Dear Anonymous Commenter

Anonymous Commenter left this comment in my first post:

I am reading your blog because I would like to be a school psychologist or a school social worker. I'm really not sure and I'm just researching. I am from NJ and currently work for DYFS and looking for a change.

First, thank you for reading my blog. Second, I do have a couple of pragmatic bits of information regarding the choice between becoming a school psychologist and becoming a school social worker. And I am speaking from a New Jersey point of view.

First is job availability: There are a lot of social workers out there and it is very hard to break into school social work. On the other hand, there has been a shortage of school psychologist. In either case, if you speak a second language, you increase your job options quite a bit. If your goal is to work in a school and you want to improve your chances of getting a school job, school psychology may be a better route.

If you want to work in a school but would also like to have a private practice, the social work is the way to go. With the educational specialist degree in school psychology, that will only allow you to work in a school setting or another clinical setting under someone else. Unless you go for the post-masters degree to become a licensed professional counselor (LPC), you can't have a private practice. And if you want to open a private practice and have a degree in psychology, you may as well go for a doctorate in psychology.

Another pragmatic thing to consider is payscale. If you aren't familiar with school payscales, they work on a step system, which you may be familiar with working for DYFS. Your pay is calculated based on your step and cross-referenced with a column indicating your level of education. In a school district, the usual breakdown for the columns are: bachelor, masters, masters +30 credits, and doctorate. Some districts have a few more categories, like bachelors +30 but that is rare.

So why does this matter? Because a social work program awards you with a masters degree after 60+ credits while someone in a school psych program usually gets awarded their masters after 36 credits or so and then goes on to get the educational specialist certificate after another 30 credits. So the school psychologist and the school social worker may have about the same number of credits to their name but because the school psych program awards a masters at 36ish and then another certificate 30+credits later, school psychologists end up one more column over on the payscale which may be the difference of a couple of thousands dollars more when negotiating salary.

Now you may think that if MA+30 is so much better than MA then a doctorate must be even better. Not really. At the most, maybe a thousand dollars difference between MA+30 and Ph. D. Being a school psychologist with a doctorate doesn't really pay off in a school district, except for the prestige of being Doctor.

Beyond the practical concerns of choosing, there are definitely other things to look at as well. I like being a school psychologist because I get to play with a lot of fiddly bits. I have my cognitive assessments, projective assessments, behavioral rating surveys, visual motor integration tests. I get to play with a lot of toys. But if you read my blog, you will get to see just how often I get to play with my toys. The majority of my time is taken up with case management and being in DYFS, you are certainly familiar with that. I also get to do counseling.

School social workers are in the same boat with the case management and the counseling. They do their social assessments but don't get to play with the fiddly bits. And I'm not trying to say that's a bad thing, I just enjoy my toys.

As far as assessments are concerned, LDTC do the most assessments followed by school psychologists and then school social workers. The reasons being that a students academic progress is more likely to change than their cognitive ability (at least theoretically, from the trenches, I'm not so sure but that is a discussion for a later date) while unless a student's family life experiences a great deal of upheaval, very little is likely to change in their social history.

Its hard not to sound bias when I type this out because I enjoy being a school psychologist. If I didn't go into school psychology, I probably would have gone for a doctorate in clinical psychology. It is hard to explain my reasons for that without coming across as a jerk so I'll leave it be. I hope I have at least provide some information for you to consider.