Petra Schaefer’s route to becoming a school psychologist was an unusual one. After receiving a biology degree from Columbia University’s Barnard College, she went to work in experimental hematology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Two years later, she was recruited by a Wall Street firm to develop strategies and to work in financial futures and future options. After many years on Wall Street, she agreed to establish a branch office in Concord, New Hampshire, and then, a few years later, “retired” to stay home and raise three children.

As her children entered school, Schaefer started volunteering. She worked on a newsletter that sought to help parents bridge the worlds of school and home. She piloted an after school program, Kids with Spirit, that Governor Jeanne Shaheen awarded a citation of merit.

“Combined with other volunteer efforts around education, it seemed like I was working full time again,” Schaefer says. “I had so many ideas about how things could be better, so I decided to go back to school for my MEd. I sought advice from a close friend who is a speech and language pathologist and she indicated that if I went into special education that I could really make a difference—and never be bored!”

Schaefer called PSU’s College of Graduate Studies and talked with the late Dennise Maslakowski, then director of the MEd program. Within the week, Schaefer had enrolled. “Dennise was amazing—truly inspiring, and a real ‘get it done now’ person,” Schaefer recalls.

After earning her MEd, Schaefer was hired by Colby-Sawyer College as a learning specialist, working closely with learning disabled students. “As part of that job,” she says, “I was required to interpret psychoeducational evaluations and I decided that I needed to learn more in that area. Dennise told me that Leo Sandy was starting a school psychology certification program at Plymouth State, [so] I met with Leo, signed up, started taking classes again, and eventually completed my certification and CAGS [Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies] at PSU.”

With her new credentials, Schaefer was hired for her current position as school psychologist at the Towle Elementary School in Newport, New Hampshire. “At first, it seemed like quite an undertaking, but I generally like to bite off more than I can chew, and then chew faster,” says Schaefer. “I love working with people, analyzing data, and crunching probabilities.”

The link between her work on Wall Street and her work in public education lies in Schaefer’s passion for data and how it can be used to help people. “Without data,” she says, “you’re just another opinion.”

Schaefer’s achievements at Towle Elementary School and in the Newport School District have included the adoption and implementation of the Response to Intervention method of diagnosing and responding to learning disabilities, earning the district one of five New Hampshire RESPONDS grants. Her work has included implementing numerous other programs for collecting and analyzing data about student progress and curriculum effectiveness, and it has shown great results, including positive ratings of Annual Yearly Progress from the Department of Education and the reduction of the need for special education by fifty percent. “Instead of labeling students as learning disabled, our focus now is on labeling what they have learned and what they still have to learn,” she says.

According to Schaefer, her time at Plymouth State was essential to shaping her new career. “I have always believed that higher education taught me how to think and all I had to do was to apply this thinking strategically for it to work in any setting. It’s never too late to be a lifetime learner.”

Plymouth State’s strength, she says, is its ability to provide both breadth and depth. “You touch on many things, then focus on a few. At Plymouth State, you get out of it what you put into it, and if you’re a go-getter, you can get an infinite amount of benefit from such a place.”

But for Schaefer, the greatest benefit to studying at Plymouth State was the personal connections she made with her instructors and classmates. “I left with great human resources. [My classmates] went on and pursued their interests, so now I know experts in all types of school psychology,” she says. “My relationships with the teachers and my classmates are the things I took with me, [they are] the things that really matter.”

Plymouth State University provided Schaefer with the tools and resources she needed to make a significant career change, and she has used those tools and resources to help change the lives of the students she encounters every day. Reflecting on the effect of her time at Plymouth State, Schaefer says, “You don’t know the effect by the grades, but by the work people do in the world.” –Matthew Cheney

Matthew Cheney is an adjunct faculty member in English and Women’s Studies at PSU.

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