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Talk to almost any school psychologist right now, especially in elementary settings, and the conversation turns quickly to assessments. Not because testing is new, but because it has taken over the job in a way that feels hard to step back from.

Many entered the field expecting a mix of consultation, intervention, problem-solving, and prevention work. Instead, days are often organized around testing windows, eligibility timelines, and report deadlines. The change didn’t

happen all at once: it crept in year after year, referral after referral, until assessment work became the center of gravity.

More Referrals, Same Resources

Schools are evaluating more students than they were even ten years ago. Learning differences, developmental delays, attention concerns, and behavioral challenges are being identified earlier and more frequently. Earlier screening and intervention are good things; few would argue otherwise.

But there is a cost to that progress. Each referral still requires a complete evaluation process, and those requirements are spelled out clearly in IDEA. Timelines do not pause when districts are short-staffed or when budgets are frozen. As one report notes, school psychologists "often juggle enormous student caseloads and heavy evaluation demands, especially in districts with staffing shortages". Districts feel the financial squeeze as well. Budget constraints limit hiring, training, and tool updates.

One analysis describes how school psychologists can "become constrained with time and take on a large workload due to economic restrictions associated with working in the public sector". The work still has to get done: it just gets spread thinner. Over time, that imbalance becomes the baseline.

When Assessment Becomes the Job

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In theory, school psychologists are trained to do much more than testing. In practice, many report that evaluations and paperwork consume most of their week. Large caseloads mean multiple assessments running at once, often across different schools or grade levels.

Each evaluation requires careful administration, scoring, interpretation, and documentation. None of that work is optional, and none of it is fast if it’s done well. Creating reports alone can take hours. According to PAR, developing these reports "can take some school psychologists upwards of 10 hours, giving them less time for other critical tasks".

The cumulative effect is exhaustion and heightened levels of stress. Research consistently shows that excessive workload and caseload pressure lead to unmanageable assessment loads and long hours. Many practitioners describe feeling drained and disconnected from the parts of the job that initially felt meaningful.

The Assessment Bottleneck

Even assessments that appear fairly quick to conduct on the surface can create time pressures and can mean other tasks back up.

On its own, a test that takes around 20-minutes or so may not seem unreasonable - but add in scoring, preparing materials, documenting results, or integrating findings into a full report across dozens of evaluations, and it adds up quickly. Physical storage of protocols, tracking prior results, and repeating testing when records are hard to locate introduce more friction. If there are delays in one area, several small bottlenecks that slow the overall evaluation timeline creep in. For psychologists already managing backlogs, those minutes matter.

Expectations Rise, Budgets Don’t

While workloads grow, expectations from districts and families continue to rise. Teams want faster turnaround times. Parents expect more precise documentation and more transparency. Administrators wish to have better data for decision-making.

At the same time, budgets restrict how districts respond. Hiring additional psychologists is often not an option. Legacy tools stay in place because replacing them feels risky or expensive. Long procurement cycles discourage experimentation, even when inefficiencies are apparent. The result? Higher expectations are layered onto systems that were built for a very different volume of work.

The Cost of Manual Systems

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Manual assessment workflows carry risks beyond inconvenience. Fatigue increases the chance of scoring errors. Documentation can become inconsistent when psychologists are stretched across too many cases. Time spent managing logistics is time not spent on vital interpretation or consultation.

Predictably enough, burnout often follows. PAR describes burnout as "a chronic condition driven by emotional exhaustion, overwhelming workloads, and a sense of diminished impact". It affects not only individual well-being but also service quality and retention. When experienced psychologists leave, remaining staff inherit even larger caseloads, intensifying the cycle. Many still find satisfaction in helping students, but feel overwhelmed by the systems surrounding their work.

Thinking Differently About Automation

The word 'automation' can be loaded in education. School psychologists are rightly protective of their professional judgment, and there is skepticism about tools that appear to replace human decision-making. But automation does not have to mean replacement. At its most useful, it reduces repetitive tasks and paperwork while leaving interpretation and clinical reasoning untouched.

Faster scoring, digital data capture, and cleaner documentation can help in very practical ways, but only if they stay in the background. Most school psychologists are not looking for tools that tell them what to think or how to interpret a student’s abilities: they want fewer steps between administering an assessment and being able to sit down and make sense of the results.

What wears people down isn't clinical decision-making: it’s the repetition. It’s re-entering the same data in multiple places, tracking down old protocols, or double-checking scoring when you’re already tired. Over time, those small frictions pile up and pull attention away from the parts of the job that actually require training and judgment.

That’s where workflow support matters - not as a replacement for professional expertise, but as a way to reduce avoidable errors and mental load.

Holding Onto Human Work

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Most school psychologists didn't enter the field to manage paperwork or chase forms: they entered it to understand students in context and help schools make better decisions.

Any system change worth considering should be measured against that standard. Few practitioners expect assessment demands to slow, and budget pressures are unlikely to disappear. That means the profession will need to be deliberate about how it spends time and energy, because neither is unlimited.

School psychologists have always found ways to adapt under pressure. The challenge now is doing so without letting the work become purely procedural. Supporting students still depends on professional judgment, relationships, and trust - and protecting those elements will matter just as much as meeting the next deadline.

Your Experiences

I’d love to hear from you about your experiences and how you’re coping with the different challenges and pressures facing you today. Have you tried a new tactic that’s helped you deal with overwhelm? Do you have a tip for managing your growing workload that’s been a gamechanger? Please consider sharing your insights below to help other members of our community.

Tags: testing, pressure points, anxiety, workflow, budgets

Underfunded, Overwhelmed, and Over-Tested: The New Reality for School Psychologists