As Schools Serve More Immigrant Children, Demand Grows for Bilingual Psychologists
A couple of years ago, as schools that had been forced to go virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic began to bring students back on campus, Pedro Olvera noticed that his phone started ringing more.
Olvera spent much of his career as a school psychologist in Santa Ana Unified School District, just a stone’s throw from Disneyland, where about 40 percent of students are English learners who speak Spanish.
He’s now a school psychology clinical manager at the staffing agency BlazerWorks, where he works with school districts to help them fill their school psychologist positions. That’s a task that’s getting harder for districts everywhere, he says, as the demand for student mental health support increases while the pipeline of qualified clinicians remains bottlenecked.
