Micahla Downey is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist and behavioral specialist. She earned her Education Specialist degree in School Psychology, with a concentration in Applied Behavior Analysis, from the University of Northern Colorado, and holds a Master of Science in Special Education and Autism from Saint Joseph’s University, a bachelor’s degree in Special Education, and an endorsement in English as a Second Language. She has completed the coursework for Board Certified Behavior Analyst certification.
Her practice covers the full span of school psychology. She assesses cognitive, academic, social-emotional, behavioral and adaptive skills; conducts functional behavior assessments and writes the intervention plans that follow from them; and builds multi-tiered systems of support, so that a school gets better at preventing difficulty rather than responding to it one child at a time. She is trained in school crisis prevention and response through PREPaRE, in trauma-informed practice through Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools and Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma in Schools, and in Youth Mental Health First Aid. Her experience runs from early elementary through high school, in public and day-school settings, in person and virtually, and she has worked across autism, emotional and behavioral disorders, and a range of developmental and learning differences.
Much of her work is with the adults around a child. She trains teachers, paraeducators and administrators on autism, de-escalation and positive behavior supports, sensory needs, self-regulation, behavior data collection, and tiered classroom supports, and she presents at the National Association of School Psychologists’ national convention, sharing practices that move the wider field forward. She is a member of NASP, the Wyoming School Psychologist Association, and national associations for special education and early childhood education.
With families, she is deliberate about language. Assessment findings leave her desk in plain terms a parent can act on rather than clinical shorthand, and her aim in any meeting is that the family, the school and the clinician walk out holding the same plan.
