E89: School Psychologists
Welcome to this week's IEP Team Bonus Series Episode! Today we talk about the qualifications of a school psychologist, a but about the difference between school and clinical psychologist, and what they actually DO inside the school! Facebook Group **NEW** Free Guide: IEP Process Ste-By-Step Guide (including when to share parent input!)
Welcome to this week’s IEP Team Bonus Series Episode!
Today we talk about the qualifications of a school psychologist, a but about the difference between school and clinical psychologist, and what they actually DO inside the school!
**NEW** Free Guide: IEP Process Ste-By-Step Guide (including when to share parent input!)
89: School Psychologist
[00:00:00] Today on this IEP team bonus series podcast, we are talking about school psychologists I’ve worked with about 10 different psychologists or psychs as they’re called over my years of being an OT. And I’m excited to tell you exactly what they do and their qualifications, because it can be a little bit confusing. So without further ado, let’s dive in because we’re talking about school psychologists today.
You are listening to the parent IEP lab, the podcast that helps you get an effective IEP plan for your child so that you can get them supported and learning in school. I’m Beth LEAs and Feld occupational therapist, who started to notice trends in parents who got effective IEP for their kids
without having to fight the school. My mission is to help you turn insider knowledge from the school side into effective parent advocacy for your child. The parent IEP lab is all about the important parent input and prepping for your upcoming meaning without all the stress. But also we talk about commonly missed opportunities for parents to get an effective IEP outside of the IEP meeting, too.
So let’s dive into today’s [00:01:00] topic and think about what we can change and tweak to get the right formula for success for your child to learn and grow at school. Welcome to the lab.
If you have a meeting coming up in the next few months, do not wait to snag my new freebie, the IEP process. Step-by-step guide.
It breaks down the 10 steps of the IEP annual review, starting from when it’s supposed to be scheduled all the way until you have the meeting. And it also includes what, and when you should share your parent input so that you actually feel heard at your upcoming meeting, download your free copy at www.theieplab.com/iep, or the link is below this podcast in your podcast player.
If you are new to the IEP team bonus series, then welcome. We are about five episodes into this bonus series with straps every Thursday. This is to give you some context about what IEP team members actually do and what their role is in the schools. And also a little bit about their qualifications, because I think a lot of parents are wondering what the qualifications are, especially when staffing is [00:02:00] pretty hard, this school year as well.
I’ve known some parents who have had a concern, but didn’t know where to go. Or even the OT in the schools was like a thing that they could get their child in school. So you guys voted on the bonus series topic in the Facebook group. And so here we are talking about IEP team members.
Each episode drops on Thursday. So all you have to do. To find like special education teacher or a speech and language pathologist, which we’ve already covered is the scroll back in your podcast player and find the role that you’re curious about. So let’s go ahead and talk about this week’s role the school psychologist. So I had a concerned parent, I think it was in, I think it was in my Facebook group a while ago.
I had a concerned parent, I think in my Facebook group. A while ago that was looking at a permission to test form. And this is the form that they will send parents to list out what the areas they’re testing for and who is going to be on that team that’s testing your kid. And then you sign it and you send it back to give permission. And she was looking at it and all confused, rightly so, because it had the school [00:03:00] psychologist isn’t listed in testing things like academic performance. And she was like, well,
They’re not qualified to do that. Are they? And so this one, especially, I’m really excited to break down for you because I think school psychologists are kind of tricky
and I remember like that first year that I was in schools because they hadn’t really worked with school psychologist before I got into schools. But I did have a field work in an inpatient clinic setting with psychologists. And so their role is very different than a school psychologist. And so, um, this situation in the Facebook group just made me remember, oh yeah, like this is super confusing to know what they can test for and what they actually do.
So. Today, we’re talking about the qualifications of a school psychologist, and then we’re also going to talk about what they actually do. And of course, that depends on a couple of different factors and we’ll get into that. So this first section is talking about their qualifications. And so if you are new to this IEP team bonus series, I am located in Northern Colorado. [00:04:00] And so I often pull resources from the Colorado state website just to have as examples because I am an example. Learner. I need examples in my life to fully understand. And it, it really, really helps me process. So I really like providing that example to you in case you’re just like me and you need examples. So we’re going to go through the Colorado state guidelines for a school psychologist license in the state of Colorado.
So, um, we have like five or six bullet points that we’re going to go through and I’ll read the first one right now. So the first one is successful completion of an improved specialist level program from a regionally accredited institution with. A minimum of 60 graduate level, semester hours. Or an approved doctoral program for the preparation of school psychologists serving children or students.
Ages birth to 21 at an accepted institution of higher education. The next one is successful completion of practicum, which is like a field worker and internship. Consisting of a sequence of [00:05:00] closely supervised on campus or field-based activities.
