Blog-Fading...
Well, like Marty McFly, I've turned translucent as I faded from sight and the few people who read this thing have probably gone away. Although, I'm amazed that I actually picked up one new follower in the past week. While it may look like two new followers, one of them is actually me. I accidently ended up following my own blog in an attempt to do something else. Now I have to figure out how to un-follow myself.
Anyway, thanks to a friend that I haven't seen or heard from in ages and who has been reading my blog without my knowledge, I've decided to get back into this. As I noted below, I stopped writing my blog due to some personal issues that have been putting me through a wringer. Those issues are still ongoing so there will likely be periods of time that I skip. I'm going to try to use this as a hobby.
So what I'm trying to say is I'm back for as long as I can be. So what can you expect? Well, I'm going to do this post now which will include a bit of "diary" stuff. Then I will probably disappeared for another week or two. Then come September, when schools all over New Jersey start up and the faculty and staff have their first day, all bright eyed,bushy tailed, and eager to start the school year, I'll start with regular posts.
So without further adieu...
The End of the 2009-10 School Year & What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Work Wise)
When I last left off, I was in the middle of IEP season. Depending on the sort of district you work in, you may have IEPs scattered throughout the school year but the two districts that I have worked in have had the trend of once January passes, IEPs begin in earnest. Things were going along well enough. I had IEPs scheduled for March and then I got sick. This had the impact of causing me to be out of work for several day and causing me to have to cancel two days of meetings. Now that was bad because that meant I would have to reschedule about 10 or 11 meetings. Spring break also got in the way. So more lost days that I couldn't do anything. Just before spring break, I got some very bad news.
This bad new impacted the rest of the school year. I had to schedule IEPs for days that I knew I was going to be in but this is hard to do because, by the law, you have to give 15 calendar days notice of a meeting to the parents. This was hard to do because I didn't know where I was going to be in 15 days. So I had to put off a lot of stuff. The end result was that I was still doing IEP meetings in June, right up until a few days before the school year ended. The majority of my coworkers were done with their IEPs by the end of May and just finishing off the paperwork so that they could go away for the summer worry free. Such was not my fate.
So now we reach the end of the school year. So if you aren't a school psychologist, you might be wondering how things work for the summer time because the legal timeline for referrals does not stop just because everyone has gone home for the summer. Once someone has been referred to the child study team, we have 20 days to have an initial referral conference where it is decided whether testing will occur or not. Then from that point, we have 90 days to complete the testing and have an eligibility meeting. For students in special education that have been referred for a re-evaluation, we have 60 days to complete the re-evaluation and have an eligibility meeting. In addition to this, there are often issues that come up during the summer that requires someone attention since coordinating things between the district and out of district placements is a colossal task.
So what do districts do. That depends on the district.
Option #1: Several child study team positions may actually be 11 or 12 month positions which mean those staff members actually work during the summer and get a certain amount of vacation time during the summer. This has the benefit of ensuring some continuity of care since the staff may know what is going on from the rest of the school year.
Option #2: Hire staff within the child study team to work the summer on a per hour, per diem or per case basis. Again, this has the benefit of continuity of care. The only real downside to this is a financial one and that is really only if you care about it: the money you are paid doesn't go toward your pension. But this is a contractual thing and I have even heard that some people that are hired on as an 11 or 12 month position may have some sort of stipulation in the teacher contract that the pay from working in the summer doesn't go toward the pension.
Option #3: Outsource the summer work. Particularly the evaluations. The particular county educational commissions have school psychologists, social workers, and LDTCs that do evaluations. They are hired on a per case basis. My district has used them during the school year when we don't have someone that can do the evaluation in a particular language. They do the assessments during the summer. The danger with this is one that has started rearing its head again. Just like outsourcing food and janitorial services, some district have looked at outsourcing child study teams. There is a rumor that a town in Monmouth county is doing that this coming school year. Most of their child study team has been RIFfed (Reduction in Force for folks at home; or just fired; RIFfing is the easiest way to eliminate tenured staff). I heard about this when I was training to be a school psychologist. It has been tried before and with budget issues in New Jersey, it is coming up again.
My district does a combination of #2 and #3. I took part in option #2 last year but not this year due to the aforementioned problems. So this left me with having to do my IEPs at home during the summer which, thanks to the miracles of modern computing, I was able to do. But working from home stinks with a capital "inks." With a young child at home, who doesn't nap, it is hard to get work done. And then there is the lure of all the things you would rather be doing.
I did get my paperwork done eventually. And I went to work for two days to print out the IEPs and put them together with the paperwork from the meetings.
And as far is work is concerned, that is how I spent my summer vacation. While the extra money from working during the summer would have been nice, it was really necessary for me to stay home this summer and I don't regret it for a moment. The last time I was home for the summer was during undergrad.
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