being online, Stiffarm feels connected and supported by her cohort and professors while gaining the skills to achieve her goals. Through partnership with UMOnline, the school counseling program built collaborative and flexible courses that foster connection between students and instructors. 

“I’ve been so happy with how this has all developed,” Johnson said. “We’re partnering with UMOnline and getting a lot of support from them with how we’re developing our courses.”

Shifting to online instruction is part of a broader strategy by UM and Montana State University, which house Montana’s only two accredited school counseling programs, to get more licensed mental health professionals into rural schools across the state. A series of U.S. Department of Education grants have supported these recruitment and retention efforts. 

A few years ago, colleagues at each university set out to learn where their school counseling students went after graduation. They found a majority clustered in the Missoula and Bozeman areas, consisting largely of people who already lived there. Counselors who went to work in more rural communities that were unfamiliar to them often weren’t retained long.

“What we’ve decided to do with this grant is leverage the online program to reach people who are living and working in rural Montana who want to become school counselors in their communities,” said UM counseling Professor Kirsten Murray. 

“The idea is that these are people who have likely already built their lives in a place, in that community and school,” Murray went on to say. “By getting access to this level of training, they can stay and sustain mental health support in their communities for many years to come – and then we can start to close the gap in school counselors in our state.”

Murray recently was awarded a $3 million Rural School Mental Health Prepare in Place grant to recruit and pay the cost of attendance for eight Montana-based school counselors in UM’s online program each year for the next five years. Graduates will be targeted toward rural, high-needs schools.

Students can apply for cost of attendance funding from the grant at the same time they apply for UM’s school counseling program. Although students from any state may enroll in the master’s program, they must be based in Montana to be eligible for the grant funds.  

The series of grants also benefit students like Nora Weichel, who enrolled in the program last year before it went online. Weichel already secured a job as a school counselor in August at Lewis and Clark Elementary School in Lewistown through the Rural Mental-Health Preparation/Practice Pathway – while continuing to complete her master’s degree at UM. 

“When I enrolled in the program and got accepted, I did not imagine that the next year I would get a job,” Weichel said. 

Weichel grew up in Lewistown and wanted to return to her community after completing an elementary education degree at UM and teaching kindergarten in Billings for three years. Working as a teacher, Weichel found she loved being in schools but wanted to support students through a different role as a school counselor. UM’s program allowed her to achieve both goals. 

In addition to attending UM classes, Weichel works nearly full-time as a fourth through sixth-grade school counselor, checking in with a caseload of students weekly, teaching classroom lessons around social-emotional learning and conducting small group counseling. 

Because Montana’s state licensure rules permit graduate students to become licensed provisionally if they’re enrolled in a school counseling program, many UM students like Weichel become gainfully employed before graduation, said Arianna Vokos, UM school counseling program coordinator and clinical assistant professor. Across all of UM’s counseling master’s degrees, students have a 100% job placement within 18 months of degree completion. 

As the online program expands its recruitment and retention efforts, UM school counseling faculty are hopeful the impact of that ongoing work will yield positive change across the state over the next couple years – particularly in rural and underserved communities. 

“There's a ton of school counseling positions in the state right now,” Vokos said. “This allows people to apply to our program, immediately fill those open positions while they're in our program and provide services immediately.  Our students are really sought out.”

To apply to the Rural School Mental Health Prepare in Place grant, email kirsten.murray@mso.umt.edu.