The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 2 70 and attention issues, with middle and high school counselors reporting greater concerns in the areas of motivation and mental health, and elementary and middle school counselors identifying attention problems as the greatest concern. The developmental onset of mental health disorders (Lambie et al., 2019) likely accounts for increased student mental health problems reported by middle and high school counselors. However, motivation and attentional issues across the grades were problematic, and because both are symptomatic of depression and anxiety, they raise a red flag for the mental health of all K–12 students in Tennessee. Alongside academics, 87.0% of school counselors reported negative changes in students’ social skills and 87.4% reported worsened behaviors among students, with trouble socializing with peers, absence of social flexibility, and an increase in physical and relational aggression being the most pronounced problems. Declines in students’ ability to get along with peers may be uniquely linked to social isolation during lockdown (Ellis et al., 2020; Karaman et al., 2021); however, of great concern is the increase in all forms of bullying, with cyberbullying being particularly problematic in middle school. Youth aggression is a long-term consequence of ACEs and has implications for overall school safety, with victimization and perpetration both positively associated with school violence (Forster et al., 2020). RQ2 investigated what interventions school counselors used to assist students with their COVID-19– related concerns and examined interventions by grade level. The preponderance of school counselors relied on individual counseling (95.7%), consultation (85.5%), referrals (80.7%), collaboration with other school-based helpers (77.3%), and coping skills instruction (71.5%), all of which are consistent with crisis-level supports. Nonetheless, only 44% of the sample, primarily elementary school counselors, had used small group counseling, despite its proven efficacy with children exposed to trauma (Salloum & Overstreet, 2008). The underutilization of group work at the high school level presents a concern, given that group work provides context for peer support and social learning, both considered critical therapeutic factors for adolescents (Gysbers & Henderson, 2012). Nonetheless, this finding resonates with previous results that high school counselors are more apt to assume administrative roles in place of the provision of direct student services (Chandler et al., 2018). Universal assessment has been proffered as an efficient and empirically grounded method for the early identification of at-risk students in need of COVID-19–related interventions (A. Erickson & Abel, 2013; Karaman et al., 2021; Pincus et al., 2020). Unfortunately, only 17.9% of the sample reported administering universal mental health screeners, a finding aligned with other studies that indicate schools have resisted adopting mental health screeners because of inadequate resources and related concerns about following up with students identified as being at risk (Burns & Rapee, 2022). For RQ3, we explored the school counselors’ perspectives of the barriers they have encountered in assisting their students with their COVID-19 concerns. The proliferation of barriers reported by school counselors (high caseload, non-counseling duties, lack of administrator support, being on the master schedule for guidance classes, and a lack of training) verifies our concern that school counselors in Tennessee did not receive the support instrumental to their ability to provide effective student services at this critical time. Our state-level findings resonate with studies conducted in other states that indicate school counselors’ non-counseling duties increased during the pandemic while administrator support declined (Savitz-Romer et al., 2021). Other studies have also drawn attention to widespread staffing shortages associated with COVID-related absences and a reduced pool of substitute teachers (Patterson, 2022). Although we did not examine staff resources explicitly, with almost 50% of our Tennessee sample witnessing an increase in their non-counseling duties, it would be reasonable to infer that campus administrators are deploying school counselors to triage critical gaps in staffing patterns. Interestingly, despite a widespread increase in non-counseling duties post–COVID-19, only 20.3% of counselors
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