School buses line up outside of The Academy @ Shawnee on the first day of school for Jefferson County Public Schools.(J. Tyler Franklin / LPM)In February 2025, facing growing concern about student mental health and absenteeism, the Jefferson County Board of Education approved a contract top distric t staff hoped would help.In exchange for $291,690, online healthcare provider Hazel Health would — at no cost to families — provide virtual behavioral assessments and therapy sessions for more than 19,000 students in schools that serve a high share of low-income households. According to the contract, JCPS staff believed Hazel Health would “reduce truancy related illness, increase retention, and improve overall academic performance of its students.”It didn’t work out.Records obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting show that by the end of the agreement in June 2026, the company provided therapy to just six JCPS students.School-based mental health practitioners that had access to Hazel Health said they aren’t surprised so few students accessed the program. Schools struggled to find staff to supervise students during sessions, they said. Or parents found the sign-up process hard to navigate. One said the contract amounted to “financial waste.”The board approved the contract with Hazel Health as the district was hurdling toward a massive $188 million deficit, revealed months later under new leadership. To close the spending gap, current JCPS Superintendent Brian Yearwood reduced school budgets, leading some to slash staff and programs. In January, Yearwood proposed cutting all but 70 of the district’s mental health practitioners, only to reverse course after public outcry.Tracey Roberts, president of the Mental Health Practitioner Caucus for the Jefferson County Teachers Association, said mental health practitioners (MHPs) spend their days whirling throughout the school building. They pull kids out for counseling, help de-escalate outbursts, and meet with principals and counselors to strategize ways to boost attendance and curb behavioral disruptions.On hearing that only six students accessed Hazel Health, Roberts expressed frustration.“To hear that, and then to have been made to feel that our salaries — which aren't much — were the breaking point of JCPS is quite interesting,” Roberts told KyCIR.“How many MHPs could we have hired and put in those schools for the amount of that contract?” Roberts said.The base pay for a mental health practitioner with a bachelor’s degree is around $50,000 a year.JCPS did not renew the contract with Hazel Health due to “a number of technical and customer-service challenges,” said JCPS spokesperson Barnard Baker. He said former JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio spearheaded the effort to bring Hazel Health to the district, despite concerns raised about implementation.Pollio retired at the end of June 2025. He did not respond to a request for comment.Hazel Health is one of 663 ed tech products approved for use in Jefferson County Public Schools, according to a recent KyCIR report. A KyCIR analysis of JCPS expenditures shows the district has spent at least $41 million on software alone since the 2022-2023 school year.That KyCIR report found JCPS allows private companies to collect and process a wide range of student information, usually under a standard data privacy agreement that affords relatively strong legal protections for student data. However, records show JCPS used a different agreement with Hazel Health, raising concerns for some about whether JCPS adequately protected kids’ sensitive mental health information.Last year, a group of Illinois parents pushed the Chicago Board of Education to end its contract with Hazel Health over fears the platform was monetizing students’ personal health information, allegedly in violation of state privacy protections for children.$292,000 — 6 kidsHazel Health is a for-profit, venture-backed company headquartered in Texas. When the company was first founded in 2015, it focused on physical telehealth, but expanded into therapy and mental health in 2021. The company’s footprint ballooned as school districts and states rushed to spend billions in federal pandemic relief funding and address growing mental health issues among young people. Hazel Health says it has served more than 5 million students in over 200 school districts, including some of the nation’s biggest: Los Angeles Unified School District, Clark County Schools in Nevada and Chicago Public Schools.JCPS signed on with Hazel Health in February 2025 in hopes that meeting students’ mental health needs at school could boost attendance. In the years after the pandemic, more than a third of JCPS students were chronically absent, which many attributed to increased anxiety among young people. According to Hazel Health’s contract with JCPS, the company was to provide telehealth services to 33 schools. Therapy sessions could take place at school or at the student’s home, but Hazel Health would first need parental consent.Records obtained by KyCIR show that by the end of the contract, school staff referred 17 students to Hazel Health — mostly for anxiety. Just six ended up completing a therapy session. Overall, Hazel Health provided 43 therapy sessions over the term of the contract. Most of the sessions took place in-home, and two were at school. The records show staff at eight schools referred students to Hazel Health. Several referred one or two students and never tried again. Staff at the now-shuttered King Elementary School in Shawnee referred six students, the most of any school.Danielle Ruffin, a mental health practitioner at McFerran Preparatory Academy, said she and another staff member referred two students to Hazel Health, but neither ended up receiving services because their parents had trouble completing the paperwork.As the district introduced Hazel Health, Ruffin and another mental-health practitioner who spoke to KyCIR said they had questions: How would staff ensure the students weren’t missing core instructional time? Who would supervise the student during the therapy sessions? And would the student feel at ease with a staff member or parent looking over their shoulder during therapy?