Making the Most of Your School-Based Speech Services

Making the Most of Your School-Based Speech Services

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP Parents' Corner School Speech and Hearing Disorders Speech Therapy Techniques

Congratulations! You’ve made it off a waiting list for school-based speech therapy services for your child. Through no fault of their own, many school districts provide speech therapy in groups of three to five children – in some states, the legal maximum can be six.

You’re grateful for the chance to have the support for your child’s speech challenges, but may feel that it could be challenging to address your child’s specific speech challenge efficiently in a group of other children who also have their own very specific challenges and goals.

As a speech pathologist who has worked in both schools and in private practice, I emphasize supplementing your school-based services with home-based work to help your child reach their speech goals.

School-based speech pathologists are dedicated and passionate professionals. They’re not only educators but also pillars of the communities they serve.

However, they’re often faced with huge caseloads that prevent them from going that “extra mile” for your child. That’s why it is critical for parents to be empowered to support their own child’s speech journey directly.

Speech Buddies provide a solution to do that in two key ways:

1) They provide a specially designed and clinically proven way to cue your child to place and move his/her tongue exactly as it should for those hard-to-learn speech sounds that develop in late pre-kindergarten and early school years (e.g. R, L, SH, CH and S)

2) They come with actionable support and learning plans that empower you to be the most effective partner in your child’s therapy process.

Each speech sound requires your child to place the tongue specifically within the mouth. For example, with the commonly disarticulated S sound, if they place the tongue too far back or too far forward in their mouth, the S won’t come out right.

Using a hand-held delivery mechanism, the S Speech Buddy provides a clear and consistent target within the mouth for your child to hit each time. In many cases, Speech Buddies provide that “aha!” moment early in the therapy process, where your child just gets it.

This can be enormously motivating for your child and for you, and is the first crucial step toward remediating a speech challenge.

But, because your child has said that speech sound in the old, incorrect way literally hundreds of thousands of times in his or her young life, it’s essential you follow up with diligent practice so this new, correct way of speaking can quickly become habit.

We know that school-based group therapy essentially means that your child gets 5 to 10 minutes of directed attention for his or her specific speech goals.  Speech Buddies tools come with a comprehensive lesson plan to help support your child.

Speech pathologists welcome parent involvement, but school-based therapists can’t give 50-70 parents a home lesson plan each week. Our lesson plans provide a clear roadmap for success and help make your child’s speech pathologist’s job easier.

If your child is in a group of three at school and is in two 30-minute speech sessions per week, your child is really getting 20-minutes of directed speech therapy per week. So, even twenty solid minutes of home-based work with your child effectively doubles the practice your child is getting; forty minutes triples this time!

And many studies throughout the field of speech pathology have confirmed that parents can only help their children meet their goals faster.

 

 

 

Tips for Drafting IEPs

Tips for Drafting IEPs

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP Individualized Education Program (IEP) School Speech Therapist Speech Therapy Techniques

Often, the beginning of the school year means drafting new Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals or updating older ones. This post is dedicated to tips on how you can get your students’ IEPs to best reflect their highest priority needs and make clinical gains this school year.

Write a Specific IEP

As you’re probably aware, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) is a legal document. What’s included in it and signed by school district officials, therapists and parents binds the school district to providing services to meet the listed goals. If you strongly believe, in your informed clinical opinion as per a comprehensive evaluation, that a child would benefit from a particular methodology, it would be a good idea to include the specific name of that methodology. In pragmatics, this could include principles of social thinking; in auditory processing disorders, this could include dedicated software applications; in articulation, this could include PROMPT or tactile biofeedback (e.g. Speech Buddies Tools). Whatever methodology you include in an IEP goals list should be supported in the research literature and be drawn from a clear therapeutic rationale, based on your comprehensive assessment or extensive experience with that child.

What Does a Speech and Language Therapist Do?

Coordinate with Other Child Therapy Services

Because a child’s therapy services are part of a more holistic plan for his or her educational development, it’s important to coordinate goal drafting, especially those highest priority goals, with other members of that child’s team: other therapists, teachers and even parents. In other words, a particular goal or set of goals may, from a purely say language development standpoint, be most urgent. However, considering the current and future demands of a child’s curriculum, another set of goals may be more pressing. For Example, Rory at age 7 could be notably delayed in acquiring those frequently used irregular past tense verbs. While this could be the most obviously delayed part of his profile, his ELA teacher has told you that the coming semester will place a strong burden on his narrative skills. In order to parallel your work with that of the classroom, it may be indicated to modify your goals so Rory can get the most out of the coming unit in his ELA class. This I’ve found to be especially important when working with middle schoolers and high schoolers; they tend to not want speech and language services to be removed from their other academic work. It’s important that we respond to the student’s current educational life.

