Mental health staff at Baltimore County Public Schools will soon get the summer off.

They’re not happy about it.

Starting in July, department chair counselors and psychologists will move from 12-month to 10-month work schedules, reducing their salaries by thousands. The change saves the school system $1.8 million as district leaders navigate budget constraints.

The unexpected pay loss has upset psychologists and counselors, who worry that people will look to other school districts for jobs and their ranks will shrink. But perhaps of greater concern, they say, is the impact on students who depend on their services over the summer.

“A cut to school psychologists is a cut to mental health and special education services for students,” Sarah Stark, a Baltimore County school psychologist, said at a recent school board meeting packed with mental health staff in red shirts.

When school isn’t in session over the summer, school psychologists assess students for disabilities and meet with their families to set up accommodations to help them succeed. They might also assist students like Emily Noonan, a senior at Dulaney High School, who helped start the mental health club Not on Our Watch because she was concerned about the mental health of fellow students.

“We’ve had several student suicides in the four years that I’ve been there,” said Noonan, 18.

Student mental health has been a growing concern across the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2023 that 40% of high school students had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Two in 10 students seriously considered suicide and 9% made attempts.

Noonan said she doesn’t directly receive mental health services at school but knows psychologists and counselors attend health classes when suicide awareness is being discussed, “so they can notice signs if students are not engaging ... or need to step away.”

The school system is asking “far too much” from the psychologists and counselors, Noonan said.

At a March news conference, Superintendent Myriam Rogers said the change to 10 months of work brings school counselor department chairs in line with chairs in other departments, like math and English. School counselor department chairs were the only ones who received an extra two months of salary in addition to a stipend for their leadership duties, she said.

Rogers and her team, she said, started realignment conversations with counselors last year. The goal was to be “fiscally responsible,” but she still offered them extra days to work in the summer that are more than twice the summer days given to other department chairs, she said.

Rogers said she understands and acknowledges the feelings around the “difficult decision.”

“But in a sea of difficult decisions, we have tried to avoid in mass just reducing large numbers of people and really being thoughtful and intentional about the decisions that we’re making,” she said.

In a message to school system staff, Rogers wrote that the school district is expected to get 6.5% less than it asked for in county funding. Rogers’ budget team will analyze what County Executive Kathy Klausmeier proposed, determine the impact and next steps.

The school systemhas made other investments in mental health resources in recent years, including free teletherapy to high school students through text-message service TalkSpace. It also has a webpage dedicated to other mental health resources.

Cindy Sexton, head of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, said psychologists and counselors are “really angry” about losing pay.

“In a $2 billion budget, we could find a million dollars in savings somewhere that doesn’t” interfere with staff who interact with students,’ Sextonsaid.

The counselors and psychologists said they were instructed by their union not to speak to the news media, but a few pleaded to school board members to overturn the change at a meeting. That included Brian Stewart, Catonsville High School’s counseling chair and Maryland’s 2022 School Counselor of the Year.

Stewart said the change will “significantly reduce our capacity to provide essential services to families throughout the year.” He told board members the average school counseling chair would lose $18,000 in salary. Counselors make an average of $89,000 a year in Baltimore County.

A counselor’s role includes helping students with their academic and career goals, developing relationships between schools and families, fostering a positive school climate and offering individual counseling.

The reduced schedules will lead to scheduling issues, “unbalanced classes, gaps in support for students over the summer and delaying the start of critical programs and services for when students return in the fall,” Stewart said.

In a letter to board members, the school psychologists said the two-month cut impacted 98 of 112 staffers and resulted in salary reductions of 10% to 20%. The 10 summer days offered in the policy change won’t be enough to complete their work, they wrote.

Many of them work at the county’s Child Find centers screening students for an educational disability. Summer is when the centers are busiest. Last year, around 55 psychologists worked there for over 41 summer days, according to the letter.

“Overall, an estimated 335 meetings were covered and 92 assessments completed,” the letter stated.

Sue Ellen LaFountain, a Baltimore County school psychologist of 28 years, told board members that the cutback will impact hiring and retention. Salaries in neighboring school districts could lure away current staff and potential job candidates.

Starting salaries for psychologists will drop from $79,122 to $66,489 under the reclassification, the letter stated, far lower than neighboring counties like Carroll where 10-month psychologists start at $83,546.

“It would take a starting BCPS psychologist 15 years to make what a 10-month Carroll County psychologist makes at year one,” she said. “We are no longer competitive or even slightly comparable to the surrounding counties.”

The National Association of School Psychologists recommends a psychologist-to-student ratio of 1 to 500, but Baltimore County is at 1 psychologist to approximately 1,100 students, according to Gboyinde Onijala, spokesperson for the school system who said the ratio is not the same as a psychologist’s caseloads. The national average during the 2023-24 school year was 1 to 1,065, according to the association.

Not every school has its own psychologist; some split their time among a few schools.

Noonan, the Dulaney senior, said she’s seen the benefits of having a psychologist in school five days a week. She’s afraid the reclassification will result in students no longer receiving mental health support.

“I’m very concerned to see us … fall back in that decline that we saw after the pandemic because of the lack of resources," she said.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.