I spend half my time tuning up and the other half playing out of tune. So today was the day I was tuning up.
I get to work and immediately begin photocopying some IEPs. When I check my voicemail I get information about the student that has been trying to register in the district. I find out that the file is still missing several things before the student may finally be registered. I call the parent's cell phone number and leave a message detailing what they need to do and who to contact and to give me a call if they have any questions. Then I send out an invitation letter to an initial referral conference. Following that, I begin to go through our IEP program and look at each of my student's IEPs so that I can print out the modifications/accommodations page for the regular education teachers. Once those are printed out, I head to the copier and make a sufficient number of copies. Then I take some time to get them organized.
Its at this point that I finally encounter my office mate for more that a minute. She asks me what I'm doing and when she hears the progress I've made, she gets miffed. She's fallen behind me for a change. I explain to her that I've had two previous years to get a system going for myself while this is really her year starting the school year. This does nothing to reduce her miffedness.
She still isn't able to get to this work because she has a social history to complete and she is looking for a place to meet with the parent. I tell her to use our office since I'm heading over to the school. A short time later, I'm driving over to the school. On the way, I stop at the high school to see if I can obtain a copy of the master schedule so I can see when teachers have their preps and such. I won't necessarily need it much this year since I'm stationed in an elementary school but I need it for the initial planning meeting that I have coming up on Thursday, and since I had my shoes on, as my father would say, I tell the high school CST staff that I'll bring back copies for them. I get to the guidance office and meet the new secretary. I don't accomplish my goal because the master schedule has some changes that need to be made. I decide that I'll email the secretary to see if I can get it emailed to me once the changes have been made. Well, off to the elementary school.
I get to the CST office in the school. And let me stop there for a second. Depending on how child study team members are placed in a district, you may find space at a premium. Not having a "place" is more the norm when you are a child study team person. If I count my internship site, I have technically worked in three districts.
In my internship site, the child study teams were based in the schools they worked in for the most part. The high school CST had an office all their own but it was one small room with three desks. If they wanted to test, they needed to either use the conference room in guidance (which usually had something going on in it) or a small room in the nurse's office or borrow the office of an absent guidance counselor. For the purpose of holding IEP meetings, we would have to reserve the guidance conference room ahead of time. During the summer time, they had access to any spot in the building that didn't have maintenance people cleaning it. I've heard that since the remodeling of the high school, the child study team now has their own suite of offices which include a place to test. Good for them.
In my first (paying) school district, each CST member had their own office. While offices varied in size, most of our offices were just big enough to test in and I would push my office to the limit and cram people in there for IEP meetings. But at least I didn't have to worry about trying to find space. At times, it was standing room only. The benefit to this was it led to meetings ending sooner as it became uncomfortably warm or played on people's claustrophobia. Just kidding.
In my current district, conditions change depending on the school you're assigned. During my first two years in middle and high school, again, space was at a premium. There were conference rooms in the guidance offices of the middle and high school but they were often booked. So that made trying to find space to test or have counseling difficulty. And then, even if you had reserved a space, there were often times I would get over there and find that my reservation had been overrun by someone else. Testing was also an issue but the CST building was close enough to the high school and middle school (less than a block away) that it was often easier just to bring the student back to that building and either test in your office (if you were one of the lucky few to have your own office) or find a little cubby hole to test in.
Now let us jump back to the present. The school that I am currently assigned to is a rarity. The child study team has their own office and there are additional rooms that the speech and Wilson reading teachers use that we are able to use on the days that they aren't there. So that means I have a space to keep my stuff on the days that I am at the school and I don't have to feel like a vagabond.
So the point I'm trying to get at is if you are going into this field be prepared to feel like an interloper in most of the places that you go to. Try to find out which rooms are free during what periods. Try to learn if there are little used places. I've held counseling and testing sessions in the room where the textbooks are stored. Don't be too proud when you need space to get your job done. Sometimes these space restrictions may be done by controlling administrators but it is usually just a matter of every available space being in use and no way to add more.
So once I reach my office, after getting an incredibly awesome parking spot, I unpack the IEPs and the mod sheets and get them organized. While I have great office space here, the parking is the real downside. There have been several occasions where I've thought it would be better for me to walk the one mile from the office to the school than to spend the time looking for a parking space and then walking two or three blocks to the school.
Then I not only go through my IEPs but my office mate's as well and compile a quick list of related services. I do this because earlier in the day the speech therapists asked for a list of the kids that have speech since everyone knows that the IEP program is not (yet) the most reliable place to access that information. When I check what I get from my quick scan of the physical IEPs and compare it to the information that is on my case load list from the IEP program, there are quite a few missing. I do a few more random things and discover that I can't really do much more since I still don't have computer access at the school. So I leave the school and return to my office. Only I can't return to my office because the social history is still going on which is unusual. My office mate is usually done with her interviews in about an hour.
So I try to get what I can done, which isn't much. I visit the speech people and attempt to install a scoring software program on their computer but neither of us have administrative rights. Following that, I head back upstairs and see that my coworker is finished and I sit down and begin to work. If my office mate was annoyed before, she is now in the angry range and doesn't even want to speak to me.
Lunch comes and goes.
After lunch I figure out how to make a report to pull information from our IEP program. This helps me make two spread sheets which assist in making file labels and getting an accurate report of related services. When I not only do this for myself but my office mate, this seems to alleviate some of the stress she was experiencing. Although she is mad that I learn how to do this today and not yesterday, when she spent 45 minutes writing file labels by hand. I chide her for her impatience.
Around this time, our regular tech guy comes around. He is the one that trusts me enough to give me administrative rights on my computer. Sort of like Andy Griffith giving Barney Fife that one bullet to put in his gun and hoping he doesn't shoot himself in the foot with it. Honestly though, I don't mess with things that I don't understand. It is just such a time saver to be able to install my scoring software without having to wait for them to come over. And to be honest, it saves him time from having to come over just to log on as an admin and hit install.
I mention my computer quandary at the school and ask him if there is a way for me to be able to access the files in my office from the school since my files are also on a server. He does me one better and gives me a way to log onto my office desktop from the other school. In my continuing act of kindness and fair play with my office mate, I ask him to arrange the same thing for her.
Following this, I discover that the adjustments that were made to my desktop to achieve this computing feat may have done something to my email. And of course my tech friend has left the building by the time I discover this. My theory is that it has something to do with the proxy server IP but I'm only willing to theorize and not test it out. Remember the one bullet I mentioned (in comedy, that is referred to as a call back).
And please, let's not get alarmed about the mentioning of a gun and bullet in a school related blog. Context, people, context.
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