‘We actually saved a kid’: Schools recruit AI chatbots as counselor shortage persists

A few minutes before the Friday afternoon bell, school counselors at Corsicana High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area rushed to catch a student before the school bus drove them home for the weekend. 

The student had confided a detailed plan to harm themself — not to a counselor, but to an AI chatbot — which is how counselors were able to bring the student in and begin a long-term mental health intervention. 

As schools across the country face a youth mental health crisis and a school counselor shortage, some are recruiting artificial intelligence to fill in. At least 200 schools in 19 states, including Corsicana High, about an hour south of Dallas, have partnered with Alongside, an AI student wellness platform. Their mental health chatbot, Kiwi, is designed for students in the fourth through 12th grades. 

Alongside is another example of the nascent technology reshaping adolescence and public education, even as school leaders remain skeptical about the benefits of AI use in schools.

Aaron Tidwell, Corsicana High principal, said the district is still evaluating the platform’s effectiveness over three years of use. Still, he credits Alongside with helping human counselors identify students in crisis in real time.

“If we wouldn’t have (gotten) that alert, that kid would have left school, and that plan might have been very well carried out,” Tidwell said. “We actually saved a kid.”

Mental health experts have widely criticized the use of unregulated chatbots for mental health, pointing to potential risks such as emotional dependency, social isolation and heightened risk of suicide and self-harm. Last year, a California family sued OpenAI over claims that ChatGPT advised their 16-year-old son on his suicide, with the case pending in court. 

Even with those concerns, some companies are building a new quasi-mental health care industry around AI chatbots, as adult and teen consumers flock to wellness-focused bots. They have names like Wysa, Youper and Woebot, along with leading multiuse chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, used widely for quick, simulated therapy.
Seattle-based Alongside, launched in 2022, claims to be the first mental health chatbot designed for children and used by schools in the country. Schools pay a subscription fee per student to use Alongside.

How it works

Kiwi inhabits the persona of an orange-yellow llama and engages with students as they talk about daily challenges like anxiety, issues with self-esteem and stress. It asks them follow-up questions or offers strategies to help resolve conflicts, according to Alongside.

Elsa Friis, director of product and clinical care at Alongside, said the platform focuses on nonsevere, early-detection and prevention efforts and acts as a tool rather than replacement for school counselors. 

“Sometimes you’re splitting a social worker across 6,000 different students across 10 different schools, and the social worker is just completely overwhelmed,” Friis said. The platform, which was designed by school mental health clinicians, alerts school counselors and social workers when a student’s conversation with Kiwi flags the system as a risk of self-harm or suicide, Friis said. 

Schools tap AI to help with counselor shortage

About 40% of high school students reportedly experience persistent sadness or hopelessness, with about 20% having seriously considered suicide in 2023, according to the CDC.

For Corsicana High Principal Tidwell, as he looks for ways to help his students, Alongside has been a cheaper solution to expanding mental health services than hiring more staff. The high school has three behavioral support counselors for about 1,800 students, he said. 

For things like managing the day-to-day stress of homework or conflicts between friends, the school counselors “let that chatbot do its work,” Tidwell said. 

In the past year, nearly 31,000 students across the U.S. have used Alongside, spending nearly 28,000 hours on the platform, according to the company. The company says it collects student-generated data such as chats, journals and safety information, to personalize the chatbot, and uses de-identified information for research.

Across the country, at Interlachen Jr-Sr. High School in Putnam County, Florida, school counselor Brittani Phillips serves over 400 seventh and eighth grade students. Interlachen Jr. Sr. High has a large student population whose parents are either incarcerated or deceased, leading to a high incidence of trauma and scarce support from home, Phillips said. 

Since the school adopted Alongside three years ago, Phillips said the platform has helped “triage” her cases, freeing up her time to prioritize students struggling with major crises.

“A goal that I have is to be able to meet with all of my students at least once, but the reality is, there are things that are put on counselors’ plates that do take them away from being able to talk to students,” Phillips said. 

