Special Education Social Worker

Essential Functions

• Provide social work service time for students receiving special education.
• Counsel individual students and student groups, regarding issues including mental health, poverty, substance abuse, physical abuse, rehabilitation, social adjustment, and childcare.
• Interview students individually or with families, assessing their situations, capabilities, and problems to determine what services are required to meet their needs.
• Serve as a liaison between school and students, homes, family services, child guidance clinics, courts, protective services, doctors, and other contacts, to help children who face problems such as disabilities, abuse, or poverty.
• Consult with parents, teachers, and other school personnel to determine causes of problems such as truancy and misbehavior, and to implement solutions.
• Participate as members of the IEP, IAT, PBIS and other school-based teams to develop interventions for promoting students’ academic success.
• Counsel students whose behavior, school progress, or mental/physical impairment indicate a need for assistance, diagnosing students’ academic success.
• Demonstrate a relentless drive to improve the minds and lives of students in and out of school.
• Provide consistent rewards and/or consequences for student behavior to ensure that students observe the school’s core values, high expectations, and code of conduct.
• Implement activities to help students meet academic and social expectations.
• Provide crisis intervention and behavior management to build students’ ability to meet the school’s high expectations.

Knowledge

• Knowledge of principles, methods, and procedures for diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of physical and mental issues.
• Understanding of group behavior and dynamics, societal trends and influences, ethnicity, and cultures.

Supervisory Responsibilities

There are no supervisory responsibilities with this position.

Competencies

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong organizational skills.
• Ability to serve as a liaison.
• Multitasking skills.
• Time management.

Work Environment

This job operates in a professional home office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines.

Physical Demands

• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to talk and hear.
• This position can be highly active and requires standing, walking, bending, kneeling, stooping, crouching, crawling, and climbing.
• The employee may need to lift and/or move items over 50 pounds.
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception and ability to adjust focus.