Reply to MCPS is executing significant changes to special education that directly affect autistic students and their families.

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Reply to "MCPS is executing significant changes to special education that directly affect autistic students and their families."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Are all school psychologists not trained the same? I do think there is value in having one building psychologist who is in the same building full time. Why would a psychologist advocate to be in multiple buildings, more freedom and less accountability. I would think all school psychologists would have training to complete autism assessments. [/quote]

As a teacher in classic autism who has worked with both our building psychologist and our autism psychologist, there is a huge differenced.  I think they're all trained the same but it's more about the level of experience.  It was a huge learning curve for me to jump into working with kids with cognitive disabilities.  This is a low incidence population so I don't think the usual psychologist comes across a lot of ID kids regularly.  The autism psychologists almost exclusively are working with our kids whose IQs are below 75 - it takes a lot more work and time to get used to each kid and get results.  The building psychologist has done a few assessments for move in/home school model kids who have been placed with us temporarily.  You can tell they are not comfortable with our kids and usually "attempt" an IQ test and when they can't get the student to do it in a short time frame they check the box that they tried and move on.  We need these scores to qualify them for alo (non-diploma track) and to help get them services later when they become adults.  It'll be a huge disservice to lose this expertise!  I also don't understand why you think they have less accountability... the Autism Unit is much smaller than the psychology department so I would think they have more oversight, not less.[/quote]

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