In a previous blog, I mentioned that I was really impressed with the professionalism and “professional conscience” of a certain educational psychologist who I like to send clients to. Since I don’t want to embarrass this kindly and modest gentleman, I will not mention his name. To be sure, anybody who has been around in the public school system would know who I am talking about because this gentleman has worked for the B.C. Ministry of education as an auditor of School District Special Education Services.

Given such an impressive bio, one would expect “big fees” for his services. I was pleasantly surprised! The fee was half of what most providers of psycho-educational assessments would charge. The reason for charging less was simply: why make the children “antsy” and the parents pay more when the job can be done within three hours of testing!

I thought, now here is a person who makes sense.

For my clients with LD children, getting the educational psychologist’s assessment is more a formality than a necessity. As someone with academic credentials at the Ph.D. level, specializing in learning disabilities, I am qualified to diagnose a child for learning disabilities.  When I send a client’s child to the educational psychologist, I have done the diagnosis already and know exactly what to expect. In fact, for my Ph.D. dissertation, I was diagnosing LD children using the low achievement approach to identifying learning disabilities. Unfortunately, in British Columbia, as in many places around the world, there is still a great deal of entrenched thinking regarding the definition of LD: an outdated IQ-achievement discrepancy formula is still widely used.  When the assessment has an IQ component, we must have an educational psychologist to do the IQ testing.

As my Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Linda Siegel, used to say, excessive testing for children is not good for them: do only what is necessary and leave it at that! Thus, I try to satisfy the school’s requirement for a psycho-educational assessment through exposing the child to the least testing possible while getting the job done.

So, it was. By chance, while having a conversation with my Italian hairstylist at her salon, the topic of psycho-educational assessments came up and she told me of a client that she has who seems to fit the profile of the psychologist I have been so impressed with. At an instant, both our eyes met, and we blurted out in unison the same name. “By George, it is Dr. ____!”

I guess birds of a feather do flock together!

Tags: Dyslexia diagnosis, Educational Psychologists
Posted in Blog