It’s a scenario many school counselors may be familiar with, as the national average is 376 students per counselor, the association reports. But Kemble-Mick — one of four finalists for 2025 School Counselor of the Year — said she’s found a solution that allows her to do more than just try to keep up.
For the past year in her work at Indian Hills Elementary School in Topeka, Kan., Kemble-Mick has created chatbots to help older kids learn to cope with minor social-emotional problems, explore career paths more deeply and get support on certain assignments. She said she only uses these artificial intelligence-powered tools with students in grades three through six.
“I don’t typically go lower,” she said, “because younger students might have a hard time understanding that this isn’t a real person.”
Kemble-Mick builds the chatbots using the free version of SchoolAI, she said, because the platform is made for kids and has third-party data security and privacy certifications.
PICKLES THE SUPPORT BOT
“It allows you to unload and it walks you through things,” Kemble-Mick said. “It gives you ideas, like let’s try deep breathing together, let’s walk through an ‘I feel’ statement together, and you can either say it into the microphone or type it out.”
Teachers can also access the chatbot to help students learn how to solve small social-emotional problems in the classroom. For example, if a student comes in from recess angry that someone took their ball or gave them a funny look, instead of calling Kemble-Mick to help them calm down, the teacher can pull up Pickles on a classroom computer.
“The teachers and I came up with a plan that they could check in for five minutes and chat with Pickles, and at the end of the five-minute timer, they go back to their seat,” Kemble-Mick said. “And my phone has stopped ringing off the hook.”
She added that she checks the chats frequently, and that the platform sends her an immediate alert if an urgent issue comes up. She also tells students and teachers to come to her with any not-so-small problems, and she tracks the bot’s data to see if some students are leaning on it more often than others.
“If they’re reaching out to this so often, there’s something on our end that we’re missing that we need to help with,” Kemble-Mick said. “And that’s a cool way to catch some things that maybe we wouldn’t always catch.”
'KIDS ARE FINDING CAREERS I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW EXISTED'
Another way AI has changed how Kemble-Mick works is in career exploration, which is something she said school counselors lead for students in grades five and six. For this, Kemble-Mick created a chatbot in SchoolAI to help students learn about a broader range of job opportunities.
“By the time kids are 9, they start to develop stereotypes of what they think they can and can't be based on their ZIP code, gender, race,” she said. “This doesn't know any of those things about you, and so it disrupts the bias and allows kids to really dream.”
Students enter their interests and hobbies, and the bot takes that information and starts making career suggestions, Kemble-Mick said. For instance, when one student said he likes dirt biking, being organized and playing video games, the AI suggested a career as an esports manager.
“I know about esports, but I never would have thought of that on my own. So I’m learning alongside them, which I think is really neat,” Kemble-Mick said. “In elementary, we focus a lot on awareness of careers and exploring different ones and seeing what’s out there, and this is more exploration than I’ve ever been able to do because so many of these kids are finding careers that I didn’t even know existed. It’s a great way as a counselor to keep up with current trends.”
ACADEMIC SUPPORT
For students who need help learning, Kemble-Mick can create chatbots on SchoolAI that are tailored to their academic needs. She gave a recent example of a third-grade assignment that required students to research someone famous from history.
“I have some students who were really struggling with their research, and so I asked their teacher if I could help them with this,” Kemble-Mick said. “It wasn’t the whole class, it was just a handful, and so I made a few bots that were their specific historical figures.”
She then explained that the bots were not real people, but that the students could ask them questions to find out about the historical figures they were designed to portray. Similar to the other chat experiences Kemble-Mick has created, the students “took to it like nobody’s business” and completed their research.
“The engagement is high,” she said, “and that’s hard right now because we’re competing against a lot of things out there that seem to be more fun.”
Kemble-Mick is quick to add that these AI tools are not a replacement for school counselors but act as assistants that can be there for students at any moment.
“I don’t want people to think that it’s something that would take away your role or something that diminishes or dismisses what we do,” she said. “This is just like an assistant to us that students can access right away.”
