DIRECTORS OF PUPIL PERSONNEL SERVICES,’ WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY GOING?

GORDON P. LIDDLE AND GARY W. REIGHARD

University of Maryland

The title, Director of Pupil Personnel Services, was almost unknown before 1950, but the public’s demand for quality education for all children has resulted in a dramatic expansion of pupil services. In New York State, for example, during the decade of the 1950s the schools doubled their nursing staff and quadrupled the number of counselors and psychologists. Nationwide the number of secondary school counselors rose from approximately 12,000 full-time equivalents in 1958 to 27,000 in 1962 (USOE, 1964). Despite an increase in enrollment, the ratio of pupils to counselors was cut from 960-1 to 530-1 during this four-year period.

The movement of pupil services into the public schools has not been without its problems. Most of these professionals, except counselors, were trained to work in one-to-one remedial relationships in clinical settings. Schools’ emphasis on aca- demic learnings and the group sometimes conflicted with the pupil personnel work- ers’ concern for emotional development and the individual. Also, a number of the pupil personnel workers, particularly the psychologists, social workers, and counsel- ors, had overlapping skills and responsibilities which often led to jurisdictional dis- putes and a duplication of effort. Concerns for these problems led more and more school systems to recognize the need for providing someone to coordinate pupil services and to help the worker become more effective. This in turn led the central staff of the Interprofessional Research Commission on Pupil Personnel Services to undertake this investigation.

For every coordinator or director of pupil services in 1950, today there are a t least ten. In New York State the first director was appointed in 1938. By 1953 there were 12 directors; during the next decade the 12 became 150 (Shultheis, 1962). Similar growth rates occurred in the Northeast and the Far West.

For purposes of the study directors were identified as any system-wide adminis- trator responsible for at least two of the following types of workers: guidance counsel- ors, psychologists, social workers or visiting teachers, attendance coordinators, speech and/or hearing speoialists, nurses, dental personnel, physicians, and psy- chiatrists. Special education was not included because it is primarily instructional in nature.

The study set out to answer questions such as: Who are these directors or co- ordinators? What are the career lines to and beyond this position? What qualifica- tions do directors have for their job, and what additional training do they think is needed? What are their duties? What innovations have they instituted? What changes do they see as taking place or needing to take place to increase the effective- ness of pupil services? To answer these and related questions, IRCOPPS decided to enlist the aid of a large segment of the directors in a nationwide study.

The staff wrote each state department of public instruction and asked them to identify their state’s directors of pupil personnel services as we defined the position, regardless of title. Only a half dozen states with sparse populations failed to reply.

‘This investigation waa supported in whole by Public Health Service Research Grant No. M E 01428, from the National Institute of Mental Health.

DIRECTORS OF PUPIL PERSONNEL SERVICES 343

The title, Director of Pupil Personnel Services, or a similar title was so common in five of the states that a sample of from 30 to 50 individuals within the state was chosen. These states were New York, California} Ohio, Kentucky, and Texas. Otherwise everyone nominated by state departments was approached.

I n all 444 questionnaires were sent, and 92% of these persons responded. About a third indicated that they were not system-wide directors of pupil personnel services as we defined the term. Persons who indicated that they spent less than 35% of their time in the administration and/or supervision of these services also were eliminated along with persons who had only building-wide responsibilities. This reduced our sample to 234 persons.

The directors had various titles. About three-fifths were called directors or coordinators of pupil personnel services. Another fifth had titles such as Assistant Superintendent for Pupil Services, or Director of Guidance} Pupil Services, and Research; that is they had the term “pupil services” somewhere in the title. The remainder had titles such as Director of Special Services or Director of Special Education. People with these titles were included if pupil services claimed a major share of their time, while other persons with identical titles were excluded because they were primarily responsible for services as remote as lunch programs or bus transportation.

On the average the 234 directors spent about 75% of their time supervising and administering pupil services. Their remaining time was approximately equally divided between responsibilities in the area of special education and other duties. About one-third reported to an assistant or associate superintendent; most of the others reported directly to the superintendent.

CHARACTERISTICS OF DIRECTORS Directors range in age from 35 to 60 and are quite evenly distributed along the

continuum. On the average, they have been in the field of education for 20 years and have spent the last 15 in their present school systems. The average director has about six years of teaching experience, usually at the secondary level, about five years as a pupil personnel worker, mostly as a school psychologist or counselor, in that order, and nine years in administration, primarily in central office jobs. About 20y0 have been elementary school principals and about 30% secondary principals, usually for less than five years.

