By Arden Berry | Staff Writer
Waco doctoral candidate and fourth-year graduate student Carol Raymond said she started working toward a doctorate in school psychology to make the “greatest positive change possible.”
Raymond and other graduate students working in the Baylor Center for Disability and Flourishing clinic help assess and counsel children and families of children with disabilities, including autism.
Raymond said autism affects every individual differently.
“It’s been in the news a lot lately, and I just encourage people to understand that if you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism,” Raymond said. “There are characteristics that we look for when we’re diagnosing, but we look at the whole child.”
Dr. Kelsey Ragan, clinical director of the BCDF, said the Baylor Autism Resource Center used to have a specific Autism Resource Clinic, but as of about two years ago, it now exists under the BCDF clinic umbrella.
“We have a lot of different clinics, and those things still exist,” Ragan said. “We’ve had a lot of growth.”
According to the BCDF website, the center was recently renamed.
“The new name reflects the center’s deep commitment to promote the flourishing of people with disabilities, their families and communities,” the website reads.
Ragan said the clinic provides psychological assessments for children aged 3 to 17.
“A lot of times we have teenagers who maybe have never gotten a diagnosis and they want to know for themselves that they have autism,” Ragan said. “And then we also have really young kids, where they’re a 3-year-old, where their family’s bringing them in.
From there, graduate students help the children through Applied Behavior Analysis Therapy. According to the BCDF website, this therapy involves “therapeutic interventions” to teach these children particular skills.
“The family works with us,” Ragan said. “They come up with some goals of what they think would be helpful for their child to learn, and then the students who are ABA graduate students, they will work with that child for a semester, helping them gain specific behavioral skills.”
Raymond, who did assessments last fall and counseling last spring at the clinic, said she joined the school psychology program after 20 years of experience as a teacher.
“I also became an educational diagnostician, which is somebody that does cognitive and achievement assessments typically within a school setting, and I got that certification so I could do some assessment at a private school that I was at,” Raymond said. “And then I just found that there were so many students who needed additional assessments.”
Raymond said she became interested in using school psychology to improve educational systems for students with disabilities.
“I like school psychology’s role in being a detective of, ‘How can this person learn better?’” Raymond said. “And then, finding the way to make that system work better.”
While clinical work is reserved for graduate students, Ragan said undergraduate students interested in autism and disabilities can help with research, which is overseen by Dr. Erik Carter, executive director of the BCDF. Ragan said the center has faculty researching the transitional period between school and adult life for autistic individuals.
“A lot of times what happens for students with disabilities, autism, intellectual disabilities, various developmental disabilities, is they reach adulthood and they graduate from school, and then it’s not really clear where support exists after that,” Ragan said. “Schools provide a lot of really helpful support and it kind of just dries up after graduation.”
She also said undergraduate students can volunteer for the center, such as at the sensory room that the BCDF will run at homecoming.
Overall, Raymond said she has learned much through her experience at the clinic, and that it’s exciting to help K-12 students through school psychology.
“How can we actually help the school understand?” Raymond said. “How can we help those individuals understand some of these populations better, and then help make almost a systemic change? That’s interesting to me because I like the idea of making the greatest positive change possible.”
