Amid national concerns around teacher shortages and burnout, school districts are grasping for ways to support staff mental health. Long-standing stressors — including, but not limited to, hefty and dynamic workloads, classroom management, rapid digital innovations and financial strain — have only gotten worse post-pandemic, pushing morale down and attrition up.
With the U.S. teacher workforce in crisis and school funding becoming increasingly stretched thin, some districts are experimenting with AI-enabled mental health tools to give educators faster, more accessible and more individualized guidance to stabilize and strengthen the profession.
Anne Brown, president and CEO of the Cook Center for Human Connection, a Utah-based nonprofit focused on mental health support, said the shift in teacher morale is clear.
“When I applied for my first teaching job, I was up against a hundred applicants,” she said. “Superintendents are reporting to me now that there are only two or three applicants for each position if they’re lucky.”
Brown, a former teacher and fourth-generation educator, said today’s teachers face a convergence of pressures that earlier generations did not. Many classrooms include large numbers of students experiencing anxiety, depression or trauma.
“You’re not walking into a classroom where you’ve got to pay special attention to two or three kids,” Brown said. “You’re walking into a classroom where you’ve got to pay special attention to 15 kids. And that becomes really hard and really overwhelming.”
Moreover, fewer veteran teachers and frequent leadership changes add to the strain. Recent data from the Council of the Great City Schools show the average tenure of superintendents in large urban districts is about 2.7 years, for example, compared to approximately five years pre-pandemic.
“Teachers’ culture is continually changing because their leadership at the top is changing, principals are changing, and then they don’t have the mentors around them,” Brown said. Combined with low pay and a broader sense of diminishing professional respect, she added, “we’re not making teachers feel like heroes right now — and we need them to feel like that.”
The Cook Center, which facilitates Parent Guidance, a free online tool that provides parents with courses and training on social and emotional learning, did not initially plan to build a separate mental health tool for educators. According to Brown, Parent Guidance began in 2020 as a nationwide, no-cost resource featuring video-based courses from licensed psychiatrists, social workers and therapists on topics like childhood anxiety and depression.
Eventually, though, district leaders began to ask if the platform could be modified for teachers. In response, the Cook Center developed Staff Guidance, a new coaching and AI-powered tool specifically designed for educators’ individualized needs. It launched three months ago and has seen faster adoption than expected, Brown said.
At the center of Staff Guidance is what the Cook Center calls the “digital mind” of Dr. Kevin Skinner, a licensed marriage and family therapist with 25 years of clinical experience. Brown said the system is built from “hundreds of hours of him on video, millions of his 25 years of writing,” allowing educators to ask questions about personal, family or professional challenges.
Brown emphasized that the tool is not therapy.
“We’re very clear that it provides education, not therapy,” she said. “We work really hard to not create a relationship between the tech and the human. We want to be there to help and support but not become your friend.”
Educators can — and do — tap into the platform for a wide range of personal and professional challenges, from preparing for potentially tense parent conferences to working through stressful family situations, Brown said. The tool allows users to describe their concerns in detail and receive individualized guidance on how to approach difficult conversations, organize their talking points, and set a constructive tone before entering a meeting.
While AI provides immediate support, staff can also transition to live help. If a teacher indicates they need to speak to a human professional, they can schedule a session with a cognitive behavioral coach, often within one to two hours, according to Brown. Coaches can assign individualized learning modules on topics like stress, burnout or emotional regulation.
“Everything we do has a real human connected to it,” Brown said. “Whether that’s a coach or a facilitator, we always keep the human in the mix.”
Furthermore, Brown added that districts are gravitating toward AI-powered mental health tools in part because they help remove consistent barriers to care: Traditional counseling and psychiatry can be difficult to access due to high costs of sessions, insurance claims getting rejected or complicated, and waitlists stretching for weeks.
An AI-driven platform like Staff Guidance, on the other hand, gives educators immediate responses within a day. Districts cover subscription costs, and anonymity helps reduce stigma — particularly in smaller communities where, Brown noted, seeking help can feel conspicuous.
“We’ve broken down all of those barriers to try to make it something that anyone can access and have an impact from the minute they access it,” she said.
While Brown views AI as a tool that can reduce administrative burden and help individualize support for both students and staff, she was also clear about its limitations.
“AI is not going to replace teachers. AI is not going to replace therapists,” she said. “But teachers who use AI are going to replace people who don’t.”
Supporting teacher well-being, she added, is ultimately central to student success and ensuring they receive a quality education. If districts want to retain educators, Brown said, they must invest in tools that help teachers feel valued, capable and connected.
