A Different Perspective on Understanding Learners

My path to becoming a Licensed Educational Psychologist began long before I became a school psychologist.

Early in my career, I worked as a paraprofessional, supporting individuals with disabilities in their everyday lives. Later, I became a Qualified Intellectual Disabilities Professional (QIDP), where I worked with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and helped oversee services designed to support their independence, quality of life, and individual goals.

Those experiences taught me something that has stayed with me throughout my career:

There is so much more to understanding a person than what can be captured on a test or written in a report.

I eventually found my way to school psychology, where I have spent years evaluating and supporting children and adolescents across preschool, elementary, middle, and high school settings, as well as students preparing for the transition to adulthood. Working within schools has given me an intimate understanding of how educational systems work, how teams make decisions, and the many factors that influence a student's educational experience.

I have also seen firsthand where the system can fall short.

When an Evaluation Isn’t the Whole Story

School-based evaluations serve an important purpose. They help schools identify students who may need specialized support and inform educational programming and services.

But school-based assessments are also conducted within the realities of public education: limited time, large caseloads, specific referral questions, eligibility requirements, and the need to balance the needs of an individual student with those of an entire school community.

Sometimes, a family needs more.

They may be left wondering Why is my child struggling? What is really going on beneath the surface? How do their strengths and challenges fit together? What does this mean for school? And what should we actually do next?

These are the questions that have increasingly shaped my work.

Going Deeper

My training in school neuropsychology expanded the way I think about assessment and strengthened my ability to look more deeply at the relationship between brain functioning, cognition, learning, behavior, and the school environment.

Rather than viewing an evaluation as simply a collection of scores, I believe assessment should help tell the story of how a student thinks, learns, processes information, regulates, communicates, and engages with the world around them.

My work with Independent Educational Evaluations (IEEs) has given me another opportunity to explore that idea. IEEs allow me to step outside the constraints of a student's existing educational evaluation and take a closer, more individualized look at the questions that matter most to the student and their family.

This is where my experiences come together.

My early work as a paraprofessional taught me to see the person behind the disability.
My experience supporting adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities taught me the importance of individualized goals and meaningful outcomes.
My years as a school psychologist taught me how students function within real educational systems—and what schools can and cannot provide.
And my school neuropsychology training has given me additional tools to understand the complex relationship between cognition, learning, behavior, and development.

Together, these experiences shape the way I approach every evaluation.

Making Assessment More Meaningful

I founded SD ed psych because I believe families deserve evaluations that go beyond answering “Does this student qualify?”

They deserve to understand why their child may be struggling, what their child's strengths can tell us, how their learning profile impacts them in the classroom and beyond, and what meaningful support can look like moving forward.

My goal is not simply to administer tests or produce a report.

It is to provide clarity, context, and actionable recommendations—while taking the time to understand the whole learner behind the scores.

Because a meaningful evaluation should do more than describe where a student is today.

It should help illuminate where they can go next.

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