Your subject heading could read something to the effect of “OPPOSE—don’t limit my career opportunities”
I OPPOSE the CACREP legislation. I graduated from Radford University’s Clinical-Counseling Psychology program in 2010. At that time, I was informed that the Virginia Licensing Board was rejecting graduates from our program because we were trained by psychologists and not counselor educators, and were assumed to have a different “professional identity” that made us ineligible for licensure in Virginia. I was able to obtain a job at the Richmond CSB (RBHA), that I was unable to get a promotion to a supervisor position because I did not have the LPC. Now, for a variety of both personal and licensure-related reasons, I have changed jobs and left the field. At this point I do not know whether or not I will pursue the LPC in the future, but I do not want that option closed to me. Radford University has been training master’s level mental health professionals for many years, and I urge the Licensing Board to return to the criteria for eligibility for the LPC that were in place prior to 2009 that did not discriminate against graduates from master’s degree programs in psychology. I strongly opposed the current CACREP-only proposal because it would assure that graduates from psychology programs in Virginia and other states will never be LPC-eligible in Virginia because most psychology programs can never earn CACREP accreditation. I thus oppose CACREP’s attempt to have a monopoly over LPC licensure in Virginia. This is not good for mental health treatment. It is only good for a CACREP monopoly.