ME

• Hello my name is liz hastie. i am currently a senior. I live at an off campus apartment near UB south campus. My screen name is shootingstar1479.

FALL INTERNSHIP

• The S.A.V.E program is in financial distress and is having a fundraiser on December 18th. For the last month I have been working on updating the webpage, calling board members to get information from them on aspects of the fundraiser and doing things for the fundraiser such as getting auction items. Many schools can not afford to have a S.A.V.E. assembly and until they regain enough money to have free assemblies, they will not be able to teach schools about educating students about bullying. This internship opportunity has shown me that a non for profit organization is hard to keep running when its board members do not stay organized. S.A..V.E is very unorganized and seems to have a problem with its board members being dedicated to it. There are many important components of this organization but it seems to be unraveling.
• Kipp Sankofa rescheduled its assemblies for November 15th and 16th. The guidance counselor that had rescheduled us did a poor job giving us a place and time to speak. There were no teachers or any faculty that watched our assemblied or even supervised it. The students at times were very rowdy but when it came to asking the students questions, they resonded very eagerly. A lot of the students said that they could not rely or get help from their teachers when they were getting bullied. One girl even said that her teacher saw another student bully her and did nothing about it. She felt like she was alone and that she could not ask anyone for help. This was very shocking to me because teachers or faculty are suppose to help and keep their students safe. One of the places that seemed to be the most common place for bullying was the bathroom. This was not surprising because the bathroom is usually not monitored and makes it very easy for incidents to happen. The charter school was an located in a run down parking lot that had a lot of empty stores. The pavement was all cracked and in terrible condition. The school looked very poor and seemed to not have a lot of room.
• S.A.V.E was booked for 4 assemblies but due to the October surprise the schools had to cancel them due to lost funds and having to maintain 180 school days for the students that were lost during the time off. The schools that cancelled were Houghton academy and Kipp Sankofa which booked two assemblies a piece. Nicole Dugan from Houghton Academy told me that scheduling the assembly was very hard for them due to maintaining the 180 days of institutional time that is mandated by the state. She told me that a lot of kids leave class for speech therapy, assessments and other practices with the school psychologist and just children missing school makes it hard for them to schedule such extra things like our program. Right now we are working on two grants which are the oshei foundation and the buffalo youth foundation. We are asking overall for about 25,000. The organization has a lot of program and operating expenses. When doing a grant you have to be very specific and follow all of the guidelines for the grant. Nothing is to be said flowery or over embellished. The organization is also having a fundraiser in December to help raise money so that we can have assemblies for free in the Spring. Buffalo public schools have a very low budget which does not allow them to participate in programs like ours. I have talked to many principals and guidance counselors and all of them have said that they need this program very badly and wish that it was free. Most buffalo public schools can not even afford to keep after school programs because they can not afford to keep the buildings open after the regular school hours. The schools are still in jeopardy of losing programs and each year they fight to keep what little they have.
• I've noticed that some of the schools biggest problem is bullying. Schools have also told me that the bullies’ biggest targets are the immigrants and refugees. These refugees that come over are fleeing from harsh unstable environments and a lot of their classmates do not understand it. Schools have been trying to educate the students and help them to more aware and sensitive to these students. The refuges and immigrants usually do not speak very good english if that and most of them have not been in school. Most of them are very behind and are suffering problems and are usually not able to be seen by the School psychologist due to the fact that the buffalo school psychologists are so preoccupied with mentally disabled students. The schools guidance counselors try to help the immigrant and refuge famillies by directing them to outside services like the catholic charities that can help them.
• The S.A.V.E organizatioin has a new member and she is an Americorp Vista who is full time and has a lot of great connections to help the program. The Vista, my self and a NY state trooper will be doing the assemblies. We have been meeting to go over the complete layout of the assembly. I am very excited and can not wait to do an assembly. We also have students in grades 5-7 from St. Vincents who are taught the program and will be coming with us when they can to give personal testimony of bullying and how they delt with it. I think that this would be great for the assemblies because having the student's peers talk to them and answer their questions is very effective. The state trooper also have been trained to talk to kids about bullying, drugs and violence and ways to deal with these issues. He has talked to numerous schools and is very active erie county.
  
• So far we have contacted about 50 elementary schools. I have noticed that it will take at least a week for these schools to respond back to us because the information/program has to be approved by a higher authority. We mostly faxed information to the principal, counselor, or school psychologist of the school. We contacted schools in Tonawanda, east aurora, lakeshore, Hamburg, Lackawanna, charter schools, parochial schools, Kenmore, West Seneca, Clarence Williamsville. So hopefully we will get a call back and be able to book some assemblies.
• My internship this fall is with a program called S.A.V.E (Students Against Violence Education) The program targets students K-8 in which they have small or large assemblies that focuses on bullying, consequences, peer pressure, reporting and coping strategies; all essential elements of the violence prevention framwork. Right now as an intern my focus is getting 10 assemblies booked for this fall and next spring semester. The assemblies for this fall are to be in the first 2 weeks of October and November. It has been a little difficult to book the assemblies because some schools say they already have violence prevention programs and it has been hard to get of hold of people on the phone but so far we have 2 booked for October.

SUMMER INTERNSHIP

• Over the summer i did a clinical internship with a program called Connections through Summit. I was a research clinican that had 6 children with Asperger's and other pervasive developmental disorders as well. The program was for 6 weeks and I worked about 46 hours a week. This internship was one of the most challenging jobs i have ever had so far but it was the experience of a lifetime because these children taught me things about my self that i never knew i could do. This internship made me more responsible, organized and opened my eyes at what i really want to do with children. I definiteley now know i want to do social work. I would highly recommend this internship to students because it will help them to see what areas of psychology they would want to work with children. In the program you get to talk to the parents and different clinicans in diverse careers. You also get to see how much paperwork and data is involved in some research. The program also shows how children with mental disorders need structure and social skills in order to help them function in society. You get to see how children with disabilities are such easy targets for low self-esteem, bullying, and have a hard time making friends. The best part of the program was watching these children take the skills you taught them and use them in their natural enviorment such as a field trip or with their peers. It was such an intangilbe reward and experience.

