School Psychologist

The purpose of this informative interview was to develop a better understating of certain aspects of the School Psychologist that are of interest to me. My interviewee for the Psy 600 interview assignment was Elsie, a school psychologist intern for the Board of Education. I have conducted this interview over the phone. In preparation for the interview, I picked the questions from professor's guidelines, that I felt important for helping to persuade myself to go into school psychologist field. Before becoming a school psychologist, Elsie has been involved in general education for 7 years and in special education for 6 years. While working with special education population, she has developed a strong interest in learning to identify the main cause of behavioral and emotional problems in children. Therefore, she learned that the School Psychologist professional training would enable her to explore her career in area of special education. Elsie's favorite part of the job is the evaluation process that involves the: assessments and other psychological testing. The most important part of the assessment is identifying the problems associated with learning and behavior. Elsie said that the assessments are something like a "detective work," but of course nature of work, is different. Elsie's least favorable part of the job is the enormous amount of administrative paperwork to be completed and submitted to the principal and other administrative staff. Elise also mentioned the importance of the School Based Support Team within the school system. The SBST consists of: education evaluator, social worker, and a school psychologist. However, when the education evaluators were discontinued from the school system, the SBST became a IEP team. The IEP team consists of. Social Worker and School Psychologist. The advantage of being part of the team is to make the evaluation process easier. When asked about the preferable counseling interventions, Elsie said that there was no one size fits all interventions and it must be based on individual needs of every student. One of the crucial elements of evaluation process, from Elise's experience, is a class observation. The class observation section of evaluation enables school psychologist to closely monitor individual's behaviors in various school settings.
Helping children to identify and overcome their emotional and behavioral problems at the early stage of their development, makes a school psychologist, an extremely valuable professional. Having a better idea about the nature of the School Psychology field, I have decided that it is the preferred career I want to pursue.