Designed to develop and evaluate a candidates mastery of distinct professional skills, consistent with program and or course goals. So that all that all is like a very long way to say that they need a internship. And the third one is successful completion of internship consisting of full-time experience over one year or half time, over two years with a minimum of 1200 clock hours of which 600 must be in a school setting. And this is why I think this is probably the only profession other than medical doctors that I know that can get a paid internship.
So all of the, the six months of the internships that I did as an OT. Uh, physical therapists, we all do not get paid during our internships, but school psychologists can and very frequently get paid. When they do internships. So that’s because they have this additional layer of, you know, their internship is really long. And so if they’re doing a year.
I have [00:06:00] an internship, then they oftentimes get paid for that as well. The next one is the internship may include BIA hunt. Beyond the 600 hours in the school setting. Uh, other acceptable internship experiences, including. In private or state approved educational programs or in other appropriate mental health or education related programs.
The last one is passage of the national school psychology exam or valid N C S P certification.
And that certifications stands for nationally certified school psychologist credential. And so that of course makes sense that they would have to pass that exam and have that credential right. So hopefully that helps the other thing that is not on this list from Colorado, but I know his experience is that there’s two different ways.
Should go into school psychology and the most frequent one that I have seen as far as like degree programs go, is that they actually get a master’s of education.
So when we transitioned into talking about like, what’s the difference between clinical psychologists [00:07:00] and. The school psychologist, the school psychologist, their degree is very much education-based. So again, going back to that example of the parent being confused about like, how can they test for like math skills and literacy skills?
It’s because their master’s degree is technically an M E D or a master’s in education.
Versus a clinical psychologist, which is a PhD Like a P S Y D or an E N D, which is e D capital D.
If you have more questions about what is the difference between a school psychologist and a clinical psychologist? Then I would highly, highly recommend that you go back. Way towards the beginning of this podcast. There is episode with Liz And she is both a school psychologist and a clinical psychologist. So in that episode, she talks about her dual role because she works part-time in schools and part-time.
In a clinical psychologist office doing [00:08:00] diagnostics. And so she talks about both things and how they are separate things. But also like how to communicate if you get an outside report from a psychologist with a report of a diagnosis, like how to bring that report to the school psychologist and how to present that to them. Because a lot of times the, they won’t be both. They won’t actually know both processes, which is kind of interesting.
But Liz talks about being both of those credentials and how they are different from each other. And of course, she’s going to explain it better than I do. So if you have more questions about that, then I would encourage you to go back to that episode as well.
And that episode number is episode number 16. So you’ll have to scroll back in your podcast player quite a bit to get to it, but it’s so good that I highly recommend you digging into that. So let’s talk about what school psychologists actually do.
And of course my answer is going to be, it depends on the district. So the first district that I worked at was what’s called a and so it’s a [00:09:00] co-op. So I’ve heard of these in Indiana as well. I know that they’re all over the place. They’re in Wyoming, too. Um, but what this is is that I wasn’t actually a direct employee of the district that I worked at.
I was an employee of this co-op. And what happened was that they’re these tiny little schools that couldn’t afford. Their own specialized service providers. And so what happened is they pulled their money into a co-op and the co-op. Um, hired people and then we would maybe serve two different districts because they were so small. So what happened in that district is that the school psychologists were serving multiple different districts and because they do a lot of the testing and don’t, we’re going to get into this a little bit, but they can see direct one-on-one clients and many of them do, but in this type of situation, the district really wanted to keep the school psychologists for things that other.
People could not do so. School psychologists are really, really skilled in [00:10:00] testing. And so they would do a ton of the testing, but things like one-on-one, might’ve been shifted in that district more to the social worker. Or more to the school counselor instead of going to the school psychologist for one-on-one direct service. So that’s just one example of like how that both CS or that co-op kind of system worked.
Now when I transferred into working directly for a district. It was like a medium sized district, I would say. And what happened was that the school psychologist covered less buildings. So they would have like two, maybe three buildings that they covered.
And so what happened was they were they were in the building and present on a more consistent basis. So they ended up, taking on more one-on-one direct service for those kids. And so if you’re wondering, like what that one-on-one. Programming looked like a lot of times they would cover, you know, social, emotional programs. Like they would teach programs like Superflex [00:11:00] or like zones of regulation, which.
These kinds of programs have come up under fire and scrutiny a little bit. So you still might have pieces and parts of them. You might not actually have some of these programs still left in your school because there’s there’s issues with kind of classifying our emotions or, you know, labeling them as how big our reactions are and things like that.
But a lot of times they will her handle social, emotional skill building, and there, they also will be a really big behavior support. So a lot of times they will, be part of a behavior intervention plan. They will do FBAs. They will help support that student and build their skills so that they have more.
Emotional regulation skills and coping skills. And so that’s a way that school psychologists and OTs overlap is a lot of them are trained in some sensory skills training. Um, they can be supportive as far as like the behaviors and supporting them in that way as well. And then also when it comes to.
