School psychologists have long been central to student wellbeing, but throughout the last 12 years of my career, demands have increased drastically, including expectations of doing more with less. Rising student needs, chronic staff shortages and increasing assessment workloads have shifted my role from one centered on direct service to one dominated by paperwork and documentation. What once felt like 50% of my daily duties has easily turned into 80% or more of my time spent testing and writing reports. This imbalance is contributing to my own feelings of burnout, reduced retention of new school psychologists in the field, and significant delays in the evaluation process that causes real harm to the students and families we joined this field to serve.
The national shortage of school psychologists is severe and well documented. According to the American Psychological Association, during the 2021–2022 school year there was, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,127 students, more than double the National Association of School Psychologists' recommended ratio of 1:500. Some states face far worse disparities: Mississippi reports 1:9,292, while New Mexico faces a staggering 1:19,811. Only one state, Connecticut, is staffed to meet this ratio goal. For most, this recommended ratio is a pipe dream. We wait for staffing to catch up, but the needs in front of us aren't waiting.
In under-resourced, high-need districts like the one I work in, the shortage doesn't just mean "a heavier workload." It means delayed assessments, crisis response stretched thin, and little capacity for prevention or consultation. A single comprehensive psychoeducational evaluation can require several hours of data entry, score interpretation, integration, and narrative writing. Who hasn't stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning finishing documentation for an 8:15am IEP meeting? Burnout is now one of the biggest threats to the stability of the profession, and NASP notes that shortages directly contribute to unmanageable caseloads, reduced early intervention, and a narrowed scope of practice focused almost entirely on legally mandated evaluations.
The result is a paradox: school psychologists are trained to support both learning and mental health, yet our time is disproportionately spent alone writing compliance documents nobody understands.
The crisis has become so visible that the federal government has invested major grant funding to expand school psychology training pipelines, an acknowledgment of both how essential this role is and how difficult it has become to recruit and retain people for it.
Help Arrives
When Adrienne asked me to help build SageReport, the concept immediately sounded like a lifeline for the profession. A comprehensive report writer with templates tailored to district standards? I dove right in. It's been a lot of work, but I'm excited about what SageReport could mean for our field. On a personal level, what used to take me six to eight hours now happens in 30 minutes or less, like a pizza delivery from the early 90s.
What surprised me, though, is that SageReport ended up being useful in a totally different way than I expected.
As a university lecturer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we prepare trainees for the realities of school psychology, including the rapidly changing role of AI. Most conversations about AI in training focus on risk: ethics, overreliance, and the fear that students won't learn how to think clinically. Those concerns are real. But what I've found surprising is that a quality tool like SageReport can actually scaffold clinical reasoning when it's designed correctly.
SageReport doesn't just generate text. It models high-quality narrative structure, integrates cross-battery reasoning, and connects scores to functional patterns of strengths and needs. For interns and early-career psychologists, that kind of structure is hard to learn from a textbook. In a field where training programs struggle to expand due to limited faculty and internship placements, having a tool that consistently demonstrates best practices in integration, writing, and compliance is a meaningful advantage.
The time savings are still the headline. When psychologists can spend one or two hours on a report instead of eight, backlogs shrink, evaluations move faster, and more time goes back to students. More consultation. More prevention. More crisis support that doesn't come at the expense of everything else. It also helps with retention, because it's hard to stay in a job where you're drowning in documentation every night.
Right now, student needs are rising and the shortage isn't easing up. That's exactly why reducing documentation burden matters. Not because school psychologists want an easier job, but because the current version of the job is squeezing out the parts that actually help kids.
SageReport was built for that reality. It's designed to protect school psychologists' time and clinical judgment, not replace it. And if we can give people hours back every week, that doesn't just change their work life. It changes what schools are able to offer students.
I'm proud to serve on the SageReport advisory board and excited for the future SageReport can bring to the profession.
