The Care Exemption

Michael Swiney worked at Hollymead Elementary School in Albemarle County, Virginia, under a title that did not exist a generation ago. He was a social and emotional learning coach, an unlicensed position, and he had held it since the fall of 2023. Before that he had been the same thing at Woodbrook Elementary, a few miles away, from December 2021. On June 1, 2026, a grand jury indicted him on eleven felonies: seven counts of aggravated sexual battery, three counts of indecent liberties, and one count of attempted aggravated sexual battery. The police had opened the investigation in January, after a child came forward, and three more children followed. The reported contact ran from August 2024 into the start of 2026. Swiney turned himself in on June 3 and sat in a regional jail without bond.

The instinct is to read this as the story of a predator who slipped through a gap. That instinct is wrong. What the Albemarle case exposes is not a man but a design. When parents demanded to know how a staff member had spent years meeting children behind a closed door, the superintendent, Matthew Haas, gave an answer more revealing than the indictment. The division had no written policy forbidding an employee from being alone with a student. It relied, he said, on an unwritten rule. Within days the school board asked him to resign.

An unwritten rule is what remains after the written ones have been taken away. In the case of the position Swiney held, they were taken away deliberately, by statute, long before he was hired.

Virginia, like every state, regulates who may treat the mind. A licensed professional counselor completes a graduate degree, accumulates thousands of supervised hours, passes an examination, and answers to a board that can revoke the license for cause. That board enforces the rule at the center of clinical ethics: the prohibition on dual relationships, the requirement that a clinician never blur therapeutic authority into personal intimacy. These aren’t bureaucratic ornaments. They are the safeguards a profession assembled over a century, having learned how much harm a trusted adult can do to a wounded child in a private room.

The social and emotional learning coach stands outside all of them. Virginia law exempts from counselor licensure any person employed by a locality or a publicly funded nonprofit, and a school division is a locality. The exemption is not buried; it sits plainly in the code, and it has stood, in one form or another, since the 1970s. The state’s psychology statute is stricter, requiring that a government employee who renders psychological services be supervised by a licensed psychologist, or licensed by the Department of Education as a school psychologist, or placed in a certified special-education setting. The counseling statute demands none of this. A role was built in the space between the two. The coach performs the relational work of a counselor, the trust, the private conversation, the emotional intimacy, while answering to neither the licensure regime of counseling nor the supervision regime of psychology. In the eyes of the law that governs mental-health practice, he isn’t practicing at all.

This is the first wall of the enclosure. A clinical function was placed inside a venue the clinical rules do not reach. The second wall is consent. A parent in Virginia assumes that nothing therapeutic reaches a young child without the parent’s knowledge. The assumption is false. Virginia law deems a minor an adult for the purpose of consenting to outpatient treatment for mental illness or emotional disturbance, and for authorizing the disclosure of the records that follow. The statute sets no age floor on its face. A child may enter the therapeutic relationship, and the parent may be treated, as a matter of law, as a stranger to it.

Layer the two walls and the enclosure is complete. The adult in the private room needs no license. The child may consent on his own. The parent, by statutory design, waits outside. This structure isn’t unique to Albemarle. It is the ordinary architecture of school-based emotional support in Virginia and, in varying forms, well beyond it.

Albemarle did not conceal the arrangement. Its own officials described it in public a year before Swiney was charged. In a March 2024 budget presentation to the county, reported by the Crozet Gazette, a school board member said that between its coaches and its other services the division had become the largest provider of children’s mental-health services in the county. Twenty-four coaches were then in place, sustained for three years by one-time federal pandemic grants that had run out, and the division was asking the county for $2.6 million to keep them and to add six more.

The coaches described their own practice plainly. Alanah Horning, a coach at Western Albemarle High School whose background is in social work, said that whether a parent learned a child was meeting with her was “very gray,” a judgment made case by case. She told students that fourteen is the age of consent for mental-health services in Virginia, and that a child uneasy about a parent knowing could keep the sessions confidential. A referral, she explained, might come from a principal, a parent, another student, or the child himself, and the meetings might continue on a regular basis.

After the arrest, the division conceded what the budget presentation had already shown. Its chief communications officer, Jason Grant, called the SEL coach “not a counselor” but a provider of emotional support, and later reporting established that neither the state nor the division set any rule for which staff could meet a child alone, or when. Hollymead had permitted its licensed counselors to meet with students individually. It had required no license of the coach who did the same.

The question worth asking is not who failed in Albemarle, but how a function so plainly clinical came to be performed in a place built to escape the rules of the clinic. The answer is a continuity, not a plot, and it runs back three decades to a single conference.

In 1994 the Fetzer Institute, a Michigan foundation, gathered researchers and educators to consolidate a scattered field of school-based prevention programs. The meeting produced a name, social and emotional learning, and an organization, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL. A year later one of its co-founders, the science writer Daniel Goleman, published Emotional Intelligence with Fetzer’s support, and the phrase entered common speech. A parallel track opened on the clinical side at the same moment, as federal health agencies began in 1995 to fund university centers devoted to placing mental-health services inside schools. By the standard measure they succeeded: the schoolhouse is now the most common place in America where the young receive mental-health care.

