Internship Placements Available for 2025-26: 1
As the regional education service center (RESC) for Hartford Country, CREC's mission is to promote equity, excellence, and success for all students from our 36 member districts through high-quality education services. As an intentionally diverse social justice organization, CREC is committed to affirming and honoring the lived experiences of others, willingly challenge inherited beliefs and ideologies; and consequently learn, grow and serve. At CREC, interns will be an integral part of clinical day schools that provide intensive programming for students with significant behavioral needs. Students in our clinical day schools require specific, individualized supports to address these behavioral needs, which often stem from substantial histories of trauma, complex family systems, and difficulties with self-regulation that may present as aggression, non-compliance, depression, anxiety, and/or a range of other behaviors.
School settings that interns will be located in will therefore be small, specialized, and include students receiving special education services in grades K-12. Shortly upon arrival, interns will quickly learn that they will be expected to be part of the close communities of staff that share the same values related to compassion, integrity, commitment, and collaboration to promote positive outcomes for our youth. Interns will be tasked and supervised in not only providing direct counseling and assessment services, but advancing systems-level behavioral programming across the various school settings and engaging in close collaboration with stakeholders. Direct counseling will include non-manualized and manualized therapeutic services, including Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS) and/or Bounce Back.
Administration and completion of psychoeducational evaluations will consistently include complex child profiles that address a range of needs and extend beyond typical triennial evaluations for special education services. By working directly with both clinical psychologists and school psychologists as direct supervisors, interns will learn both educational and clinical perspectives within the school psychologist roles and competencies.
Interns support the clinical day school population (grades K through 12), through psychological assessment for initial, three-year and 45 day diagnostic evaluations, facilitate and co-facilitate group therapy, support students for therapeutic check-ins, attend professional development and didactic trainings, and present at Planning and Placement Team Meetings. Pre-doctoral interns will have the opportunity to develop professional development training for special education teachers, associate instructors and social work staff.