Jessica Diaz McKechnie spends a lot of time speaking to school counselors in the state’s second-largest school district.
A professor in the University of Maryland’s school counseling program, Diaz McKechnie, helps place interns from the university at schools across Prince George’s County.
Some of the professional counselors, she said, have asked why colleges and universities aren’t spending more time training school counselors to meet the needs of immigrant students.
“Immigrant and refugee students and families really, while they are an amazing group of students and families, they also create unique, complex, systemic realities for the schools and also for the school counselors,” McKechnie said. “So there are experiences that these students have had, things like unification stress, trauma, and they are experiencing systemic barriers that school counselors haven’t necessarily been trained to meet those needs.”
In 2020, the Prince George’s County Public Schools counseling department asked the educators in College Park to address that gap.
A few years later, the university launched a four-course, 12-credit certificate program aimed at preparing K-12 school counselors to better help immigrant students and their families.
The first cohort, which completed the program in 2025, exclusively admitted counselors from Prince George’s County. The program is now accepting applications from school counselors in other jurisdictions, McKechnie told WTOP.
Participants start with a class about family systems, helping them learn about themselves, each other, and each culture’s definition of a family.
There’s also a focus on navigating immigration policies, and understanding the needs of multilingual learners.
Johanna Moore, now a counselor at Springhill Lake Elementary, was among the first to complete the certificate program. She said wanted to learn more about how to support refugees from Afghanistan who were enrolling at her previous school.
“I felt like a lot of the times, they got dropped off, they got registered, they got put in class, and then that was it,” Moore said. “I wanted to learn more about how I could support them as a school counselor.”
Part of the training, Moore said, offers counselors strategies for helping immigrant families adjust to school in the U.S.
Many times, students are used to a different structure, “and then you come here and we’re like, ‘Well, if you miss 10% or more of school, you’re chronically absent,’ and we’re sending all these notes home. And in their (previous) school, in their culture, they didn’t have to go to school every single day, all the time,” Moore said.
The coursework also helps counselors understand signs of trauma, which may be at the root of a student’s withdrawal or aggression.
While teachers may sometimes tell counselors a student is showing troubling behaviors, such as acting out in class, “we can take the time to help understand what’s going on in the home, helping understand that they’ve had unique traumas coming in through this immigration process, or there’s maybe family separation going on.”
The program hopes to accept between 20 and 25 counselors each calendar year, McKechnie said, and most of the four courses are entirely online.
Special tuition rates are offered for nontraditional students who work full time, and McKechnie said school districts sometimes offer scholarship support.
“Strengthening the abilities and the connections with immigrant students and refugees is only good for the school, McKechnie said. “It increases attendance. It increases graduation rates for the entire school community. So it’s something that I think the entire school building will benefit from.”
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