A couple walks across the Oregon State University-Cascades campus in 2021.

Oregon State University-Cascades was awarded a $3.9 million federal grant to provide full tuition for up to 75 master’s-degree students in a counseling program specifically geared toward increasing school counselors in rural K-12 Central Oregon schools.

The five-year grant is meant to address a school counselor shortage in Central Oregon amid a rise in children’s mental health needs.

The program, called Promoting and Advancing Training of High Desert School Counselors, will launch this summer. The master’s degree has been an option at OSU-Cascades for at least a decade, and has two tracks: one for clinical mental health and one for school counseling. Students can choose between taking two or three years to get through the program. The grant is specifically for those in the school counseling track, and the new program includes a few new features that differentiate it from the regular counselor track.

“We’re the only face-to-face program that’s closest to some of the eastern parts of the state, so that was really important for us to recognize,” said Lucy Purgason, an OSU-Cascades assistant professor of counseling who co-developed the program with fellow professor Molly Moran.

Purgason and Moran worked with the High Desert Education Service District and the Bend-La Pine, Crook County, Redmond and Jefferson County school districts in developing the program. Purgason is in her second year at OSU-Cascades, and said she’s been handling partnership work connected to this program since she started.

Purgason and Moran first connected with the High Desert Education Service District, and began to hear that Central Oregon school districts were having a difficult time hiring school counselors. Since they were part of a training program already, they were determined to figure out some kind of solution.

The two concentrated on how they could attract and graduate more students, and what it came down to was financial need, particularly for students living in rural areas.

“We were able to really map onto ‘if we want to grow our program and grow the number of school counselor graduates that we are putting forth, we’ve got to be able to address this financial barrier to attending graduate school,’” Purgason said.

After finding the grant through the American School Counseling Association website, Purgason and Moran crafted the grant narrative and applied in January. They learned OSU-Cascades had been awarded the grant in March.

“I always want to say I’m so humbled by the teamwork and collaboration that went into making this possible,” said Purgason. “It wouldn’t have been possible if Molly and I had done it on our own. It really was through connecting with folks who just had their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the districts and were really connected within the districts. Truly a team effort.”

Students who are in this program will receive supervisor and faculty mentorship. Though all master’s of counseling students are required to do an internship, students in this program will be placed into an internship at a high-needs school.

Students who receive grant funding additionally commit to working as a counselor in a rural Central Oregon school for two to three years after they graduate. The program team is also working to attract students who are either bicultural, bilingual or originally from the rural communities where these counselors will be working, in order to match diversity among staff with the increasing diversity among student populations.

“I think it’s so important and exciting to think that we could have potential applicants who are doing some of this work already…that there are individuals applying that have a really important skill set already and would benefit from the specific training and counseling approaches to enhance the work that they’re doing,” said Purgason.

Purgason said she’s also thinking about the student who’s never had a school counselor and how someone intervening in a mental health crisis or stepping in to prevent a mental health need would be life-changing.

“It’s our hope that every student in our Central Oregon community has access to a school counselor,” she said.

The deadline for prospective students to apply for the summer 2023 program has been extended to May 25.

New Oregon State University-Cascades dean Sherman Bloomer excited to get to work