Annotated Bibliography:

• The topic that interested me came from my positive psychology article. I wanted to look further into interventions with students who have externalizing behavior. I have used PSYCHINFO before but not the thesearus. I typed in externalizing behaviors and it came back with externalizing behavior. But when I seached using "externalizing behavior" and school I found over 272 articles. When i typed in interventions it gave me early, school, and parent.Then typed in externalizing behavior and school based interventions and found 52 articles like the effects of a therapeutic playgroup intervention on the social competence and executive functioning of young children in foster care and Using an Ecological Framework for Understanding and Treating Externalizing Behavior in Early Childhood. When i looked at the articles to do my paper, I found that most of the links did not have html or pdf full texts. After using 5 articles i then did a new search on externalizing behavior and treatment. I found 3 more good articles and then after that i did another search of Conduct Disorder and intervention. I found my last 2 articles. As I did my first 3 articles, the results section was really hard for me to interpret and just even some articles where overall hard for me to understand or interpret. Some interesting things i found where that for externalizing behaviors, parent training programs where to best treatment, but had a very high drop out rate. Some of my research articles had insufficent results due to the fact that their was a high drop out rate for parents in their treatment program. In most of my articles they needed longer follow up dates to see if their treatment really worked. If the studies did do follow up they had poor participation from clients. To me after doing these articles, researchers can put so much time and effort into their program but if their subjects drop out or do not follow up then the research is inadequate or not significant. I know that taking advanced statistics helped me when i was interpreting the articles. I knew the difference between a linear and logistic regression model and could understand why they used the methods they did. For some of the externalizing behaviors like ADHD i found that pharmasutical intervention was the best and that early intervention with parent training programs with behaviors like Conduct Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder was the best. I know if i was a school psychologist, i would know the best intervention programs to use with externalizing behaviors and make a difference because i have empirical knowledge on the subject now.

The Interview Results:

Q: Which providers of services inthe community do you use for outside referrals?
A: We use Family Support Services such as

• Catholic Charity Services
• Refer the Social Worker at the school who can better assist the client
• When they use outside referals they try to keep them near by so that the family does not have to drive so far.

Q: What special intervention services do you offer in your buildings that you think are particularly effective?
A: - We have Child Study teams. The counselors, psychologists, teachers, speech pathologists and other important faculty memember meet weekly to talk about students who teachers want evaluated because of concern. Everyone brainstorms and comes up with solutions to the concern and talk about what solutions to use. By doing this it makes sure that everyone is on the same page with the student to better help him or her.
Q: What ouside agency educational programs does the district use?
A: We use :

• BOCES in Angola, Fredonia, and East Aurora
• Baker Victory
• Falk School and Gateway longview for behaviour challenge kids.
• All of the programs are very helpful.

Q: What courses would you recommend taking in college besides the required classes that either helped you or would have been?
A: If you can take any extra courses, I would recommend taking classes on helping children to read. This is something i wished i had more experience in because it is a real problem in the schools.
Q: Should we get our doctorate or a specialist degree?
A: I would not recommend a doctorate at all. I would just make sure the master's program is NASP or APA approved.
Q:What do you do each day?
A: I do basically assessing and then writing them up which takes a very longtime. Writing up the assessments is the only bad part of the job. After assesssing I will call the student's partents and arrange a time where we can all meet in person together.
Q: How often do you interact with parents and what do you normally do with the parents?
A: I usually meet with parents about 2-3 times a week. I will show the parents the results and go over them with it. There can be a lot of confrontation over the resluts but you just have to work with the parents and show them their options. This is why it is better to meet with the parents in person than talking about it over the phone.
Q:What are you work hours like?
A: It is usually a 7:30am to 4:30pm work day. It really depends on how much paper work there is to be done and what the day was like.
Q: How else can school psychologists get involved with students?
A: I can get involved as much as I want. It all depends how much time I am able to devot to other activities because I have a family at home. There really is no limit.
Q: Would you consider your job to be very stressful?
A: Sometimes this job can be very stressful because of the confrontation with parents. There are times where parents are screaming in my face and yelling obscene things to me. At the end of the day it is very important not to take this stress home and just leave it at work because if you don't it will cause a lot of problems.

Overall I thought thought that Mrs. Dolores Armbrust was very enthusiastic and informative about her job. She answered my questions very thoroughly and gave the impression she had all the time in the world for me when i knew she didn't. From this experience it made me question the idea of becoming a school psychologist because she said she really did not have a lot of time talk to the students and help them. She basically always assessed the students and that other faculty members like counselors or social workers were left to deal with other issues. She gave the WISC III about 100 times a school year. I really want to work one on one with students and help them with their problems. Mrs. Armbrust said she loved her job and that this is such a great work field to be in. She also emphasized on how there is going to be a deficit in the number of school psychologists and that there will be many job opportunities for me. After I asked my questions she also told me somethings that she thought was important for me to know. School psychologists in her distric had a higher increases in salary than teachers because they do more than them and that the benefits are really good. She said when looking for a job it is also very important to look at the job security and the benefits that come with it. This is why she thought that school psychology is such a great job to have.






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The following 3 pages belong to LizHastie:

Psy370PositiveArticles

Psy370Spring2006Interviews

Psy498PracticumLog