School Psychologist, Hempfield School District

>> My name is Aaron Burke. [phonetic] I am a school Psychologist and I work for Headfield School District in Lancaster County here. And presently I am one of seven school psychologist in the district. And primarily my job consists of a lot of consultation so working with parents, working with teachers, working with administrators, working with other student service team members. And really the overall goal in all that consultation is to work with students and to help meet their needs as best we can in the school setting. So that's the main thing that takes up the majority of my time. But also, you know, in our training for school Psychology we spend a lot of time working on how to administer Psychoeducational testing for students. And that is in order to identify potential learning disabilities or autism, emotional disturbance and then also giftedness on the opposite end of the spectrum. So I spend a lot of time doing that as well. Also in my role I am lucky enough to work in intermediate center as well as an alternative Ed setting. So it is a little alternative in terms of that I'm not doing the traditional role of a school psychologist in the alternative Ed program. So I do get to work directly with students a lot in that. I provide some counseling services for them and focus a lot on the social and emotional needs for those students. So I spend a lot of one on one time with those students. The other aspect of my job that I spend a lot of time doing is administering, or rather instructing students in social skills instructions. So students who are in special Ed classes, we focus in on the areas of need for them in terms of their social and emotional deficits and try to develop those skills and hope that they can take the skills that we're teaching them and generalize them into the regular Ed setting or at home and things like that. It is the schools Ed, yeah. I mean I work, I'm actually hired under a teacher's contract so I work a similar schedule that a teacher would but yes, I split my day every day. I go between the two programs that I work so lucky for me I work in an alternative Ed setting at the secondary level but I also work at the elementary level so I combine those two schedules so some days my schedule is a little bit longer than a typical teacher would work. But I do go back and forth between those two programs every day so that presents some challenges but also you know it splits up the day a little bit and makes it go a little faster as well. [laughter]