Of every ten directors} three have an earned doctorate, and another two are working on this degree. Nine out of ten have more than ten hours of graduate work beyond the master’s, and only one director in twenty-five lacks a master’s degree.

Generally, the director’s master’s degree is in school administration, although exceptional children and psychology are common areas of specialization. I n their post-master’s education, about a third have specialized in guidance, another third in psychology, and smaller numbers in school administration, special education, exceptional children, or child development. Thus the directors are a very well educated group. School psychology and guidance seem to be the road to the director- ship. Medical and dental personnel, speech and hearing specialists, attendance co- ordinators, and social workers seldom become directors.

There is no national professional organization for directors of pupil personnel services. Other than NEA, the directors belong in significant numbers to only three

344 GORDON P. LIDDLE & GARY W. REIQHARD

organizations. Half of them belong to the American Personnel and Guidance Association (APGA), almost a fourth, to the Council on Exceptional Children (CEC), and one-sixth, to the American Psychological Association (APA). Very few directors belong to any of the organizations of school administrators.

In view of the many problems and unresolved issues in the administration of pupil services, there would seem to be a need for a national professional organization at which directors of pupil services could discuss their mutual concerns. The survey would seem to indicate that such a group might affiliate with either NEA or APGA.

Most of the directors are rather new to their jobs. A third have held the job for no longer than two years, another third from three to five years. More than half are the first person to hold the position. Half of the systems have had this specific job title for five years or less, and only one-fourth have had a director for more than ten years.

There does not seem to be a clear cut career line to this position. Almost a fourth have been directors of guidance immediately before taking their present jobs; a sizable group have been principals and school psychologists. Almost 4Oy0 have come from still other positions, usually administrative posts. Directors report that their predecessors, if they have not retired, have subsequently b e w e college pro- fessors, superintendents or assistant superintendents, or principals, in that order.

Nine-tenths of the directors report that they work more than ten months a year. Three-fifths earn more than $12,000 a year, another fifth earn from $10,500 to $12,000, and only 3% earn less than $9,000 a year.

DIRECTORS’ RESPONSIBILITIES Systems with directors are not an unbiased sample of American school systems.

They are larger, richer, and better staffed than the average. More than 90% of the directors are responsible for a program which extends from kindergarten through high school; 5y0 have responsibilities for junior colleges as well. The director typical- ly is responsible for from four to six services.

TABLE 1. NUMBER OF SERVICES FOR WHICH THE DIRECTOR IS RESPONSIBLE ~~

Number 2 3 4 5 6 7 8+ Percentage 4 15 20 28 20 7 6

As compared with the services available in a random sample of American school systems, as determined by a study previously carried out by the staff, these systems have more psychological, social work, and psychiatric services available; in other areas they are typical. Table 2 reports on the number and supervision of pupil personnel professions employed in systems with directors.

Slightly more than half of the directors are responsible for all of the pupil per- sonnel services, as we define the term, in their system. On the average about 15y0 of the services are not responsible to the director. Health services are very often autonomous. Speech is sometimes included in special education, and secondary counselors are sometimes still exclusively responsible to the secondary principal. If present, psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and elementary counselors are almost always under the director.

DIRECTORS O F PUPIL PERSONNEL SERVICES 345

TABLE 2. SERVICES AVAILABLE IN SYSTEMS WITH DIRECTORS OF PUPIL

Percentage of Systems Having a Given Service

PERSONNEL SERVICES (N = 234) I .

Present in Service the System

Attendance 73

Nurse 81

Secondary Counselor 93 Elementary Counselor 33

Physician 52 Social Worker or Visiting -

Teacher 57 Psychiatrist 26 Psychologist 87 Speech and/or Hearing 78

Present Under Director of PPS

Present but not Under Director of PPS

63 83 32 57 33

54 21 82

10 10 1

24 19

3 4 5

68 10

Among the systems represented in this study, 24 is the median number of pro- fessional staff in pupil services. Seven per cent supervise from 100-600 professional employees. An additional 13% have responsibility for 50-99 workers, and 27% more for 25-49 professionals. Thus, a majority of directors coordinate staffs large enough to require a full-time director.

The directors’ estimates of the percentage of the school’s operating budget going into pupil services vary from 1% to almost 20%. The median figure is 5% and the mean 6%. As will be seen later, they think that this percentage will continue to rise sharply in the immediate future.

