A few years ago, when schools began bringing students back to campus after being forced to teach online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pedro Olvera noticed his phone starting to ring more frequently.
Olvera spent most of her career as a school psychologist in the Santa Ana Unified School District, a stone’s throw from Disneyland. 40 percent The percentage of students who are Spanish-speaking English Learners.
He now works as a school psychology clinical manager at the staffing firm Blazerworks, working with school districts to help them fill school psychologist positions, a job he says is becoming increasingly difficult for districts everywhere as demand for student mental health support rises while the supply of qualified clinicians dwindles.
But the school district seeking Olvera’s help needs something even rarer: a bilingual school psychologist who can assess the special educational needs of Spanish-speaking children.
That’s because states such as Louisiana, Iowa and Colorado are seeing an influx of English language learners into schools that never needed these kinds of experts before, leaders told Olvera.
Additionally, determining whether a child needs special education services or additional language support is inherently risky: schools do not want to misclassify a student with special needs as one who simply needs extra help learning English, or to place a student in special education who simply needs English language support.
Add in the language barrier between the child and the school psychologist and the evaluation becomes more complicated, Olvera said.
“That’s always been a challenge: Is the learning disability due to difference, is the meaning due to language, or is it due to a disability? That’s always been a challenge, given that when you look at the scores across the country, kids who are learning English tend to have achievement gaps.”
What makes this job different?
School psychologists have standardized tests they can use to determine if a child needs special education services, but Olvera said the process has many more components than one evaluation. Psychologists need to know how language affects learning, or how trauma affects children if they’re refugees. Psychologists also talk with students’ parents about their children’s behavior at home.
“If you were to add another element, it would be the cultural variable,” Olvera says, “dealing with kids from Central America, South America, Asia and understanding how that culture influences the assessment. What if there are items on the assessment that are unfamiliar to the child’s culture? How do you take that into account?”
Monica Oganes is a licensed school psychologist who has been in the field for 20 years and has served on the National Association of School Psychologists, including: training Assessing multilingual learners with special needs.
The shortage of bilingual school psychologists is a long-standing issue that resurfaces whenever immigration in the U.S. increases, she said.
That’s why she advocates for school psychologists to be trained to assess multilingual children, regardless of their own language proficiency: Even professionals who are bilingual in English and Spanish will face a language barrier if asked to assess a child who speaks one of the hundreds of languages spoken in American homes.
Like Olvera, Oganes said assessing the special needs of English language learners is a more complex issue, starting with how the child came to the country.
“Basically all immigrant children are stressed, but some are severely traumatized because they’ve experienced traumatic events in their home countries, like gang violence or the death of a parent, and they’ve been forced to leave their country,” Oganes explains. “Trauma can lead to behaviors. We’ve had kids who’ve been recommended for an autism diagnosis, but when they got the diagnosis, they were severely traumatized by their situation. [That’s why] They are not sociable.”
Immigrant children may have fewer opportunities to attend school or come from countries where the quality of public education is lower than in the United States, she added.
“Not only are they learning a second language, but their literacy and numeracy skills may not be up to par,” Oganes said. “Just because the quality of their education is not up to par doesn’t necessarily mean they have a learning disability or a physical disability.”
School psychologists working with multilingual learners must be aware of how trauma affects brain development, particularly the hippocampus, which regulates emotion and memory, she adds, but simply being bilingual or learning more than one language also affects the brain.
“Some languages don’t have plurals, so mistakes happen when they’re reading and writing,” Oganes says, citing an example. “Could this be related to differences in orthography? Because the brain has to process the first language in mind, inhibit the first language and generate the second language, which can take five to seven years after starting school.”