Using AI for crisis intervention

Alongside’s AI system monitors student chats with Kiwi for signs of abuse, harassment, bullying, suicidal ideation, self-harm and other signs of severe risk to oneself or others. Chats are private, but a student mentioning a serious topic like suicide would trigger the detection system. In those cases, counselors receive an alert with the student’s chat log within five minutes.

Phillips remembered when her phone lit up with a critical alert late one evening. She read an eighth grade student’s chat to Kiwi flagged for risk of suicide. She called the sheriff’s department to conduct a home wellness check and quickly got on the phone with the student’s mother, who had been out of the house grocery shopping. 

“And your heart just sinks. He’s home alone. He’s writing this. We’ve got to get someone there right now,” Phillips said. An hour later, Phillips said the student was found safe, and she referred him to a mental health counseling clinic. 

In three years, since using Alongside, Phillips has received 19 “severe” alerts, and she regularly meets with nine students who have triggered more than one alert for risk of self-harm or suicide.

Across the U.S., the platform identified more than 1,800 students in the last year who needed immediate intervention, Friis said. The human clinical safety team also reviewed an additional 6,000 chats that did not flag an alert but could signal a potential crisis with more context.

Many kids are also “more likely to disclose that they are suffering to something that’s not human,” Friis said.

Phillips said she has watched her students, particularly since the pandemic, withdraw from in-person interactions at school. 

“Our kids at this age, they just want to be heard. But you can bet your bottom dollar that they’re not going to just go to an adult and say, ‘I think I’m having harmful thoughts,’ ” Phillips said. 

ChatGPT poses ‘unacceptable risk’ 

About 1 in 5 adolescents use AI chatbots for mental health advice, according to researchers from RAND.

Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute and the Stanford Medicine Brainstorm Lab found in a recent risk assessment that the majority of consumer-facing apps, including ChatGPT, Gemini and mental health-focused Wysa, posed “unacceptable risk” to children and failed to notify guardians if their child was in crisis. 

In contrast, researchers rated Alongside a “low-risk” platform, as its system notified the school about almost every simulated crisis within 15 minutes. 

“Instead of positioning the chatbot as the thing that the user is talking to exclusively, the platform supports the adult who’s supporting the user,” said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI and digital assessments at Common Sense Media. 

The report identified one test scenario in which Alongside did not detect a sign of suicide risk. Friis said Alongside’s chatbot can miss context at times and misunderstand human speech, such as confusing “shooting humans” with “shooting hoops,” leading to potential false positives or missed signs of risk. It also struggles to detect potential signs of psychosis, she said. 

Torney, of Common Sense Media, said even an effective AI detection system still lacks the “overlapping protections” of a social support network, such as family members, teachers and support staff, who can “close the gap” if a counselor misses a warning sign.

In a sample of Texas and New Mexico schools, about 76% of high-risk students reported no suicidal ideation after three months of using Alongside, according to a pilot study conducted by Northwestern University. But the full sample of students showed no significant effect on depression, anxiety and loneliness, according to a Common Sense Media analysis of the report. 

It’s unclear if school-provided chatbots are the solution, Torney said, since research shows that both teens and their parents overwhelmingly prefer more engaging, human-like chatbots.

“Having Alongside be present in the school system doesn’t mean that kids are going to be using it instead of ChatGPT,” Torney said. “It might mean that they’re using it in addition to ChatGPT.”

Friis said Alongside is designed to prevent students from forming a parasocial attachment, or a one-sided feeling of intimacy with an AI, to Kiwi. It will gain a basic understanding of a student’s message and help problem-solve in under five minutes, and it caps the amount of messages a student can send within a three-hour window. 

“The goal of these chats is not for someone to engage with AI,” Friis said. “It’s for the AI to help them take a step in their real life to solve the challenge that they’re dealing with.”

Tidwell, the Texas high school principal, said the platform has saved each counselor about three weeks of work during the regular school year.

“What our counselors say the most is that there’s (students) popping up that they would have never had on their radar if it wasn’t for the app,” Tidwell said.

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This story was originally published by EdSource.