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• Awards

Remarks from OSPA Awards Committee Co-Chair, Melissa Bestgen

Denise Eslinger began her extensive education in 1978 at Baldwin-Wallace College.  She has obtained degrees in Biology, Counseling, and School Psychology, as well as certifications in Autism and Asperger’s Disorders, Social Work, Administration, cognitive behavior therapy, and many more.  She has practiced in a variety of settings, such as MetroHealth Medical Center, Indiana State University, Ashland University, private practices, and Midview Local Schools.  She is highly involved in her professional organizations, serving as an executive board member and President of OSPA, and most recently serving as chair of the OSPA Dyslexia Task Force.  In the past year, Denise has also provided professional development to counselors on ASD, has assisted Pearson with research on dyslexia, and provided training within her district on best practices in evaluations and training to counselors working at a summer camp for autistic children.  Throughout her career, Denise has worked to spread research based practices to the staff she works with in Midview schools, students in training programs, other professionals in a variety of settings and practices.  For her contributions to the field of school psychology in the past year, and since she began her training in 1978, the Ohio School Psychologist Association Executive Board is honored to present the 2015 School Psychologist of the Year Award to Denise Eslinger. 

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Remarks from OSPA Awards Committee Co-Chair, Cindy Thompson

Melissa Bestgen completed her graduate training in school psychology at Cleveland State University, where she was widely recognized among her cohort as an enthusiastic student who readily stepped into formal and informal leadership roles. From her first moments of leadership in OSPA, her skills, competence, and dedication resulted in her being appointed to represent OSPA at the NASP Public Policy Institute in Washington, DC. As an attendee at the Institute, Melissa met with legislators and their staff members and compiled resources based on the NASP advocacy priorities. She presented to the OSPA Executive Board at an annual Summer Planning Meeting and continued to serve as a liaison between the Institute and our Board. She further consulted with the OSPA Executive Director and the Legislative Committee on ways OSPA could advocate for the NASP Practice Model, as well as improving mental health outcomes for Ohio students. Melissa’s remarkable involvement in the Public Policy Institute developed into her being appointed to a leadership role on the Executive Board as the Co-Chair of the Awards Committee. As Awards Committee Co-Chair, Melissa helped to: 1) update criteria/scoring rubrics for all awards, 2) develop a structured process for evaluating nominees, 3) streamline the awards presentation process, 4) implement new awards timeline procedure, 5) develop a new award to recognize early career school psychologists, and 6) update the Awards Committee section of OSPA website. Melissa has made countless and tireless efforts to recognize the distinguished achievements of her colleagues, with a particular emphasis on creating a nurturing environment where so many others have enjoyed their own moment in the sun. The Ohio School Psychologists Association is pleased to recognize Melissa Bestgen as the 2015 recipient of the OSPA Early Career Award.

Remarks from Melissa Bestgen

Thank you so much to the OSPA Exec board for this honor. It has been a very exciting five years and I owe so many people huge debts of gratitude for the opportunities that I’ve been given.

Thank you to Cleveland State University school psychology program for such a rigorous training program. Thank you to Dr. McNamara and the other amazing professors at Cleveland state, as well as to my cohort, especially Sagar Patel, who has been helping me bumble my way through school psychology since 2006.

Thank you to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District - Dr Noelle, Pam Honsa, Kelly Lavandowski and all the other amazing school psychs in Cleveland - for helping fix my mistakes during internship and my first year. Cleveland gave me such a solid foundation for practice and so much exposure to unique situations. I don’t think I would be the school psychologist I am today without the Cleveland schools being on my resume.

Thank you to OSPA for sending me to Washington - where I may have accidentally ridden in a private elevator and talked about sending Chick-fil-A through an x-ray machine, so good choice there. Thank you for welcoming me into this amazing network of school psychologists.

Thanks to my current district, Wickliffe, for trusting such a young school psychologist with so many leadership responsibilities and just letting me be the person I am in the district.

And finally, even though he couldn’t be here today, thanks to my husband Andy, who has an honorary school psych degree for all the help he has given me. He’s let me practice IQ tests on him numerous times (he is pretty solidly between and 110 and 120), helped me word ETRs (he’s an English major), and generally supported all of the things I’ve gotten myself into over the past five years. He and my little daughter June are pretty awesome.

Take a look around the room and see at how many “baby psychs” are here today, how many of you who are so new to your programs. You guys are rocking it in your training programs and in your first couple of years in your districts! You got this! Everyone take a look around at who you could nominate for his next year.

Thank you so much!

• Videos

Remarks from Kate Lavik at the OSPA 2013 Spring Conference:

Good afternoon, everyone. I am here today to speak to you about Pauline Alexander. Pauline was a founding member of the National Association of School Psychologists and its first President. She was President of the Ohio School Psychologists Association in 1967. She passed away recently and we would like to take a few moments to remember the contributions that she made to the field of school psychology. Here with me is Nadine Block (another famous name in school psychology), winner of the Clyde V. Bartlett Distinguished Service Award in 1991, our previous Director of Legislative Services and Professional Relations, and Polly’s friend and colleague.

Remarks from Nadine Block

I knew Polly well. Support for Talented Students began in 1983 to provide scholarships for special opportunities outside of the regular school day for gifted and talented children whose parents could not afford them. It was a natural extension of what Carolyn Fleming, a gifted coordinator, and Polly Alexander, a school psychologist, were already doing in Delaware City Schools. They would come across children whose needs could not be met by existing school programs and found friends and organizations to sponsor them for programs in music and art instruction, science and math enrichment, drama workshops and for summer camps like the United States Space Camp. To extend the program outside of Delaware City Schools, serve more children, and make contributions tax-deductible, they and a couple of friends (I was one of them) began Support for Talented Students, a 501(c) 3 organization. School psychologists, counselors and gifted coordinators were trained in the grant procedures and a steady stream of applicants began seeking scholarships. Some have become professional musicians, artists and actors. Many have gone on to academic success. Most write STS to tell of the wonderful experience of being chosen to be supported in their dreams, the special feeling that comes from being acknowledged for hard work and talent.

