A couple of years ago, as schools that had been forced to go virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic began bringing students back to campus, Pedro Olvera noticed his phone started ringing more.
Olvera spent much of his career as a school psychologist in the Santa Ana Unified School District, a stone's throw from Disneyland, where approximately 40 percent of the students are English learners who speak Spanish.
She is now a clinical manager for school psychology at the staffing agency BlazerWorks, where she works with school districts to help them fill their school psychologist positions. That’s a task that’s becoming more difficult for districts around the world, she says, as demand for student mental health support increases while the pool of qualified clinicians remains stagnant.
But the school districts turning to Olvera for help need an even rarer creature: bilingual school psychologists who can assess Spanish-speaking children for special education needs.
That's because, leaders tell Olvera, schools that never needed these types of professionals before are seeing an influx of English learners in districts in states like Louisiana, Iowa and Colorado.
Beyond that, it is inherently very important to determine whether a child needs special education services or more language support. Schools do not want to misclassify a student with special needs as someone who needs more help learning English, or have a child who simply needs support with English placed in special education.
Adding a language barrier between a child and school psychologist makes the evaluation more complex, Olvera says.
“It has always been a challenge. Are learning difficulties due to differences, is meaning due to language or disorder? Olvera says. “That's always been a challenge, given that when you look at these scores nationally, children learning English tend to have these achievement gaps.”
What makes work different?
While school psychologists have standard tests they can use to determine if a child needs special education services, Olvera says the process involves much more than a single evaluation. They need to know how language affects learning, or how trauma does, if the child is a refugee. The psychologist will also talk with the student's parents about the child's behavior at home.
“If we were to add another layer, it would be that cultural variable,” Olvera says. “Dealing with children who may be from Central America, South America, Asia and understanding how that culture also comes into play in your assessments. What if there are elements in the assessment that are unfamiliar to the child’s culture? How do you account for that?”
Monica Oganes is a licensed school psychologist with 20 years of experience in the field, and has worked with the National Association of School Psychologists in training on the evaluation of multilingual students for special needs.
She says the shortage of bilingual school psychologists has been a problem for a long time and resurfaces every time the United States experiences an increase in immigration.
For this reason, she is in favor of school psychologists, regardless of their own linguistic abilities, being trained to evaluate multilingual children. Even professionals who are bilingual in English and Spanish will face a language barrier if they are asked to evaluate a child who speaks one of the hundreds of languages spoken by families in the United States.
Like Olvera, Oganes says there are more complexities when it comes to evaluating an English learner to determine if they have special needs. It all starts with how the child arrived in the country.
“Basically all immigrant children have stress, but some have significant trauma because, in their country of origin, perhaps they were exposed to traumatic events that caused them to leave their country,” explains Oganes, such as gang violence or the death of one. from his parents. “Sometimes trauma creates behaviors. We have had children referred for autism evaluations and when I arrived for the evaluation, they were severely traumatized by their situation. (That's why) they are not socializing.”
Immigrant children may have had fewer opportunities to attend school or come from countries where public education is of lower quality than in the United States, she added.
“Not only are they learning in a second language, but their literacy and math skills may not be adequate,” Oganes says. “If the quality of education is not adequate, it does not necessarily mean that they have a learning disability or a period of disability.”
School psychologists who work with multilingual students need to be well-versed in how trauma affects brain development, he adds, specifically in the hippocampus, which regulates emotions and memory. But the simple fact of being bilingual and learning in multiple languages also affects the brain.
“There are some languages that do not have plurals, so now they are making reading and writing errors,” Oganes offers as an example. “Does that have to do with spelling differences? Because the brain processes by expressing the mother tongue first and has to suppress the mother tongue to produce the second language. “That could take five to seven years from the time they enter school.”
