THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST
Message from President Beth Doll, Ph.D.

A perk of being on the Division's Executive Committee is the opportunity that I have to discuss alternative futures for the profession with rooms full of the people who wrote my textbooks. Inevitably, as we disagree about which are the notable influences to consider and the impact these will have on our emerging professional lives, someone will point out that we must keep our eye to the future if we are to safeguard our services to children.

That always reminds me of a moment out of my junior high school years. (We didn't have middle schools then.) My father was a former Montana homesteader who decided that his three children should learn to aim and shoot a rifle. He was thinking ahead to his retirement and realizing that one of us was going to inherit his impressive rifle collection. And he chanted while we were practicing: "Keep your eye on the target. Keep your eye on the target."

Fast forward now to last month's Denver Post. The paper reported on an unusual hunting accident in one of the first few days of this Fall's season. An inexperienced hunter had picked out a young doe and was preparing to shoot. Thinking that it would steady his aim, he rested the rifle on one rail of a nearby train track, focusing on the doe through rifle's sight. When he fired, though, the shot ricocheted off the second rail to hit him in the face. As the officer at the scene pointed out, the rifle's sight rested above the barrel. The moral: Sometimes you have to take your eye off the target and notice what else is happening.

My target, as I enter this year as the Division's president, is to provide for high quality mental health services to children and, relatedly, for the working conditions that allow us to provide such services. But there are lots of other things happening out there that might shift our aim:

• As private practice becomes less and less attractive, school-based practice with children is looking more interesting to increasing numbers of licensed psychologists.
• Regulatory agencies are toying with the notion of omnibus mental health licensing boards or omnibus grievance boards, rather than adhering to traditional disciplinary distinctions between psychology, social work, counseling, and therapy.
• States are re-examining the practice of separated credentialing procedures for psychologists working in schools and psychologists working in the community.
• Schools are reconsidering their commitment to providing mental health services as part of the array of educational services provided to students.
• Medicaid has become a third party payer that reimburses school districts for the mental health services provided to eligible children.
• The use of paraprofessionals has been posed as one alternative for stretching very limited school psychological services.
• National demographics of School Psychologists suggest that a disproportionately large number of us will be retiring in the next few years.
• Prompting a looming, national shortage when Doctoral and Educational Specialist programs are not able to graduate sufficient numbers of new school psychologists to replace them.

Of course, the beauty of future thinking is that none or all of these trends could persist into our future professional lives. Still, my target loses precision once it's been framed within these trends. Which mental health services are most essential to children's competence and well-being? How should we balance our efforts between the provision of health-promoting services to all the children and the provision of restorative services to children in crisis? Which of our mental health colleagues are also well-prepared to provide quality mental health services to our clientele? Are some better prepared than we? (Do we need to upgrade our skills?) Or what kinds of re-training might appropriately prepare a psychologist who's been in private practice for school-based practice? Are we and our child-clients better served by restrictive credentialing rules that make clear distinctions between specialty areas, or by omnibus rules that cut through traditional disciplinary boundaries? Are we and our child-clients better served by school-funded mental health services, by the infusion of non-educational funds into school-based practices, or by shifting mental health services off-school grounds?

I don't pretend that I have any answers to questions such as these. In fact, I've learned over the years that I'm more adept at posing questions than answering them. Still, I have come to believe that the simple rules that could guide my thinking in previous decades may not serve me well in the face of changing national realities - instead, it will be important for me to move my eye away from the target, at least momentarily, and look around. Decisions about where to go and how to go there will have to be framed within the larger context of schools, communities, governments, health care and even international events. I expect to call on all of the Division's membership to help me look - just so we don't shoot ourselves in the face.

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