LEARNING THE HARD WAY
Sydney Mines mom calls psychoeducational assessment wait ‘very frustrating’
Sydney Mines mom calls psychoeducational assessment wait “very frustrating.”
Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series by The Chronicle Herald about the education system in Nova Scotia.
Tyler sits on the living room floor with a laptop computer. He’s showing off a science project that he did last year at Jubilee Elementary School in Sydney Mines.
“It was fun. There’s so many unknown things that I want to find out,” says Tyler as he goes through his power-point presentation. “That’s why I like science.”
Apart from science he’s also interested in art, math and gym class.
“They do this thing called the beep test. You have to run across the gym every time you hear a beep,” he says. “You get really tired and you feel sharp pains in your sides, but you have to push hard, and then it’ll go away.”
This week, Tyler starts Grade 5. He’s 10 years old.
When he was six, a pediatrician diagnosed Tyler with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
ADHD is a behavioral disorder associated with short attention span, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. It can also lead to other, more specific, learning disabilities.
For example, in addition to ADHD Tyler has a learning disability called dysgraphia, which is a condition that makes it hard for him to form letters and put thoughts to paper.
Tyler’s parents and teachers noticed that these behaviours were impacting his performance in the classroom, but it would cost the Whalens $1,500 to find out why.
“The biggest thing we needed was a psychological assessment,” says Tyler’s mother, Darlene. “We tried to set it up when he first started in grade primary, but they don’t start testing until students are seven.”
And then there’s the waiting list.
“If he’s seven and we requested it, then there would be a two- to three-year waiting list and he’d be nine or 10 years old before it got done. We felt that was just too late,” says Darlene. “Because of the wait time we decided to pay for it ourselves.”
The assessment also recommended a followup in two years.
“Which will be another $1,500,” says Darlene. “We’re just waiting to hear back form the psychologist with an appointment time.”
“It’s very frustrating. It’s upsetting as well because every parent wants the best for their child. They want them to succeed and be happy.”
Darlene’s frustration is being felt in every region of the province.
A parent in Halifax who didn’t want to be named said that they have been using different programs that are offered out of the IWK while they wait their turn for a psychoeducational assessment.
“It’s been a patchwork assembly,” they say.
Unable to pay for a private assessment, they need to wait.
“I don’t know what’s going on. The assessment should come first. The assessment should be the very first step.”
The lack of qualified staff in the schools who can administer these assessments was flagged as a main cause of the problem in the Students First report by the Commission on Classroom Inclusion.
“We heard all around the province that even when the funding is in place, we don’t have enough qualified personnel to fill the positions. And that’s a big factor in the wait lists,” says Monica Williams, who was one of the lead commissioners tasked with writing the Students First report released on March 26.
“We heard that in the city and in rural Nova Scotia,” says Williams. “There was concern expressed about inadequate recourses for fully implementing inclusive education,” says Williams. “That was a common theme, that the recourses hadn’t been adequate to implement this model of education.”
The impetus of the report was the passing of Bill 75, which imposed a contract on Nova Scotia’s teachers and ended a near two-month work-to-rule job action by the Nova Scotia Teacher’s Union.
Both the NSTU and the province have affirmed the findings in the report, and the province has invested an additional $15 million into 190 new jobs that Education Minister Zack Churchill says will be filled by the end of September.
However, less than six of those new jobs will be filled by school psychologists. According to Williams, it’s a problem of supply and demand.
“Those professionals can also go into private practice, which is very lucrative and in really high demand. We’re also competing against the health-care sector, other provinces, and there are not a lot of School Psychologists trained every year in Nova Scotia.”
“Although the demand has skyrocketed, the supply has not kept pace.”
Of the 190 new positions, the Cape Breton-Victoria Regional Centre for Education will be receiving 20. Depending on the need, one of these will either be a school psychologist or a speech language pathologist.
This summer Tyler was enrolled in a program run out of the occupational therapy unit at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital. Once every week he and the other students in the group practiced techniques on the best ways to form letters.
Soon, he’ll be putting it into action.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he says. The laptop is closed.