Alongside is "an App to Catch Kids Who Are Slipping Through the Cracks"
Fredericksburg City Public Schools is using the mental health support app Alongside this year. It has an AI component, but is not an open-ended social companion bot.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele
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.’”
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”