Systems employing directors serve relatively affluent populations. Only one director in eight estimates the median family lncome in his district to be as low as $5,000, and a third estimate the median family income to be in excess of $7,000. These estimates are well above those of principals in an unbiased sample of school s ys tems .

The directors in this study are responsible for a total of more than 10,000 pro- fessional workers. The percentage of full-time workers supervised by the director in each of the areas is reported in Table 3.

TABLE 3. PERCENTAGE OF FULLTIME WORKERS IN EACH PUPIL SERVICES FIELD

Attend- Elementary Secondary Social Speech & ance Counselor Counselor Nurse Physician Worker Psychologist Hearing

10 9 43 10 1 10 8 9

Thus, about half of the members of the pupil personnel team are counselors. Since nurses and physicians are more often independent of the director, the 11% figure is somewhat low.

IMPORTANCE OF PREVIOUS TEACHING EXPERIENCE Previous teaching experience is one of the most discussed issues in pupil services.

In the past, pounselors, and often psychologists, social workers, speech and hearing specialists, and attendance coordinators as well have had to become teachers before becoming pupil personnel workers. Recently some states have changed their certi- fication requirements to eliminate the provision that pupil personnel workers fist be certified as teachers, or they have accepted practice teaching, substituting, or an

346 GORDON P. LIDDLE & GARY W. REIGHARD

intern experience for the teaching requirement. The directors’ responses to this issue, arranged in altered order, are shown in Table 4.

As a group, directors still strongly approve of previous teaching experience for counselors. A large percentage think that previous teaching experience is desirable but not essential for other workers in the non-health fields, and such experience is not generally considered important for physicians and nurses.

SATISFACTION WITH PRESENT SERVICES The directors were asked directly how well satisfied they were with the present

status of various aspects of their program; and how satisfied they were with the quality and appropriateness of the service rendered by each of the groups of special- ists. Perhaps under these circumstances it is difficult to voice negative judgments. However, five years ago, directors in New York State told Schultheis (1962) that their principal problems were that many of the pupil personnel workers were highly egocentric, and that many of their workers withdrew from contact with teachers and other members of the pupil personnel team. Hopkins found that three-fourths of the critical problems of pupil personnel administrators were connected with staff relationships, particularly conflicts between workers and status-conscious, un- cooperative principals (Hopkins, 1960). Either today’s directors are less frank, or considerable progress has been made.

Directors reported that they were relatively satisfied with the interprofessional relationships among pupil personnel workers, and also with the workers’ relation- ships with principals and teachers. They expressed the need for more community agencies, but were quite well satisfied with their relations with existing agencies. They saw a need to get the insights of workers into the curricular and administrative de- cision-making process, and were quite dissatisfied with the size of the staff and with clerical assistance for it.

When asked about the quality and appropriateness of the services rendered by the various types of workers in their systems, directors used the category “very adequate” about 39% of the time, (‘rather adequate”-28%, “not what it should be”-l8%, and “quite po0r”-57~ of the time. The directors were often pleased with the present services in speech and hearing, nursing, psychological services, and counseling, but were less happy with the medical and psychiatric services. Since the directors foresee a moderate expansion of psychiatric services in the near future, perhaps their dissatisfaction is largely with the unavailability of psychiatric per- sonnel.

EXPANSION OF SERVICES Directors report that in the past five years the greatest expansion of services

per 1,000 pupils has been in the area of guidance counselors, followed by speech, psychological services, and social work in that order. There has been much less ex- pansion in the services of physicians, dental personnel and attendance coordinators.

Looking to the future the directors do not foresee a great expansion in medical, dental, or attendance services, but almost 90% expect some or considerable expan- sion of counseling, social work and psychological services, and almost as many foresee expansion of speech and psychiatric services. Hardly anyone expects to see a re- duction in the number of workers in any area. Directors see their jobs as growing.

