I got to start my sch9ool psychologist internship a little early! Yahoo! I got assigned to two schools: a year-round school and a traditional schedule school. I was a little frustrated though because I did not receive my school assignment until 2 days before school started (I was seriously starting to wonder if I had just imagined being hired), so while the other specialists (speech and resource) are making schedules and starting to see kids, I'm still trying to organize my office. The previous psychologist left a lot of stuff behind and it's my lovely job to go through all of it and decided what is important and what needs to be chucked. Despite such a daunting task and already being horribly behind everyone else in getting up and running, I'm still really excited to be at work and to be doing the job I've been studying to do the last 2 years.
This is what I finally decided as my office set up. I like it! I have all my files and cabinets out of child reach. I can see the door, the clock and where the kids will sit. Ususally I'll sit with them, but every now and then I'll probably make a contract with a kid to have them come down to my office as an option if they are having a hard time working in class or something like that where I just need to monitor them and not actually sit and work with them. I have my little desk with pens and pencils, a sharpener, hand sanitizer and a large timer to make sure I don't keep them too long.
Now all I have to do is send out permission forms, create a group schedule and go through all the old files.... before that, my other school has to figure out when they need me so I can set a final schedule between the two schools. They have an autism cluster, so that means a lot of IEP meetings, so we need to make sure the days the Speech specialist is there are also the days I am there, so that we have scheduling options. Bah!
The principal at my traditional school told me I can start coming in and organizing my office there anytime I want.... bleh. One mess at a time thank you very much. My other office is an oddly shaped corner room, and sadly the more typical type of office given to school psychs. It definately does not compare to my beautiful, wonderful, storage filled office (seriously, did you SEE all those cabinets? That picture did even show the huge closet size cabinet in the corner!) at my year-round school.
Both schools had full-time school psychs previously and I'm afraid they expect me to do the same amount of work as a full-time psych. Because of bugetary problems in the district they've been cut back to a more typical model of having a school psych at more than one school. I can only do what is possible, so I'll do that and hope that it is enough. Wish me luck!
