The Road to Hell...

As I stated in my first post, it was my intention to do a post a day...well so much for that this week. Ah well. Here is the week in a nutshell.

Tuesday
After a three day weekend, it was like I never left. There were a number of paperwork and organizational issues to take care of which is nothing unusual. Then the big one came: a risk assessment. A student had spoken about killing herself. I went over and met with the student, guidance counselor, the district counselor, and the guidance counselor's intern. It was very crowded in the very small office. In the end, it was determined that the student needed to be screened at a local psychiatric screening center for a number of reasons that are too confidential to place on a blog. The whole situation was made more murky due to a question of guardianship.

Wednesday
I got a chance to meet with students that have counseling in their IEP. Some were the same students that I had seen last year. Some were new. Counseling in a school is not psychotherapy, although many teachers and other school staff think that it is or should be.

Following this, I had to make final arrangements for a meeting with some teachers on Thursday. Arrangements included making sure one of the teachers, who had a class scheduled the period of the meeting, was able to send her students to another class. After that it was back to my office for a quick lunch before a student showed up for testing.

Testing: I completed the psychological evaluation. It was composed of a cognitive assessment, some projective drawings, a behavior rating scale, visual motor coordination test, and an interview.

This was the one day of the week that the majority of the work was actually related to being a school psychologist and not a case manager.

Thursday
I got into work and had a voice mail message from a guidance counselor that a student had seen her during back to school night and had asked her to change a class to another period because the atmosphere in the class was too distracting. The guidance counselor was going to change the class from period 4 to period 1. I checked the high school master schedule to make sure that the class was an in-class support teacher and discovered that not only wasn't the period 1 class supported but neither was the class that he was currently assigned. Crap.

I took a closer look because a similar issue had occurred with another class about two weeks before. And I found that not only was this student in an unsupported class but so was another student. Then I got a sinking feeling. I called one of my co-workers who is deeply involved in scheduling the special education high school students. She stated looking at the various sections of this subject (physical science; I don't know why I'm being so mysterious about it) and discovered that 5 other students were impacted in the same way. Double crap.

We then started looking other courses and student schedules. One of my students who was supposed to have all in-class support classes wasn't in any in-class support classes. Then we discovered that it wasn't just freshmen (my caseload). This impacted students across the grades, mostly in the sciences. So the high school case managers had to check each students schedules against the services in the IEPs. This took a fair amount of time and raised the blood pressure of everyone involved because, thanks to computers, we were able to look at when the classes were changed from in-class support classes to unsupported classes. Without casting blame, the only explanation that we were able to come up with was that more sections of certain subjects were created and the scheduling program was allowed to balance the class numbers but no one ever looked to see if special education students were where they should be when it was over. And since it was guidance that created the new sections and did the redistribution of students...And that is one of those situations that leads to the Us vs. Them feelings.

In the midst of this, one of us gets a call that there is a student in crisis over at the high school and since I'm the school psychologist, off I go. It didn't end in a referral to the psych screener but it did involved about an hour and a half of counseling and working on coping skills. It was a textbook case of someone in the process of developing a generalized anxiety disorder. Fortunately the student was about to enter outside treatment and, in the end, the student was able to return to class for the rest of the day, which was good because I was concerned that this might lead to school avoidance.

I made it back in time to be a part of the second half of a conference call with the company that provides us with the special education information system. The district had just purchased the services of this company toward the end of the '07-'08 school year and there are still kinks in the system, particularly in having this system communicate with the school information system. It was a good meeting because we learned about some capabilities of the program that we didn't know about.

Then it was off to the meeting I mention under Wednesday. It involved the teachers of a particular student and to answer any concerns regarding that student. It is an involved case and a number of the teachers were passionate in their positions, which is a good thing. Especially since none of them seemed passionate for selfish reasons. I did spend about 40 minutes after the meeting debriefing one teacher who had been particularly heated.

Friday
The day started with the aftermath of the scheduling debacle from Thursday. All the schedules were corrected and we had to call the students down and give them their new schedules and explain the change. Some students were cool about, some didn't necessarily want the change. In the case of the latter, I told the students to speak with their parents and if they felt the same, the parents should give me a call. By the time this was done, it was time for the Friday staff meeting.

The theme of the meeting: monitoring of course. Following a brief discussion, we were broken down by school and told to review charts for monitoring. My group put together a list of names and then we split up to go through charts. And that is how the day ended.

See you next week.