The Road to Hell...

As I stated in my first post, it was my intention to do a post a day...well so much for that this week. Ah well. Here is the week in a nutshell.

Tuesday
After a three day weekend, it was like I never left. There were a number of paperwork and organizational issues to take care of which is nothing unusual. Then the big one came: a risk assessment. A student had spoken about killing herself. I went over and met with the student, guidance counselor, the district counselor, and the guidance counselor's intern. It was very crowded in the very small office. In the end, it was determined that the student needed to be screened at a local psychiatric screening center for a number of reasons that are too confidential to place on a blog. The whole situation was made more murky due to a question of guardianship.

Wednesday
I got a chance to meet with students that have counseling in their IEP. Some were the same students that I had seen last year. Some were new. Counseling in a school is not psychotherapy, although many teachers and other school staff think that it is or should be.

Following this, I had to make final arrangements for a meeting with some teachers on Thursday. Arrangements included making sure one of the teachers, who had a class scheduled the period of the meeting, was able to send her students to another class. After that it was back to my office for a quick lunch before a student showed up for testing.

Testing: I completed the psychological evaluation. It was composed of a cognitive assessment, some projective drawings, a behavior rating scale, visual motor coordination test, and an interview.

This was the one day of the week that the majority of the work was actually related to being a school psychologist and not a case manager.

Thursday
I got into work and had a voice mail message from a guidance counselor that a student had seen her during back to school night and had asked her to change a class to another period because the atmosphere in the class was too distracting. The guidance counselor was going to change the class from period 4 to period 1. I checked the high school master schedule to make sure that the class was an in-class support teacher and discovered that not only wasn't the period 1 class supported but neither was the class that he was currently assigned. Crap.

I took a closer look because a similar issue had occurred with another class about two weeks before. And I found that not only was this student in an unsupported class but so was another student. Then I got a sinking feeling. I called one of my co-workers who is deeply involved in scheduling the special education high school students. She stated looking at the various sections of this subject (physical science; I don't know why I'm being so mysterious about it) and discovered that 5 other students were impacted in the same way. Double crap.

We then started looking other courses and student schedules. One of my students who was supposed to have all in-class support classes wasn't in any in-class support classes. Then we discovered that it wasn't just freshmen (my caseload). This impacted students across the grades, mostly in the sciences. So the high school case managers had to check each students schedules against the services in the IEPs. This took a fair amount of time and raised the blood pressure of everyone involved because, thanks to computers, we were able to look at when the classes were changed from in-class support classes to unsupported classes. Without casting blame, the only explanation that we were able to come up with was that more sections of certain subjects were created and the scheduling program was allowed to balance the class numbers but no one ever looked to see if special education students were where they should be when it was over. And since it was guidance that created the new sections and did the redistribution of students...And that is one of those situations that leads to the Us vs. Them feelings.

In the midst of this, one of us gets a call that there is a student in crisis over at the high school and since I'm the school psychologist, off I go. It didn't end in a referral to the psych screener but it did involved about an hour and a half of counseling and working on coping skills. It was a textbook case of someone in the process of developing a generalized anxiety disorder. Fortunately the student was about to enter outside treatment and, in the end, the student was able to return to class for the rest of the day, which was good because I was concerned that this might lead to school avoidance.

I made it back in time to be a part of the second half of a conference call with the company that provides us with the special education information system. The district had just purchased the services of this company toward the end of the '07-'08 school year and there are still kinks in the system, particularly in having this system communicate with the school information system. It was a good meeting because we learned about some capabilities of the program that we didn't know about.

Then it was off to the meeting I mention under Wednesday. It involved the teachers of a particular student and to answer any concerns regarding that student. It is an involved case and a number of the teachers were passionate in their positions, which is a good thing. Especially since none of them seemed passionate for selfish reasons. I did spend about 40 minutes after the meeting debriefing one teacher who had been particularly heated.

