Currie, minister of education, early learning and culture, feels government needs a more comprehensive strategy to address this issue.
“We have to be more innovative. We need a longer-term strategy,” said Currie.
This was in response to a question from Sidney MacEwen, MLA for Morell-Mermaid, who focused his questions on student mental health services during question period in the legislature Wednesday.
Currie said he has been working closely with his deputy and the Public Schools Branch director of student services, Julia Gaudet, to identify why the situation exists and to identify ways to make investments to address the wait times for assessments.
“We are making investments to support those children in school as we speak today, but still as the minister I recognize that we do have wait times that are unacceptable and we are looking at a longer, stronger strategy and broader strategy to address that list.”
MacEwen wanted to know if the wait times were still more than three years for a student to get a psycho-educational assessment in schools and how many students are currently on this wait list.
Currie did not answer the first question, but he did say there are around 330 students on the wait list.
Currie again pointed to the efforts of Gaudet and her team to look at a draft recruitment and retention strategy.
“It’s clearly been identified that school psychologists are hard to recruit,” said Currie. “There is a supply and demand issues, not only in this province, but in the country.”
There are currently 6.6 full-time equivalent psychologist positions in P.E.I.
Currie said the Public Schools Branch has outsourced for private psychologists in order to reduce wait times.
“These are short-terms gaps to address the current issue. Not only are we looking at recruiting, we are looking to backfilling the maternity leaves.”
MacEwen wanted to know how aggressively the government is looking at these labour gaps.
Currie said the Public Schools Branch is aggressively looking at adjustments and interventions in addition to looking at ways to modify the workload.
“One of the challenges with school psychologists is that they are required, two years after their degrees, to focus on time on task interventions, not necessarily working on assessments, so it is a challenge,” said Currie. “The complexity of the work that the school psychologists do, does reflect the reality of the wait times.”
MacEwen pushed Currie to answer when these wait times will be eliminated.
“I am confident that we will work towards a strategy that will help address the wait times for psycho-educational assessments in this province,” said Currie.
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