CASEL did not stay a research collaborative. Through an effort it calls the Collaborating States Initiative, it worked directly with state education agencies to write social and emotional competencies into their standards. Twenty-seven states have adopted such competencies for kindergarten through twelfth grade, and all fifty have them for early learning. The framework moved from a foundation’s conference room into the education codes of the states, one agency at a time. No single vote enacted it; it accrued.

What began as pedagogy became a market. The emotional and psychological data of schoolchildren, once collected, has value, and capital arrived to collect it. Panorama Education, founded at Yale in 2012, sells the surveys and dashboards that measure and track students’ social-emotional states, and reports serving thirteen million children, roughly a quarter of American students, across all fifty states. Its early money came from Mark Zuckerberg’s education fund and from Google Ventures; its later rounds from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, and the education fund Owl Ventures, with General Atlantic leading a sixty-million-dollar round. A co-founder, Alexander Tanner, is the son-in-law of former Attorney General Merrick Garland, a tie that drew notice after Garland directed the FBI in 2021 to assess reported threats against school boards. In Fairfax County, parents objected that the firm measuring their children’s inner lives was funded by a social-media fortune the district had never disclosed.

The wealth of the funders isn’t the point. The point is what the funding reveals: the unregulated venue had become a place to build a business, and the business ran on the interior lives of children whose parents, under the consent statutes, held no standing to see the data.

The federal government supplied the fuel, and each time it did so in the aftermath of horror. Project AWARE, the flagship school-mental-health grant program, was created after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook. A decade later, following Uvalde, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 directed roughly two billion dollars into school mental health: one billion in formula grants to state education agencies, another billion split between two competitive programs to place mental-health workers in schools, and two hundred forty million more into Project AWARE. Senator Marco Rubio introduced the law; President Biden signed it. Tragedy, reliably, opened the appropriations.

Between the advocacy and the appropriations sat the work of legitimation, and the most respectable institution available performed it. In 2016 the Aspen Institute convened a National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, co-chaired by CASEL’s Timothy Shriver, the Stanford scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, and John Engler, the former Republican governor of Michigan and president of the Business Roundtable. Its members included a Google executive, a former Accenture chief, two sitting governors, two superintendents, and a retired four-star general. The 2018 report it produced certified as bipartisan consensus what had begun as one foundation’s initiative. Shriver, its central figure, sits on the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of the advertising conglomerate WPP. The migration was finished, from the margin to the mainstream, from a coined phrase to a plank of establishment policy, with no single moment anyone could name as the decision.

One move remains. If the coach is the unregulated tier, and the consent statute seals the parent out, the final piece is the mechanism that feeds children in. That mechanism is universal screening.

In July 2025 Illinois became the first state to require mental-health screening for every public-school student, on an opt-out basis, beginning in the 2027 school year. Virginia is close behind. In April 2026 Governor Spanberger signed House Bill 355, directing the state to procure screening tools and prepare for the annual screening of every student in grades six through twelve, again on an opt-out basis, beginning in 2028. Opt-out is the load-bearing word. The burden falls on the parent to learn that the screening is coming and to refuse it in time. The default is participation.

A universal screener does one thing above all. It converts the entire student body into a stream of referrals. Every child is assessed, a portion is flagged, and the flagged are routed to support. The support waiting at the near end of that pipeline is the tier this essay began with, the one with no license, no prohibition on dual relationships, and no parental party to the record. The mandate doesn’t create the unregulated venue. It fills it.

None of this is a settled victory, and to treat it as one would mistake an architecture for its outcome. The evidence that universal screening improves the mental health of the young is contested on the merits, not only in politics. Critics point out that decades of screening research have failed to establish benefit, and that Oxford Community Schools in Michigan, a district saturated with mental-health infrastructure, still failed to stop the 2021 shooting carried out by a student it was actively monitoring. The politics have turned as well. In September 2025 the federal secretaries of Health and Human Services and Education, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Linda McMahon, warned that universal screening risks over-diagnosing and pathologizing ordinary childhood. Several states have moved the other way. Colorado repealed its screening program in 2025 over parental-rights objections, Utah requires written parental consent rather than an opt-out, and Florida’s parents’ bill of rights restricts the practice. The structure is built. Whether it stands is now in dispute.

The dispute is the point, and what is truly at issue needs naming, because the familiar framing hides it. The argument is not care against neglect, nor the state against the family in the abstract. The argument is jurisdictional. A function that carries strict rules everywhere else, licensure, supervision, consent, the record, the bar on private intimacy between clinician and child, was moved into the one venue where those rules had been legislated away. The rules didn’t fail at Hollymead. They were absent, by design, before Swiney was hired.

A self-governing people is entitled to one plain principle: that a clinical function carry its clinical safeguards wherever it is performed, and that no jurisdiction be built inside a schoolhouse to escape them. The modern world was not built through invasion. It was built through infiltration, through legal form and quiet institutional design, through the patient relocation of authority from the places that answer for it to the places that do not. The children of Albemarle met that method in its purest form: an adult who needed no license, a consent they could give alone, and a parent the law had placed outside the door.

The question a republic must answer is not whether children deserve support, but which adults answer for them, and under what rules. In Albemarle, for two years, the answer was no one, under none.

Liberty. Transparency. Truth. Justice.

- Mel K