Center Continues Services for Children, Families and Teachers Online

MDC Team members (Photo 2019)
MDC Team members (Photo 2019)

The FSU Multidisciplinary Center (MDC) housed at the FSU College of Social Work has provided a range of empirically-based psychological services to a diverse client population with complex academic, medical, emotional, or behavioral problems for more than thirty-five years. Services include diagnostic evaluations, therapeutic interventions for children, along with teacher and family consultation. In the middle of March, all services requiring face-to-face contact were suspended due to COVID-19 and MDC offices were closed to the public. 

MDC contacted school districts by telephone and email to make them aware of the center’s continued availability to teachers and families for consultation with academic and behavioral challenges they are experiencing as a result of homeschooling. The center’s team worked remotely via email, phone, and video conferencing to provide services to these districts, schools, and families.  In particular, the center worked closely with school and district personnel to complete any evaluations that were initiated before school closures.

The MDC serves children and their families referred by 20 school districts in 18 counties in the Florida Panhandle and several medical and community agencies that primarily serve low-income families. Children and their families in these school districts are ethnically and linguistically diverse; and, according to the Florida Department of Education and the North East Florida Educational Consortium, 15 of these 20 school districts (75%) are designated as “small and rural” with limited resources for psychological services. 

When face-to-face diagnostic evaluations were canceled, outreach was provided to families of children already referred for assessment and their school districts to update them on the status of testing and to check in on any specific needs that could be addressed via telehealth. As much of the testing and evaluation process that could be was completed remotely to provide continued support for these families. The same method was used for school-based mental health counseling case, which was a challenge as many children and families had limited access to technology.

In May, MDC provided a virtual workshop on “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children’s Mental Health” to all teachers and school and district administrators in the North Florida service area with more than 80 attendees. The center also established an FSU Multidisciplinary Center Facebook page as another point of connection and for posting tips and resources for families and teachers. 

MDC also offered four telehealth sessions for children and their families who attended summer behavioral health treatment groups in 2018 and 2019. For 2020, they facilitated nine behavioral health groups for 40 children, adolescents and their families on social skills, emotional regulation and stress/resiliency via telehealth. One of the benefits of using telehealth was the center’s ability to extend its services to a broader geographic area.  Also, the MDC is offering free telehealth individual sessions for teenagers “Unchartered Waters: Navigating your Way Through Grief.”  

As pandemic restrictions were lifted in June, the MDC also began to resume some face-to-face testing with approved health and safety precautions in place, particularly for children and adolescents that required psychological evaluations for them to receive other medical, psychological, and/or educational services. 

The MDC’s professional staff includes four full-time licensed psychologists (two of them also licensed as school psychologists) and a licensed clinical social worker.  All have service and training as their primary responsibilities.  Graduate students from FSU majoring in clinical, counseling, and school psychology, social work, and art therapy, have completed training practica through the MDC for more than 25 years.  The MDC also provides a nationally competitive internship for doctoral students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology through its APA accredited Doctoral Psychology Internship Program.

The center has remained conscientious of the well-being of its team members. It connects on a weekly Zoom, along with numerous supervisor meetings that focus on navigating the constantly changing reality of the pandemic. To learn more about the services offered by the MDC, visit https://mdc.fsu.edu.  

Monday, July 13, 2020 - 01:29 PM
Last updated: Thu, 03/28/2024 - 04:16 PM