“[T]he services were not in line with what the children really needed,” Ruffin said. She preferred to refer kids to the licensed therapists who visit the school several days a week for in-person sessions. JCPS also has a list of vetted therapists staff can refer kids to outside of school hours, Ruffin said.Asked why only six students were served, Baker, the JCPS spokesperson, said in an email that one of the primary challenges was finding a school staff member to supervise a student during the telehealth visit. In a statement, a Hazel Health spokesperson acknowledged, “a number of unanticipated logistical barriers.”Those barriers led the Jefferson County Board of Education to approve a no-cost extension to Hazel Health’s contract in December 2025 through June 2026. The board did not renew the contract for the following school year.Records show JCPS had an unnamed third party on deck to extend Hazel Health services to an additional 46,500 students, which would have resulted in a donation to the district of nearly $700,000.Baker declined to name the third party, and said the donation never materialized.In other school systems, Hazel Health partnered with insurance giant UnitedHealthcare to expand online therapy services, including in Chicago Public Schools and Miami-Dade County Schools. A 2024 release from Hazel Health says the company planned to work with UnitedHealthcare to bring virtual mental health services to students in 14 states.Baker, however, said JCPS had “no involvement” with UnitedHealthcare.How did Hazel Health use students’ data?In order to get the free online therapy services for their children, parents had to give Hazel Health something too: permission for the company to use their child’s personally identifiable health information “for the development and improvement of software, hardware, and related tools[.]”It’s one of several “really worrisome” provisions in the parental consent form families had to sign to receive mental health services from Hazel Health, said Cassie Creswell, cochair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. That’s a national group that advocates for protecting student data from commercial exploitation.The form requires parents to acknowledge their child’s personal health information “may not be secure and may be illegally accessed by a third party.” And it requires parents and guardians to allow Hazel Health to use students’ personally identifiable mental health data for a wide range of purposes, including “business operations,” which Creswell said was far too broad.“It could be developing new software. It could mean developing statistical models that you will then use to have a Gen-AI therapy bot,” she said.Creswell spearheaded the effort that led to the Chicago Board of Education ending its no-cost contract with Hazel Health earlier this year. Parent and community groups sent letters to the board requesting they renegotiate Hazel Health’s contract with stronger privacy protections, or end it. Creswell said she was especially concerned by Hazel Health’s 2025 acquisition of an AI-backed telehealth company Little Otter, whose cofounder has ties to Palantir.Hazel Health also acquired BeMe Health last year to offer a youth mental health app that tracks mood and has a chat feature.In an email, a spokesperson said Hazel Health “has never had a business relationship or agreement with Palantir,” and that no JCPS student data has been used to train AI models.“More broadly, Hazel Health does not use patient data to train AI models and has not trained any AI models of its own,” the spokesperson wrote. Hazel Health does use aggregated patient information, the company said, “for research and product improvement.”In Hazel Health’s notice of privacy practices, the company says it can use a patient’s personal health information “to develop, test, and validate analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)tools that support clinical decision-making, care coordination, and operational efficiency.”Asked about the privacy notice, the spokesperson said the language “was included proactively to provide transparency and account for potential uses of AI to support healthcare operations.”“Any such use remains subject to HIPAA and other applicable privacy protections,” the statement said.The broad discretion Hazel Health requires parents to give in the release form stands in contrast to the data privacy agreement JCPS usually requires tech companies to sign, which has specific guidelines for data usage, clear definitions, a list of data items to be collected and security and data breach protocols. In Hazel Health’s case, JCPS allowed the company to use its own DPA, on the condition that the company got parental consent.“Our data protections are understandably more stringent in situations where the District has made the decision to share data, rather than the parent,” said Baker, the JCPS spokesperson.KyCIR found Hazel Health signed a version of the more restrictive DPA JCPS usually uses in at least one other district.One privacy expert, privacy consultant Jim Siegl, said JCPS was right not to use its standard DPA because it is designed to protect data covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Data collected by Hazel Health would be protected under a different federal law – the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Siegl said. Siegl was part of the national working group that designed the model agreement JCPS usually uses.In a statement, a Hazel Health spokesperson said information that originates with the school district is protected by FERPA, and information collected during clinical sessions is protected by HIPAA.Creswell disagreed. She said all student data collected or created by Hazel should be protected under FERPA.“When the school has a contractual relationship with that provider and they are paying the bills for it, then they are clearly responsible for what that provider is doing,” Creswell said, noting that parents have expectations, for example, that when they sign a field trip form, that the school has vetted the transportation provider.“It's the school's job to make sure the bus company is safe, right? And, you know, is using licensed drivers and the wheels aren't going to fall off,” she said.She noted that Hazel Health is facing headwinds now that COVID relief funding has dried up, possibly making the tech company, and the student data it collected, vulnerable to acquisition by another firm.She was glad to hear that only six JCPS students accessed the service.“Six families,” Creswell said, “that need to go ask Hazel to immediately delete their data and show them some proof that it's been destroyed.” ...read more read less