OTAs doing assessments?

Our assignment this week is to blog about whether OTAs should be allowed to do assessments, particularly with peds? My answer is yes. Yes, if we have established, demonstrated and documented service competency with our supervising OT. The reason I say yes is, I am pretty sure I want to work within the school system and I would love to be able to help out the OT with assessing students. We just finished practicing giving an assessment to a student in the county where I attend community college. I did the assessment with a first grader. I know now that it is going to take practice to be able to establish service competency! But, that is also part of being a student. The actual assessment wasn't very difficult, but the scoring took quite a bit of time. The scoring brings up another issue. I think my student would have been able to do more had he not been in a room with other students. But then again, when I am able to obtain service competency, I will be doing a much more efficient job at administering the assessment, and maybe being in a room with other students won't matter.
The county I live in serves ~8,009 students in grades PK-12, with 15 students for every full time teacher. The county has one OT. What a help OTAs could be to the OT! In this school system, 13% of all students have an IEP, that's over 1,000 students. That is a lot of students who need help with various things. I'm sure the OT would love to have several OTAs to help her manage some of the workload. Who could be better at helping her than OTAs?!
If you click on my title, there is a website with a list of assessments for all ages. Check it out fellow students of OTA, we can do this!!