Well I was out on Monday because I was under the weather. If I'd had any appointments I would have sucked it up and gone into work but my schedule was clear.
Tuesday, October 20th
I get into work to find out that not only are the phones, which haven't been working since last Friday, still aren't working but some sort of update to our IEP program has had people twiddling their thumbs since yesterday and still has us down today. Its a good thing I was out on Monday. I went through emails and voice mails. I learned that I had to examine some new charts that the monitors will be looking at before turning them in to my boss.
Since the phones weren't working, I went over to the high school to make some phone calls. All three phone calls ended up going to voice mail. Sigh. I then went back to the office and wrote up a letter to send to one of the targets of my phone calls. I'm trying to arrange a meeting with the parents of a new classified student because he is drowning in his current academic placement and something needs to be done. So I finish that letter and drop it in the outgoing mail.
Then I begin spending some quality time with those charts and meet with the transition coordinator about our having a pre-monitor pow-wow with the high school principal. Since the high school principal was absent today we have to find another day to meet with him. Then its lunch and more paperwork and chart review.
Then it was time for a middle school/high school teacher meeting. Of course the major topic of discussion was monitoring. We also discussed progress reports and a number of issues with our IEP software, and that ended the day.
Wednesday, October 21st
Counseling Day! I met with a number of students today. There have been a number of female students that don't feel comfortable meeting with a male counselor. Often this is because they don't feel comfortable talking about boy troubles or other personal issues with a male. If this were private counseling, they would be able to choose the gender of their counselor. I try to be sensitive to this with any female students on my caseload and if it is too much of a barrier to counseling, I try to make arrangements. Today, I meet with two female students on my counseling caseload that I didn't have last year. They were both fine with meeting with me. I met with one male student who pretty much ran out of the room we were in, he was so eager to get out of counseling...well, you can't win them all.
Counseling on Wednesday is pretty good because I get to use one of the guidance secretary's computers because she is out on Wednesday. Today, both guidance secretaries were out. So while I was looking up student schedules on the computer, I also played secretary. I took several messages for one of the guidance counselors as several students came down trying to see her when she wasn't available. Ahhh, the glamorous life of a school psychologist.
So after several hours of counseling, it was back to the office. I stopped off to help one of my coworkers go through their monitoring charts and then it was lunch. After lunch, I played a few more rounds of phone tag with parent and ended up getting two of the parents. I finished reviewing charts...at least until I'm given more names to review. I met with another case manager and the staff from the alternative school that shares our offices about one of the students that we have a meeting with on Friday. This student has already lost credit for the school year due to poor of attendance. This is a student that I strongly advocated retaining last year but I didn't get to make the final decision. Perhaps if this lesson had been taught last year we wouldn't be going through this now. But who knows...we'd probably be in the same boat now. And that was that.
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