Other things that they do within a building level. A [00:12:00] lot of times they’re in the crisis teams. So if there is somebody who, um, has made a threat or they are suicidal. The school psychologist will come in
to do like a threat assessment or to, um, figure out if somebody needs more intense, psychological help or not, you know? So they will be kind of on call. On a building level to do that as well. But mostly, and this is across the districts that I worked for. Mostly, they would test a lot. So when it comes to initial evaluations,
A lot of times they’re even considered the case manager. Before the child is determined if they’re eligible or not. So a lot of times you will hear from the school psychologist in order to set the eligibility meeting in order to contact you, to see, you know, what your results were. They do a lot of the cognitive testing. So the IQ testing, they do, um, ADHD testing.
So you might get like a Vineland, a assessment from them. [00:13:00] And they will also do testing like the Basque, which is I’m not going to spell it, that acronym. Cause I don’t. Even know it, but the basket is something that you might get something in your email. That’s like 150 questions. And they’re talking about, you know, are, is your child depressed?
Does your child have they have these functional skills? You know, they’re, they’re the basics of mental and emotional health supports. And so they will be the assessor when it comes to those things as well. They are also mostly trained in the test to identify autism. And like I said, ADHD, cognitive deficits, anything that has to do with the brain and
functional support too. So that’s another way that OTs and school psychologists overlap is that a lot of times we can both test in those activities of daily living skills as well. The thing that comes down to it though, and a lot of times what happens is the school psychologist will assess all of these things.
And a lot of times they’re very analytical. They’re incredibly intelligent. And so they get [00:14:00] really like into the testing. And then a lot of them, I’m not going to say all of them, cause that’s definitely not my experience, but some school psychologists are so intelligent. And so into this cognitive piece that they have a hard time.
Telling the rest of us, how that actually impacts them in the classroom. So like my friend, Liz, who was on episode 16, that I just mentioned, she was amazing at taking those results and all of that information and that saying, okay, that might look like this in the classroom, or this might mean that they might need some accommodations or supports in this area.
And so really when you get a good psychologist, they are just amazing and taking all of this information and letting us know, okay, this is what it means. This is what support they might need. And this is how we can kind of approach that because they can look at different areas of the brain and how they’re functioning and capitalize on strengths. And then also build up those.
Quote-unquote deficit areas so that they [00:15:00] can really. Really be a lot more at home in the educational environment. So they do a lot of testing. And so now, hopefully I mentioned this before, but you can see why, if they have a master’s of education like that med. But they can test for, you know, IQ testing and ADHD and autism, just like we talked about, but they also are qualified to do some of the.
They also were qualified to do some of the academic testing. So like the, the Woodcock Johnson or the whisk, those kinds of testing, they can do that too. And then some of them are even qualified to do some, some of the speech and language tests as well. So you might see on a notice to test, or you might have the school psychologist doing all of the testing.
They might be more of a diagnostician. Because they are qualified to do a lot of testing. So just know that that is the thing. Um, but that often times, you know, it depends on the district, but oftentimes they’re not doing a ton of one-on-one [00:16:00] work. They kind of do the testing and they inform the rest of the team on what the picture is.
And then they’re involved in the IEP. Maybe there, you know, consulting with teachers on that IEP, or maybe they’re doing indirect services or, um, you know, helping the team understand more of that profile that they have to really utilize their strengths. But a lot of times they won’t do a ton of one-on-one work unless it’s something that’s really, really needed from the school psychologist as well.
So hopefully that helps put school psychologists in a little bit more of context. Today, we went over the qualifications for a school psychologist, and we went over the example of them getting their license in Colorado and what that looks like. They have a lot of internship,
a lot of supervision, because as you can see, like if they’re on crisis teams, they really need to be trained in how to identify if somebody needs more psychological help or testing. And also just like to be that support for person, that’s a really high level skill. And so they have a lot of internships to support [00:17:00] them as well.
And then we also talked about the difference between a clinical psychologist who does like diagnosis and an outpatient clinic. And school psychologist who does a ton of testing for academic work, but doesn’t necessarily diagnose, right. They help in that eligibility process, they might be your case manager until your child
gets qualified for an IEP. And they also might be pulled in to do observations. And, um, some of the testing for trying to know, try any I’ll review as well, depending on their role in the district. But when they do one-on-one work, it is mostly around that social, emotional programming. It’s a lot of mental health.
It can look somewhat like counseling and small. They overlap with counselors in that way, and they can also help with things like executive functioning, support and organization and attention and things like that as well. But a lot. Lot of the times their job is primarily in testing because they are highly, highly trained in that as well. So just a quick reminder, don’t forget to download the new freebie, which is the IEP process step by [00:18:00] step guide. And in that guide, if you have an IEP meeting coming up, you definitely want to check this freebie out because they break the IEP annual review process into 10 steps.
And as part of those 10 steps, I tell you exactly what parent input to share at what point in the process. So you actually feel heard in that IEP meeting. So thank you so much for tuning in this week and hopefully I will see you. Same time, same place next week. Thanks so much.