Thank you for your comment, Sarah

I just read Sarah's post below and, while I think I've discovered the trick to commenting, I figure I'll post my answer here.

Thank you for your kind words and good luck with your application. I don't know what state you are in so your experience as a school psychologist may vary. I should probably put something in my tagline at the top to explain that I'm a school psychologist in New Jersey so your individual experience may vary.

In NJ, child study team members serve two functions. One is the our specialty (school psychologist, learning consultant, school social worker) and the other is case manager. In other states, it changes. In New York, school psychologists do all the testing, both educational and psychological, while LDs spend much more time in the classroom. In other states, a school psychologist will do the testing while the special education teacher holds the IEP meetings and does the paperwork.

In Jersey, we do both, which is why in one of my posts, I mentioned that I often do more case management stuff than actually being a psychologist.

This is my 5th year as a school psychologist. I've worked in two school districts (three if you count my intership). One for three years, which I was glad to leave, and this is my second year in my current district. Prior to this, I worked for 11 years in the adult behavioral healthcare. I started as a residence counselor in an adult psychiatric group home; then went on to work as a case manager with adults with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI, as the acronym goes) in a psychiatric outreach program, which provided all the services of a psychiatric hosptial in an urban setting, and I eventually became the team leader for the treatment team I started on, which was the biggest mistake of my life. The only way out of that was to switch careers or to move into an even more administrative role which is not my strong suit.

Without trying to sound arrogant, I am much better with positions that provide me with "client" contact and make use of my clinical skills, and to stay in my previous field would have meant the only way to move up was to lose the one thing I was good at. And I don't like to be the boss.

The other problem was that the program I worked for had a saying, "PACT is for life." While I sometimes wondered whose life, it really was supposed to mean that our program was available for a person as long as they needed it. So when I left there after 7+ years, there were still some clients with us that were there when I started. Which can be very disheartening and leads to high burnout.

I started the school psych program because I needed a change. I had also gotten married and being on-call 24/7 is not something that I wanted to continue in my married life. I had noticed that a large number of our clients had been special education students when they had been in school. So I thought that maybe if I could get to them a little bit younger, it would help them avoid have multiple hospitalizations over the course of their adulthood. I had adult clients that had spent years in psychiatric facilities that were now trying to start their life over. It was pretty damn rough for them.

I still don't know how it has played out as far as helping some of the kids end up in psych hospitals. But as far as burnout is concerned, it is much better for me because I'm not the boss and eventually, the student will graduate or age out so my clientele will change on a fairly regular basis.

So that is the awfully long winded story of how I got into school psychology.