DIRECTORS OF PUPIL PERSONNEL SERVICES 347

TABLE 4. IMPORTANCE OF PREVIOUS TEACHING EXPERIENCE (PERCENTAGE) ,

Specialist Very Somewhat Not of

Important Important Great Importance

Guidance Counselor 82.6 16.0 2 . 6

Social Worker 46.7 43.6 9 . 8

Attendance Coordinator (without

Psychologist 49.6 39.6 10.9

Speech and/or Hearing Specialist 34.5 45.6 19.9

social work responsibility) Nurse Physician

30.2 5 . 7 1 . 9

42.3 28.8 14.7

27.4 65.6 83.4

PROBLEMS AND ISSUES It would seem that the expansion of pupil services, the wide scope of the job,

and the inexperience of the average director in his job have combined to urge direc- tors to get further education. Despite the high level of directors’ present education, 77% indicate a need for additional professional training. Of directors indicating this need, the areas most commonly mentioned in response to an open-ended question were as follows : administration and supervision-27%, psychology and learning- 22%, special education or some field within it-21y0, research, statistics, tests, and computer operation-14%, social work-9%, counseling and guidance-8%, bud- geting and accounting-7%, and health education-5%. Other areas mentioned include school law, public relations, and a new skill, “grantsmanship.”

In the next five years, directors expect to hire many additional staff members to strengthen their existing services. They also expect to add new programs, partic- ularly elementary school counseling, and to incorporate into the department those pupil services, such as health services, which sometimes still are not under the pupil services umbrella. Directors predict that school-based elementary counselors will become common.

About a fourth of the directors foresee changes in the roles of pupil personnel workers. A majority of these expect their workers to render more indirect service through consultation. Many expect to have better trained workers capable of using technological developments such as computers to schedule students and to keep records, thus freeing the workers from much of the clerical burden.

The directors view their most difficult problem as obtaining sufficient pro- fessional staff , but many also indicate that administrators fail to understand pupil services. Smaller numbers mentioned a need to find more effective roles with teach- ers and improving their relations with teachers.

Despite the lack of therapeutic and remedial referral sources in many com- munities, directors did not seem very concerned. Interprofessional rivalries were mentioned as a major problem by only 5% of the directors, while needs to improve staff competency were mentioned by 8%.

More than four-fifths of the directors mentioned one or more recent innovations which have improved their services. In addition to adding a service or improving the quality of a service, the team approach to children’s learning problems was the most often mentioned. Directors feel that the coordination of services is improving. New approaches such as central record keeping, group work with parents and students,

348 GORDON P. LIDDLE & GARY W. REIGHARD

and occupational courses were often mentioned. The increasing availability of federal money has tended to up-grade the staff.

Directors of pupil personnel services are shaping their role in response to parent and teacher demands for competent assistance. They feel reasonably successful in getting the workers to pull together as a team, but under pressure to expand their services more rapidly than staff can be expanded, they are looking for more econom- ical methods of assisting teachers and their students. While continuing the ameliora- tive roles of their workers, the directors are looking for ways to utilize the insights of their staff in the prevention of learning and emotional problems. They hope to in- crease the consultative functions of their staff. Despite a very high level of education and experience, and a basically optimistic, expansionist viewpoint, the directors feel a need for further training and an opportunity to learn more from one another.

REFERENCES HOPKINS, R. P. Critical problems in pupil personnel administration. Unpublished doctoral disserta-

SCHULTHEIS, W. C. The director of pupil personnel services in public schools of New York State.

U. S. Office of Education. Commitment to youth. Washington, D. C.: Author, 1964.

tion, Teachers College, Columbia Un.iver., 1960.

Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia Univer. 1962.

THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST AND HIS TRAINING' WILLIAM ITKIN

Illinois Teachers College Chicago-North

WHAT DOES HE Do? School Psychologists at Mid-Century, the report of the Thayer Conference,

was published in 1955 and reprinted in 1958. It has twice gone out of print. Much has happened in school psychology within the past ten years. The number of school psychologists has doubled and redoubled without keeping pace with demands for school psychological service. The functions of the school psychologists have been reconsidered and further reconsidered, and training standards have been studied and restudied. So the report of the Thayer Conference seems quite ancient by now.

Let us re-read the summary statement of functions of the school psychologist from the Thayer report (Cutts, 1955, p. 30).

The school psychologist is a psychologist with training and experience in education. He uses his specialized knowledge of assessment, learning, and interpersonal relationships to assist- school personnel to enrich the experience and growth of all children, and to recognize and deal with exceptional children.

Functions. The school psychologist serves in a advisory capacity to school personnel and performs the following functions.

1. Measuring and interpreting the intellectual, social and emotional development of children.

DeJinition.

'Paper read at the annual meeting of the Michigan Psychological Association, Detroit, October 29, 1965.