Errors in IEPs

I cannot tell you how often I’ve reviewed IEP goals and seen blatant errors. I’ve seen cases where the name on the front page of the IEP didn’t match the name listed on the IEP goals; I’ve seen grammatical gender errors (he vs she, etc.) and goals from other disciplines (e.g. OT and counseling and even remedial academic domains) included in the areas meant for speech and language goals. I’ve seen goals that simply make no sense in the context of a child’s true needs. Make sure you a give any IEP you are writing a thorough once-over before drafting your own goals. and if you’re reviewing an IEP written by another therapist and the content of the goals simply doesn’t match the needs of that child, consider amending the IEP.

I don’t need to tell you that the IEP is our principal guiding document. Given its importance, the above tips can provide act as a useful guide for how to maximize the effectiveness of an IEP. We at Speech Buddies wish you the best of luck as we all together embark on another great school year.

How to Get Speech Buddies Tools for your School

How to Get Speech Buddies Tools for your School

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP School

At this time of year, many schools assess the progress their students have made, and in turn re-assess their materials needs. Some students are making excellent progress in therapy and some may have already been discharged from articulation therapy, using Speech Buddies and other evidence-based materials. But, as we know from a seminal study I often cite (Jacoby, 2002), 28% of kids make little to no progress in even an extended regimen of therapy.

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Improving Artic Outcomes for Students and SLPs: How One Big School District Did It

Improving Artic Outcomes for Students and SLPs: How One Big School District Did It

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP School Speech Therapist

TSHA 2015

I have had the pleasure of working with Justina Heintz, M.S. CCC-SLP, an SLP with Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas.  This school district is not only one of the largest in Texas but is one of the top thirty largest school districts in the United States.  They approached Speech Buddies with the primary aim of reducing caseloads. And in order to justify such a large-scale adoption of Speech Buddies Tools the district, under the supervision of Ms. Heintz, undertook a pilot study to determine the effect of Speech Buddies Tools on the districts’ caseloads.  Ms. Heintz presented her findings at the 2015 annual convention of the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association.  Recently, I had a chance to speak at length with her about this study. She shared some updates: about how the first year of Northside’s district-wide Speech Buddies Tools adoption program progressed, about the impact that Speech Buddies Tools are already having on reducing clinician caseloads, and about how Northside SLPs are improving the lives of the children of NISD.

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4 Reasons to Supplement your School Speech Therapy with Private Therapy

4 Reasons to Supplement your School Speech Therapy with Private Therapy

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP School Speech Therapist Speech Therapy Techniques

There are many wonderful, publicly funded options for your family’s speech therapy services. These could come in the form of speech and language therapy provided by your local Early Intervention (EI) program, the Committee on Preschool Special Education (CPSE) administered by your local school district, or from services provided directly to your child in his or her public school or via something called a Related Service Authorization (RSA). You may also have access to services funded in whole or in part by your health insurance plan. No matter who is providing your school speech therapy, you may want to consider supplementing those services, where possible. Here are 4 reasons that these extra services may have a profound impact on your child’s development, and could be a smart investment in your child’s future.

Choice

School speech therapy services, or those provided by other public pay sources are invaluable to your child, your family, to society in general. But because of budgetary pressures, school districts and other public payers do not allow for parents to choose which speech-language pathologist their child can see. This is of course unfortunate as so much of any therapy relationship is based on a “good fit” between your child and the speech therapist. Private speech therapy services have the added benefit of allowing you maximum choice. Speech Buddies Connect gives you choice based on many different therapists in your local area so you can decide what is most important to you. Is it the speech therapist’s level of experience or qualifications with a particular speech or language challenge? Is it convenience in terms of schedule or location? No matter your priorities, you have your choice in finding the best speech-language pathologist (SLP) for your family.

 

Undivided Attention

In the case of school speech therapy in kindergarten and elementary school, services are most often provided in groups of 3
students, and sometimes up to 5 or more students. Again, this is primarily due to strains on the resources of the public school system; there are simply too many students in need of speech and language therapy for the number of speech therapists on staff.Benefits of speech therapy
This of course means that for every 30-minute session your child receives, he or she is only really getting 10 minutes of direct intervention that is specifically tailored to your child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals but is still missing that full 30 minutes of class time. I have had clients who have preferred to decline school speech therapy to work privately instead because of this very issue. Now I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you decline school-based services, particularly if your child is working on overcoming a language-based learning challenge. But private speech therapy does provide undivided attention which may provide a stronger learning environment for your child.

