You are rightly horrified and would be justified being quite horrified. And yes, that includes public schools.
I have duly upgraded my level of horror!
Perhaps he moved to private practice because he can process his case load faster out of the board, and is trying to alleviate demand pressure for lower-income families.
I had a sense of that from his website, too. At least, that's his sell to affluent parents, perhaps to assuage guilt about being able to cut the line.
On speculation, I even placed DS on the waitlist for a private psychologist (school psychologist who moonlights by providing fee-for-service assessments...I'll leave the sticky ethics of that for another day).
This question comes up on every school psych licensing exam...and if they take clients from within their district, that's not the correct answer...
It's also reminiscent of the situation in certain Southeast Asian countries (Little Dragons) where public school teachers are underpaid, and working with class sizes of 60-70 students, where students learn pretty much what you would expect from the conditions. Then the same teachers run afterschool tutoring businesses where the same students pay them to get the education they were unable to receive during the school day.
... run through the tiered system of experience-harm-before-admission to congregated gifted would have been at least three years.
FWIW, this is the same challenge that has been facing disabled children in public education since the first federal special education law was passed in the early 70s. "wait-to-fail". Long-standing frustration with it among educators is one of the principal motivations behind the movement toward response-to-instruction/intervention. (Which, I know, also has challenges for GT learners.)
And now that I have picked my jaw up and dusted it off...