Polly was the “driver” in those early years, ever optimistic that the organization would be successful and that many children would benefit from its work. “Bright kids can be born to coal miners as well as bank presidents,” Polly said in the newsletter STS FOCUS, in the summer of 1986. Many children have benefited from Polly’s work. Over a quarter of a million Ohio children have been served by STS since 1983. Current chair of STS: George Fichter who served as a state educational consultant, for Programs for Gifted; July 1975 - December 1987.

And finally, I would like to read a story that was shared by Alex Thomas: “A vignette from Polly, an indomitable spirit who I came to know when I was in the second inning and she was in the ninth of our careers. She and Nadine Block had started an initiative (in 79 or 80, I believe) to pro- vide support and/or services and/or some-thing for gifted students in the Columbus area and lobbied me as brand new Ohio NASP delegate (1980 or so) to get NASP to create an umbrella 501(c)(3) where such initiatives for kids could receive tax exempt contribution status. As brand new delegate to the BIG NASP I was reluctant to go down that path but having Polly advocate in front of you quickly dissipated my concerns. She was not intimidating but fervent and usually correct. My first motion in NASP governance, in my recollection, was for the creation of such an umbrella group which eventually became what is now the Children’s Fund. The circuitry was not as direct but one thing is sure, without her initial advocacy, insistence, and spirit, the Children’s Fund or some type of NASP 501(c)(3) would likely have been created years later.”

Thank you all for your attention. Let’s all hope to keep Polly’s memory alive and strive to make an impact in the lives of children, as Polly did.

• Videos

 Remembering Donald M. Wonderly

Remarks at the OSPA 2013 Fall Conference
Dr. Kathy McNamara

Good afternoon. I am deeply honored to say just a few words in memory of Don Wonderly, who died at the age of 93 on September 17th of this year.

Tom Fagan, 2-time NASP President, former Communique Editor, NASP Historian, and Don’s first PhD student, wrote a memorial that will appear in The Ohio School Psychologist. As Tom’s tribute describes it, Don’s career was long, varied, and colorful; he was a professional musician, family services case worker, classroom teacher, school psychologist, student services administrator, private practitioner, and university professor. He was a pioneering member of OSPA, hailing back to the glory days when conferences were raucous events held at Atwood Lake Lodge, and members kicked in a grand total of one dollar to pay his salary as the association’s first executive secretary. To Tom’s inspiring and touching tribute, I will add only a few personal reflections about Don.

I thought it strange when my first encounter with Don involved my racing to keep up with him as he hurried through the Student Center at Kent State. I thought I was being interviewed for admission to the Kent School Psychology program, but that experience and countless others cemented my perspective of him as someone who was always late for an engagement; al-ways preoccupied with some larger question; and always on his way to launch yet another challenge to the status quo. Don was often a dinner guest in my home, and those events were always seasoned with lively and often contentious debates that he would deliberately instigate after dinner ended and his drink had been refilled. He challenged my feminist views and I fought back as he knew I would. In later years, he taunted me by turning up the volume on the radio in his office so I would be forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh rail against the politics of liberals and feminists. Of course, Don had the last laugh when, in 1991, he published a book in which he included me in his acknowledgments by saying, “Dr. Kathleen McNamara was perhaps our conscience, pointing out the need for recognizing the unique contributions of females in every professional field, while preparing endless examples of gourmet cuisine that belied her feminist leanings.”

Alex Thomas has reminded us that “education is what’s left when you’ve forgotten everything you learned,” and I can’t think of anyone who educated me to the extent that Don did. Two lessons have remained clear to me as a result of that education. The first is to always ask, “so what?” I recall having written what I thought was an eloquent first chapter to my dissertation, explaining how existing research was related to my topic. To my dismay, Don responded with the starkly dismissive comment, “So what?” He had little patience for the dry, dispassionate approach so characteristic of published research, and snorted (literally) at those of his students who defended their points in class by simply citing someone else’s research findings. Don demanded to know first why an idea was important enough to spend time defending. And, to answer that, he proposed his second lesson: Get in the bathtub and think about it. I have no doubt that his bathroom was an intellectual sanctuary of sorts, stocked with books and papers, and I learned that a coffee stain imprinted on my work was Don’s way of certifying that he’d given it careful review. While I never found the bathtub to be conducive to deep thought, I have noticed that the ideas I’ve eventually given up and left behind are those that I never thought through as deeply as Don would have expected me to.

I was a student of Don’s in the late 70s and early 80s, when the recently-adopted PL 94-142 dominated the playing field for school psychologists, focusing attention on multi-factored evaluations, report- writing, and special education eligibility. Don liked to say that a monkey could be trained to give IQ tests, one of his trade-mark assertions that sent colleagues into a tailspin of outrage. Many don’t know that the company he founded with several former students, PSI Associates, was created to offer schools an alternative approach to school psychological services, one that was based on a model of prevention that also formed the basis for a federal training grant to Kent State. P-S-I stood for “prevention: systems intervention,” and some of you might recognize that as the same principle that defines the tiered approach of today’s RTI model.

I don’t use the term “genius” lightly, but that is what Don Wonderly was. Looking back at my career, I see his influence at every step of the way, a point on which my students – who last week spent a class period on the “so what” question – would have to agree. The world is a far less interesting place without Don Wonderly’s insight and wit, and I’m grateful to have been a student of both.