A hike in troubling student behaviors at Coeur d’Alene School District middle and high schools is prompting a cry for more counselors.

Trustee Dave Eubanks has advocated for more counselors during discussions at school board meetings.

“We have had a very worrisome number of suicides and suicide attempts in recent years,” Eubanks said Wednesday. He guessed most of them happened at the middle schools, but some at the high schools as well.

Current counselors, board members and administration said they all want to see a better environment for counselors so they can focus more on students and their social and emotional needs.

“Counselors have a lot of roles and a concern of mine and some other trustees is that we need more counseling staff,” said Tom Hearn, a board member of the Coeur d’Alene School District who owned a mental health clinic for 27 years. “Some of the schools have counseling needs that are going unmet. We’re supposed to have the American School Counseling Association standards — one counselor for every 250 students — and we’re way under that. Our policy says we’ll try to meet the standards of the national model, but we don’t.”

As of June 3, each of the Coeur d’Alene School District’s three middle schools had two counselors on staff who were each responsible for 303 to 426 students. There are four counselors on staff at each of the district’s large high schools — Coeur d’Alene High and Lake City High. The high school counselors at Coeur d’Alene High are responsible for 350 students each, and at Lake City the counselors each have 390 students assigned to them.

Not only do Coeur d’Alene School District counselors have a lot of students to help, they also have a lot of other duties not related to students’ mental health or counseling, including proctoring tests and helping students plan for and appy to colleges.

Rick Jones, a counselor at Coeur d’Alene High for 10 years, said he feels his work as a counselor suffers because so much of his time is being used elsewhere.

“With all of those things going on, dealing with the personal and social aspects of the students doesn’t happen as much as we’d like because the perception is the counselors aren’t available or worse, they didn’t know that’s what we’re trained to do,” he said. “One of the biggest challenges at the high school level is that I don’t necessarily see the need until the student is hospitalized, because we don’t get a chance to know our students on the level we would like to and as much as we’re trained to, because we’re busy doing so many different things.”

Jones told The Press Wednesday that although he does see students who are at risk of suicide or self-inflicted harm, such as cutting, he hears more about those kinds of behaviors from middle school counselors.

“I definitely have a big case load…but middle school kids have so many more emotional needs,” he said. “Middle school is a difficult transition period in the life of a child anyway, but for some reason they are more often choosing self-harming behaviors.”

Trina Caudle, Coeur d’Alene schools’ director of secondary education, said the school district is taking some steps to alleviate some of the counselors’ less pertinent responsibilities.

The school district received state funding to hire two career and college advisers to help high school students plan classes and assessment tests.

The advisers will be at the high schools, but, Caudle said, they will also help eighth-graders plan their high school careers. Caudle said she thinks two advisers is enough.

Even though the advisers will be working with the district’s eighth-graders, they will be mostly at the high schools.

“The Legislature did give some money toward college and career advisers and that will help, to some degree, take the burden off of secondary counselors in terms of helping with the academic planning,” Hearn said. “But it’s not the same as more counselors to meet the standard.”

The Coeur d’Alene School District will be hiring 12 new teachers for the 2016 - 2017 school year. Even though he would like to see some of those positions go to more counselors, Hearn said he understands those teaching positions are being added because the district promised taxpayers levy funding voters approved in 2015 would be used to reduce classroom sizes.

“I think that’s a legitimate use of the money. I don’t think it’s really fair to say we’re increasing teachers and therefore we’re not funding counselors. I think they’re both needed,” he said. “I don’t fault the administration for this. They’re not purposefully not funding those positions. It’s a question of whether they can afford it.”

Eubanks said he is in favor of hiring more counselors, but he does not want to see thos positions funded through deficit spending.

“I would be fine cutting spending elsewhere,” Eubanks said. “Hopefully (the college and career advisors) will cut counselors enough slack so they can counsel our kids.”