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Attendees of the Mountainland K-16 Alliance Counselor Conference are pictured Tuesday, March 10, 2026, at Utah Valley University in Orem.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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Keynote speaker Tyler Small speaks at the Mountainland K-16 Alliance Counselor Conference Tuesday, March 10, 2026, at Utah Valley University in Orem.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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School counselors play an integral role in the student experience at the grade school and college level, providing educational and employment resources as well as emotional support.

Sam Jarman, the executive director of the Mountainland K-16 Alliance, said counselors are heavily relied upon by the administrators of local schools to help meet the needs of the students and their families.

This can be an enormous responsibility because counselors have the highest adult to student ratio of any school position, assigned upward of 350 to 375 students at a time, according to Jarman.

So the Mountainland K-16 Alliance, a coalition of school districts and higher education leadership in Utah County and the Wasatch Back, offers support to school counselors through an annual Counselor Conference.

This year’s conference was held Tuesday at Utah Valley University. School counselors from Alpine School District, Provo School District, Nebo School District, Mountainland Technical College, UVU and more institutions attended workshops and listened to speakers on topics aimed at assisting their efforts to help students.

“We want to make sure that this is a conference that is designed for learning,” Jarman said. “We want our counselors to walk away with skills and tools that will enhance what they do on a daily basis.”

One focus of the 2026 conference was artificial intelligence. Closing keynote speaker Tyler Small gave the approximate 400 attendees strategies on how to incorporate AI into their work, and multiple breakout sessions discussed the idea further.

Jarman said one way AI can assist counselors is by helping write letters of recommendations for students applying to college, saving hours of time.

“AI can help you to create valid and correct letters of recommendation for these students, because your information comes from your school data,” he said. “And in many cases, that letter that’s written by AI could actually be more accurate and helpful for the student than if you took the time to write. And AI can write that for you in a matter of minutes.”

Other discussions Tuesday pertained to finding ways to help students stay in school. Amy Ewell, a CTE pathway coordinator for Mountainland Region, said classroom attendance has become an even bigger problem, and said one solution is to get students involved in career and technical education, or hands-on projects that will get kids excited to be a part of something.

“There was a study that came out several years ago that showed that students who can make a connection with at least one person in their school and have that connection — even in career and technical education — their level of hope and engagement tremendously increases, and it’s because they can see a future,” Ewell said.

The conference also serves as a networking event for counselors, where they can bounce ideas off one another and discuss what is working in each of their schools.

“There’s a lot of talking and networking to try and figure out, how do we do this? What resources do we need to make it better?” Ewell said. “Because counseling is a hard job, and it’s getting harder. It feels like the workload is maybe even getting greater for them.”

All these resources, Jarman said, are designed to help counselors be as prepared as possible to help students as they make school and life decisions.