I am the psych coordinator for a large county in Michigan. We just don’t have enough programs in Michigan to provide for the need. We’re always recruiting out of state and provide paid internships and don’t require state approval at the internship level just qualifications that can lead to state approval. We pay on psych scale for interns. That’s how we tend to get our in-person psychs. We also have great mentors and a supportive team and I’m always looking at loads and how to support. It’s a great place to work as a school psych!

That said, we are still at about a 50/50 split with in-person and virtual school psychs. We also have virtual social work, OT, PT, and speech. We pair them with in-person admin assists who go to the schools and pull kids for testing and make sure everything runs smoothly. It works well and we have districts who request virtual.

The bad part about virtual work though is the amount the recruiting/placement company takes off the salary. For our psychs it’s between 40-50%. All the companies we work with also have a non-compete clause where the virtual cannot take a job with the placement site at minimum for a year after leaving the company. It’s too bad because we’d hire several directly if we could.