ISPA Award For Distinguished Services

Elisabeth Jacobsen

The International School Psychology Association takes great pleasure in presenting its 2007 Award for Distinguished Services to Elisabeth Jacobsen, who has been an active member of ISPA for nearly thirty years.

She was already an active member of the Local Organizing Committee of the second ISPA Colloquium in Helsingør, in 1977 – and has been a driving force and source of energy behind many ISPA activities ever since.

She became an elected officer in 1992 as a secretary o the Association – a post she served until 1996, when she was appointed an Assistant to the Executive Secretary in August 2006. After the official retirement of Anders Poulsen in July 2003 she became the Executive Secretary of ISPA. During her years as an Assistant to the Executive Secretary she accumulated a detailed knowledge of the day to day running of the Association. Utilizing this extensive knowledge as an Executive Secretary she has helped and supported the work and members of the Executive Committees, having an amazing memory for ISPA facts and figures, being able to recall who served on which Committee and when, what decisions have been made in the past, being able to recall and cite contents of the Operations Handbook when uncertainties arose. As Executive Secretary she guided many Presidents, President-Elects and Past Presidents through their roles making sure in her kind and gentle way, coupled to an unquestionable authority – all markers of her personality – that everyone carried out their role fully and in a timely fashion in the best interests of ISPA.

Elisabeth cares passionately about ISPA and its future as an organization whose key goal is to serve the interests of school psychologists around the world. In particular she is committed to the Association maintaining its place as an international organization. She is always looking for ways to encourage active recruitment of new members from developing countries and has made several innovative suggestions on how we can achieve this goal. Her main concern regarding the Association is to keep hearts and minds alike open to the diverse ways of school psychology service-delivery in which the shared value is the well-being of children all over the world.

She has been here for ISPA when the Association was growing up – and she has been instrumental in helping the move of the Central Office from Copenhagen to its new location in Chicago – helping to take the first steps and the work of the new officers in every way she could. I am sure this change in roles and places have not affected her values and sentiments regarding ISPA, and she will maintain her ties to the Association as we move into a new era.

I am sure that those of us who have worked with Elisabeth over the past 30 years would share the view it has been a privilege to have known such a sensitive, warm hearted and caring individual and to witness these qualities in everything she does. She will be sorely missed.

Helen Bakker

President of ISPA

2007 Tampere, Finland