This is a tricky thing to address, but I feel like I need to since it comes up so often. A lot of parents will submit paperwork for their child to be evaluated by their school district or Intermediate Unit, and then the waiting starts. Officially, once a consent is signed, the district has sixty days to conduct and evaluation, but it does (depending on the district and how exactly you ask) take time to get the consent to sign. The end result is that sometimes, there is a wait of several months before a child is evaluated. This stinks. Children are not usually referred for no good reason and there is no worse feeling than telling panicked parents and teachers that they have to wait a while. So, I am often asked, not unreasonably, what is taking so long.
One factor is that it just takes a while to perform a good evaluation. Giving an IQ test takes an hour or two (longer for very bright students and older students). Achievement testing can take even longer, closer to two to four hours, with students going through long sets of math problems and reading long passages for comprehension. Most Evaluations will also include a clinical interview and further testing such as attention. Finally, there’s components in addition to testing like talking to teachers, waiting for paperwork and records and observing the student. After all of the information is gathered, then we need to write up the ten to twenty pages and try to make it easy to read. This is all necessary to make sure we do enough to determine a child’s needs and make a good plan to help, so there’s a minimum time each evaluation will take. This is of course compounded by a much bigger problem; there just aren’t enough school psychologists.
The National Association of School Psychologists recommends that there be one school psychologist for every 1,000 students in a district. Most districts have between 1,500 to 2,000 students for every school psychologist http://www.nasponline.org/publications/cq/cq288sp2000.aspx. In other words, the average school psychologist is doing about one and a half to twice as money evaluations as they should be. This is worse in districts with high needs, where there is likely less budget to hire school psyches and likely more students needing evaluation. The end result is that students and parents find themselves at the back of a line that is much longer than any of us would like. Sadly, there is not much to be done about speeding things up.
Hypothetically, we could try to speed up evaluations, but I don’t like what that would mean. I could cut out some testing, but I don’t want to miss anything. I could try to reject more evaluations (and certainly every so often a student is so obviously excelling that I do reject them), but if a child needs help enough that he or she is referred to me, then I want to help. The end result is that, sadly, there is often a long wait for an evaluation.