School Psychology Timeline

The History of School Psychology School psychology is considered to be a relatively new field. It emerged in the late 1800’s and is still rapidly growing and changing today. Currently school psychologists are professionals who work with children to help them succeed academically, socially and emotionally. They work alongside of other school professionals as well as parents to help make the learning environment one that will foster each need of the child to help them to be successful. Today, in order to be a school psychologist one must obtain either their doctorate/ terminal degree or a master’s degree plus 30 credits (masters plus 30), and must attain either a license or a certificate. However, school psychology did not become this way over …show more content…
Since its start in 1890 to present day, school psychology was been growing and changing, and it is not expected to stop growing and changing in the future. The start of the Hybrid years in 1890 was the birth of the field of school psychology. The hybrid years are known as being a time when school psychology was a combination of several types of educational and psychological practitioners loosely mobilized around a central role of “psycho-educational assessment” or what we now call special education (History Timeline). The very start into providing psychological services in schools can be traced back to the social reform era. A few popular movements during this time were “compulsory schooling, juvenile courts, child labor law, mental health and vocational guidance. ()” These advances to society were perhaps the leading force in the push for school psychological services. For a long part of history, children were looked at as being miniature adults. At the turn of the century, children were looked at as representative …show more content…
The field of school psychology grew from a few hundred to 500 practitioners working in the school setting holding number titles. However, those in rural areas mostly only had access to traveling clinics that were usually operating from a regional mental health center. The downside to these traveling clinics was that they were unable to provide the range of services at the same level that was available to the school systems who hired their own school psychologist. With the growth of special education however, there was also an increase demand for school districts to employ their own school psychologist. Therefore, there was an increasing amount of schools that created the resources to hire their own district based school psychologist. Following World War II there was another major growth in the education system from the baby boomer generation. In 1968 the number of children receiving special education was over 2 million students, which more than doubled the 837,000 children 10 years before in 1958. With a major growth of children receiving services, also came the growth of school psychologists. Starting from the 500 that were practicing in 1940 grew to 5,000 in