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June 21, 2008 Winding down a career as a school psychologist has given me time to reflect over the past years. Few parents, or teachers, know what we do. It is possible to become a school psychologist without taking even one counseling course. We are not therapists. We are test givers. We test for special education eligibility and placement. We also are involved in writing the individualized education plans for the students who qualify and we are involved with discipline plans and suspension issues of the special education student. The biggest category of special education student is the “learning disabled”. This translates to "underachiever". We no longer aspire to a medical model and we compare what the student is able to do academically with what we guess the student should be able to do academically. The difference is a “significant discrepancy” and is required for placement. It may surprise the reader that this placement qualifies the student as a disabled person, with all the legal rights afforded to the handicapped. Many of the qualifying students are not handicapped in the slightest, but underachieve due to lack of English fluency, truancy, need for eyeglasses, or because last year’s teacher was not the excellent teacher we all wished for. These exclusionary situations are not supposed to be present in a qualifying student, but we look the other way because teachers are pressured into obtaining higher end of year test scores and these students do not count against them once identified as “disabled”. The families of the “disabled” students are now able to obtain social security money. If you can get several of your family to qualify, it is a pretty good living coupled with welfare. If America wants to know why there will be no social security in the future, this would have to be one of the biggest reasons. We are giving it away to the families of underachievers. However, the abuse of funding does not stop here. Now we have Medicaid in the Public Schools. The school districts are reimbursed millions of federal dollars for providing these “disabled” students an education. If the nurse hands out a pill at noon time, it is billable. The evaluation from the psychologist is billable, as are the speech therapists’ time and the special education teachers’ time. Sometimes the aide’s time is billable, and the bus ride to school is also allowable under some circumstances. I thought this was our mission as educators-to educate, no matter what it takes. There is one more absurdity. We “educate” students who are medically fragile and so mentally retarded that a goal for the entire year might be to get the student to smile, or turn their head in the direction of sound. These students are never going to be contributing members of society, but we make the parents send them, and pay huge money to baby-sit them, often even during the summer. After all, the parent “needs a break” we are told. Most of these students belong in a hospital or nursing home, not a school. Who are we kidding? ------------ About the author: I love writing for fun and hope to someday write for profit. I will soon be retiring from my "day job" and will have more time to spend writing. Email Jo Haran: joharan_2000@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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