Catching Up

I know I said that I wasn't going to post on Monday or Tuesday since I had some personal business to attend to on those days.  Technically I'm actually sticking with what I said since I didn't post on either of those days but some of my plans changed on Monday and I actually went to work for half the day.

On Monday, I really didn't get to do much of anything that I had planned.  I ended up in a parent meeting for a coworker that ended shortly due to the parent being unhappy with what was being said.  The parent left, threatening to see us in court.  My one interesting interaction was with the case manager of an out of district placement.  One of my students attends this placement.  They were actually placed there by the district.  It is a very therapeutic placement.  So something happened with my student where they had not attended in several days and I got a 5 day letter.  So I was following up on it.  I had left a message for the mother and hadn't received a callback and I called the case manager.  The case manager said that she couldn't tell me anything about what had happened due to HIPAA laws.  I found this very unusual.  Considering that we are responsible for the student's educational program and are the ones providing the payment then some incident that leads to the student not being in that program would seem to me to be fair game for sharing information.  It would seem odd that we would need HIPAA release papers signed to share the information with us.  Or at least odd that that isn't standard practice.

On the other hand, this placement doesn't just receive students from school districts.  They have a residential component to their program and receive DYFS placements and referrals from non-educational agencies.  So that might be where the difference comes in and that extra layer of confidential arises.  Still, this is the first time I've encountered this.

So that pretty much ended my Monday.

I returned to work today to find that I had to reschedule a re-evaluation planning meeting for the second time because the rescheduled time was next week when the teachers had half-days.  So I rescheduled that.  I also called a parent to find out if they had met with a neurologist for an appointment, just to see if I would have to harass the neurologist to get the report.  The parent told me that the appointment was scheduled for next week.

I was also a little trapped at my office today.  I didn't have my work keys with me, so I was nervous about going anywhere and getting locked out.  So I stayed in the office and did the follow up work that I mentioned.  Also, I finally spoke with the parent of the out of district student and got the information.  This resulted in speaking with my director and making a follow up call to find out information about education for the student while they are not attending the out of district placement.

I also worked on the report of one of the three psychological evaluations that I completed last week.  The good news is that I am almost done with that report.

Finally, I attended an eligibility conference and worked on calming the parent who became upset when reading the section of where I reported the results of the BASC-2.  This is the problem with the law that says that we must provide the parents with copies of our reports 10 days prior to the eligibility meeting.  As much as you may try to avoid using the jargon of the profession in a report, and I have been taught and believe that you should try to avoid it as much as possible, when you report the names of scales, there is almost no avoiding it.  So you are sending out information that uses words like "depression" and "anxiety" and "hyperactivity" to people that don't know the instruments and whose understanding of such words are formed by popular culture.  Everyone has an idea of what "depression" is.  Just not what it may mean on the BASC-2.

When I think about it, I know there are somethings that I need to work out for my reports to try to avoid this in the future.  I just have to make the time to work that out.

Finally, I'm going to talk about what happens when your personal life begins to impact your professional life.  This is a particularly important topic for this profession and any helping profession.  Again, I'm not going to go into too much detail since this blog has been about the profession.

Someone very close to me is very sick.  This has placed a great deal of stress on me in my personal life and the days that I have taken off, such as Monday and Tuesday, have been related to the care of this person.  The situation and the stress related to the situation has made it difficult to focus at work, particularly when the situation originally arose toward the end of last school year.  This situation was the reason I didn't work during the summer.

At this point, I'm just going to say that in a helping profession you need to be aware of how your personal life impacts your professional life and how your stress level may make you more prone to acting in a rash manner.  You need to be aware of your triggers and insecurities so that you can guard against overreacting or not reacting when you should.

As time goes on, I can only see the stress of my situation increasing and I have to remain aware of how this is impacting me at work.