Friday
The day started with the aftermath of the scheduling debacle from Thursday. All the schedules were corrected and we had to call the students down and give them their new schedules and explain the change. Some students were cool about, some didn't necessarily want the change. In the case of the latter, I told the students to speak with their parents and if they felt the same, the parents should give me a call. By the time this was done, it was time for the Friday staff meeting.

The theme of the meeting: monitoring of course. Following a brief discussion, we were broken down by school and told to review charts for monitoring. My group put together a list of names and then we split up to go through charts. And that is how the day ended.

See you next week.

First Post; Student Schedules; Staff Meeting

Well, this is my first post. As the description and "about me" thing says, I'm a school psychologist/case manager on a child study team. What this mean, if you are unfamiliar with this type of arrangement, is that I perform the duties of a school psychologist (psychological evaluations, risk assessments, and counseling) as well as overseeing the special education programs of a specific caseload of students. The latter part entails a large amount of paperwork, time, and redtape. IEPs, eligibility statements, etc. All the things they don't really teach you about in school psychology programs.

I know in other states the duties of a school psychologist varies. One of my new coworkers reported that in the state that she last worked, she largely did all the school psychologist stuff that I noted above but the case management duties were largely the responsibilities of the special education teacher. So if you think doing the duties under school psychologist would be cool but the duties of a case manager would be completely outweigh the coolness of the former then check your state regulations before going any further.

My overall plan for this blog is to do a post a day, not including weekend and holidays, and give a brief overview of what an average workday entails. I'm doing this to inform people about school psychology, as far as how it is done in a public school setting, and maybe this will inspire some people to enter the field or help them change their mind before they get too deep into the course work.

So onto today, Friday, September 25th. The Friday before one of the more loved things: a three day weekend. Well I had to go see a guidance counselor regarding one of my kids schedules. This is the after effect of something from the day before.

Yesterday, we learned that somehow, one of the sections of in-class resource math did not actually have any special education students while another section of the same subject had special education students but no in-class support teacher. (Now I know that to some I am using jargon so I'll give a brief explanation: in-class resource = a general education class with one general education teacher and one special education teacher to provide addition support and modifications). Along with this discovery came a second discovery that there was a single special education student that had been placed in a class that did not have an in-class support teacher even though the Individual Education Plan said that he was supposed to be in a class with that second teacher.

Now the how's and who's and "whose to blames" for this often leads to an Us (special education) vs. Them (regular education) thought process where Us generally thinks They don't understand and don't get it. While They see Us as a pain in the ass and that entire shifts have to be made to accommodate a single student. Both sides have their points and their unfounded points which I won't really get into.

Needless to say, my mission to the guidance counselor was one of those cases where mountains were moved (in this case put an additional student in several classes that were already filled to capacity) to satisfy the educational needs and education contract (which is what an IEP is, a contract between the student and/or his family detailing the services that the district is going to provide) of a single student.

Following this event, I returned to my office to continue to plot how I was going to screw with guidance even more...I mean to review the rest of my students' schedules to make sure they were all receiving the classes that they should be receiving according to their IEP.

Before I could complete that, it was time for our weekly staff meeting. This is just like any other staff meeting in any other field or area of work. If you have ever been to one, you know what they are like. And since I have worked in another industry, I can honestly say it is exactly like any other staff meeting you can imagine.

Our ongoing topic is that our department is due for state monitoring in the near future and we are in the process of doing an in-house audit of student records so that we may come through monitoring with as little bloodshed as possible. This took up the majority of our meeting. This was followed by a discussion of the technical problems we are having with our special education software package. Then an issue regarding the process of reporting suspected child abuse to our local child protective services. Finally an issue that nearly every school psychologist has to deal with: space.

The availability of space to perform our specific duties. How am I supposed to test a student when there isn't a space in the school or in my office building to actually sit privately with the student? Or provide counseling on a regular basis when I have to scramble to find a private closet to meet with a series of students for their contractually obligated allotment of counseling?

I could go on and on about this last bit but it would just degrade into another "Us vs. Them" thing which isn't where I want to go with this blog.

Well, that is it for now. See ya' on Tuesday (which is really pretentious of me to assume that someone is actually reading my drivel).