I could say that nothing really interesting happened on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and I wouldn't be lying, but that isn't the real reason I didn't post. In all honesty, I just flaked due to the prospect of a four day weekend and the need to finish up season one of Leverage before it had to go back to the library.
Monday was another story altogether. It started off normal enough. I had to ask a coworker to cover for me at an initial referral conference because I had misread an email and accidentally rescheduled one of my own re-evaluation conferences for a time that was too close to cover both. And it was a good thing I did because the parents of that afternoon meeting were extremely punctual. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So after I got another psych to cover for me, I started packing up my stuff to go to the school with the expectation that I would have several hours to do paperwork and perhaps get a little counseling done. As fate would have it, that was not to be. About 10 minutes after my arrival at the school, I get a phone call from my boss to go to another school for a risk assessment.
The situation was interesting. The triggering incident didn't even happen in school. It happened the day before at the student's home. The student had gotten into an altercation with a sibling. After the altercation, the student had gotten a weapon with the thought to do harm to the sibling but didn't because the parent had intervened. No one was hurt.
The thing that was interesting was that neither the parent nor the student could keep the story straight. Details of the story kept changing. The only constant was that the student had gotten a weapon. Since this was the first time something like this had happened, I recommended the student follow up outside the school to determine if they were a danger to themselves or others. At the time of my interview, I didn't think the student was a danger to harm themselves or anyone else. And from my experience with mental health screening, I'm fairly certain that a screener isn't going to think so either. So my decision was partly a "cover my bases" thing but not completely.
I felt that the behavior indicated an escalation in behavior. In the world of siblings, arguments and fighting are pretty common place. Even in the world of just being boys, if my childhood was any indication, I would have a fight with my best friend. The type where we would end up rolling around on the ground wrestling each other because we were upset. Then go into our respective houses, angry. Then five minutes later, we would call each other up on the phone and say, "Wanna go out and play?"
But when something standard like a sibling fight over standard stuff occurs and the reaction is to get a weapon with the thought of doing bodily harm then something has changed and it needs to be looked at.
Now the other thought that occurs to me with this is: since the student is already connected to services outside of the school, why wasn't this brought to those service providers attention? Why come to the school?
I have some thoughts on that too. Or rhetorical questions, actually. Is the role of the school in the community changing? Should schools become a mental health resource? I know that there have been some school districts that have had mental health centers as part of their district, even having such centers open after school hours. I don't know how I feel about that. Part of me thinks that there does need to be some sort of boundary and definition of roles. Or, at least if these boundaries are going to be blurred then administration needs a better understanding of what is being taken on.
After this my morning went on fairly smoothly. My meeting arrived, as did the parents. As I said, it was a re-evaluation planning meeting. With this we reviewed the previous testing. For anyone reading this that isn't a school psychologist and is thinking of becoming one then consider this: Are you able to tell someone bad news? Or tell them news that will be hard for them to hear? That may even make them cry?
It was one of those situations. Unless you have been with the family since the student was first found eligible, you really don't know just how much the parents know until you talk about it with them. Even then you don't know how much the parents may understand.
This student had cognitive limitations and I had to discuss this with them and I also started discussing working on a program that is going to meet the needs of the student and prepare them for life outside of school. It could have gone one of two ones: the parents could have left feeling that I was placing a limitation on their child or they could have left feeling that we were going to develop a plan that would help the student meet their potential. I hope it was the latter. I know how angry I would be as a parent if I felt someone that doesn't know me or my son was putting a limitation on what my child could do.
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