This school year, Fredericksburg City students in Grade 4
and above whose parents did not opt them out have been enrolled in Alongside, a mental health support app
with an AI component.
Division leaders last week acknowledged, in response to
concerns raised by parents, that the app was not adequately introduced to
families—but they said it’s already resulted in “safety plans” being created
for 10 students with significant mental health challenges.
“These are kids who were not on our radar for other issues,”
said Matt Eberhardt, deputy superintendent. “This is an app to catch kids who
are slipping through the cracks. It can catch kids when something bad is going
through their heads.”
Eberhardt stressed that Alongside is “a skill-building
platform and a resource, not a replacement for an adult.”
“Always, we want kids talking to a human, not a pamphlet or
a program,” he said.
According to its website,
Alongside is an AI wellness platform. The company’s head of product and clinical
director is Elsa Friis, a Ph.D. and licensed psychologist who earned
her degrees at Duke University. A licensed therapist, clinical counselor, and
clinical psychologist make up the rest of Alongside’s clinical research and
development team.
For
students, Alongside features personalized coaching and skill-building
activities where students can track their mood, write in a journal, set goals,
and work on “superpowers”
to help them deal with specific issues such as rebuilding friendships, meeting
new people, making decisions, and practicing self-care.
The personalized coaching happens through a chat with Kiwi,
Alongside’s llama mascot. This is where the AI component comes in—but the
app’s website and
Fredericksburg school division leaders stress the difference between chatting
with Kiwi and chatting with an open-source AI companion bot.
“[Kiwi is] a chatbot with a scripted mental health response
from a clinician’s point of view,” said Maris Wyatt, director of special
education for City schools. “It’s not an AI open source platform where you can
put in anything and get an answer. It won’t search for an answer for you.”
For example, a student can ask Kiwi for help managing test
anxiety or what to do after fighting with a friend, and receive a response,
tailored to their concerns, reading level, and language, with tips for working
through the issue. But Kiwi won’t provide the answer to a math problem. It also
won’t provide medical advice or a diagnosis.
“The horror stories you hear about [around AI chatbots]
occur when you can go outside the system,” Wyatt said. “This is a closed loop.
It will only recommend activities that have been vetted by the mental health
professionals.”
Wyatt said that since the COVID-19 pandemic, “We have
experienced a lot of mental health needs in a short period of time.” She said
her team looked at several similar mental health support platforms and chose
Alongside after learning about it from the developers at a mental health
conference last year.
A pilot group of about 200 students—made up of two 4th grade
classes and English language learners at Walker-Grant Middle School—used the
app during the spring semester last year and “the feedback was very favorable,”
Wyatt said.
The division purchased Alongside for $10,000, using funds
from a five-year
mental health grant received from the Virginia Department of Education.
Fredericksburg was among eight divisions in Virginia chosen to receive a
portion of the $15 million federal grant awarded to the VDOE in 2023.
So far this year, Wyatt said lack of sleep is the #1 issue
that Fredericksburg students—and students across the country, according to
Alongside—are asking for help with. After sleep, students in the City are
asking for help dealing with some specific challenge, followed by help
balancing school work and activities.
According to data the division has gathered so far, 40% of
students using Alongside are accessing the chat, and 60% are accessing the
other activities, such as journaling and superpower-building.
The app is loaded onto school laptops. The chat feature is
accessible between 7:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily, Wyatt said, and students can log
into the other features during free time in class or with instructor
permission.
Alongside comes with screening that will activate an alert
any time a student types a trigger word into the chat or into their journal.
Nine people in each of the five division schools—a mix of Central Office staff,
administrators, counselors, social workers, and psychologists—get the alert,
Wyatt said, and someone will do an in-person check-in with the student.
The response time between receiving the alert and personally
checking in with the student has been under 15 minutes, Wyatt said. So far,
Alongside has activated 15 alerts and 10 of those have led to the development
of a safety plan for the student involved.
Eberhardt said this feature is why the division felt it was
important for families to have to opt-out of the app, rather than opt-in.
“Opting-out creates a safety net,” he said. “Everyone is in
the pool and it catches as many issues as we can.”
Wyatt said that as of last week, 24 families have opted
their children out of Alongside. She said families can opt out, or opt back in,
at any time.
That messaging was not clear to many of the parents who
raised concerns about Alongside at School Board meetings in September and
October. Parents also said they were worried about the AI component and about
student privacy and the potential sharing of sensitive mental health
information. And they said information about the app from the division has been
inconsistent.
“I think we could have done a better job rolling it out,”
Eberhardt said. “We wanted teachers to get the information out to parents. We
don’t believe that happened and that’s a problem. It should have been rolled
out at the division level. We should have done a better job.”
Still, Eberhardt said Alongside is valuable as a Tier 1
mental health intervention—meaning it catches all students.
In addition to Alongside, the division is training all 7th
grade students in the suicide prevention program SOS Signs of Suicide, and
has now administered teen
Mental Health First Aid training to all 10th grade students two years
in a row.
Eberhardt said the division wants to empower kids to help
each other, but, “We’re also not backing away from the message of ‘See
something, say something.’”
The FXBG ADVANCE is Fredericksburg Parent’s sister publication.
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