 

Convenience

Public payers of speech therapy services also tend to offer reduced convenience in terms of where services take place. In the case of EI, services are almost always performed in the child’s home or day care facility. Very rarely do they approve services in the provider’s office. In the case of school-funded preschool speech and language therapy, there is more flexibility but in many cases, the school administrator will dictate whether services are conducted in the provider’s place of business. Depending on how contracts with the provider agencies and the local school district are structured, they may ask you to travel sometimes long distances to your speech therapy lessons. Private therapy allows you to choose your speech therapist for maximum personal convenience. And with our lives often so hectic these days, this benefit is not to be underestimated!

 

Another Hand on Deck

Speech and language development is incredibly important to a child’s whole course of life – there simply is no other way to put it. The sheer weight of this importance can be enough for parents to seek additional support for their children. Also, for many children, having another professional communication partner can be invaluable. You will also have another member of your team: someone who you can bounce ideas off of and someone whose experience could be a powerful complement to the team you already have in place. So if you feel that your child could you a boost and you already have public speech therapy services in place, it may be time to consider finding a local speech therapist through Speech Buddies Connect.

 

Parents' Guide to Speech Therapy in School

School Speech Therapy in East Harlem

School Speech Therapy in East Harlem

by Felicia B. School

Guest post! Felicia B. an SLP for City Sounds of NY, joins us this week to give us an inside look at school speech therapy in a Charter School in East Harlem, NY.

I work for City Sounds of NY, a pediatric based speech-language pathology center serving the New York metropolitan area. We provide contracted services to DOE students, which has allowed me the opportunity to work in a New York City Charter School in East Harlem, NY. Our school’s core values of courage, service, originality, humility, achievement, leadership, and reflection promote not only academic improvement, but also positive behavior. A strong sense of community connects the school with the parents through family engagement events. Collaboration is very important, and parents, teachers, and administrators work together to best support the needs of our scholars in and outside of the classroom.

Photo by Fett
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Work with Your School to Maximize Speech Therapy Effectiveness

Work with Your School to Maximize Speech Therapy Effectiveness

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP School

Whether your child is in private therapy or is getting services in a school or via, say, your local Early Intervention (EI) program, it is always a good idea to use the resources around you to maximize your child’s therapy gains. Unless your child is very young or home-schooled, he or she is going to spend a huge amount of time in school. This post is dedicated to the notion that therapy and the activities of daily life of your child, here school, don’t have to be so separate. Use the tips provided below to maximize the gains your child can make in speech therapy. Think of it as leverage for your time. You only have a limited amount of time with your speech therapist, and yet so much time outside of therapy. Applied consistently, these simple principles can perhaps double the value of your therapy.

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Parent Teacher Conference Questions for School Speech Therapy

Parent Teacher Conference Questions for School Speech Therapy

by Gordy Rogers, M.S. CCC-SLP School

I’m always filled with a tiny modicum of dread whenever I really feel the passage of time, even if it’s only a couple of months’ time. This is how I feel about the fact that parent-teacher conferences are upon us – my kindergartner’s conference (and personally, as a parent, my first ever!) is scheduled for Nov. 7th. I’ve spent much more time on the other side of this interaction, as a school-based speech-language pathologist (SLP) primarily in NYC charter schools. Here are 7 critical parent teacher conference questions so parents can get the most out of these crucial and relatively infrequent interactions with their child’s SLP.

[image by woodleywonderworks]

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5 Ways to Encourage the Love of Reading

5 Ways to Encourage the Love of Reading

by Courtenay M. At Home Ideas Language Development Parents' Corner School

Encourage the Love of Reading

How to Encourage the Love of Reading. Image source: besteducationpossible.blogspot.com

Reading is essential. It is the backbone of education. In order for your child to become successful in all subjects of school such as math, science, history and language, he must be able to read. How can we as parents encourage our kids to enjoy reading? Are there ways to improve a child’s reading ability? Yes to both questions. Begin by being a good reading role model, and allowing your children to choose the books they would like to read.  As the late, great Maya Angelou said, “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.” Parents and children both can work together to help make reading a rewarding experience.

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What Happens In Speech Therapy?

What Happens In Speech Therapy?

by Courtenay M. Language Development Parents' Corner School Speech Disorders Speech Therapist Speech Therapy Techniques

What to expect during speech therapy

What to Expect During Speech Therapy. Source: thetherapyvillage.com

What happens when your child visits a speech-language pathologist? What exactly will the SLP do? These are questions that many parents ask when their child has been recommended to start a speech therapy program. In order for you to set your expectations (and your child’s), here are the basics of what to expect from a speech therapy program. Of course, each course of therapy is tailored personally to your child’s particular speech disorder, or speech impairment. This should serve as a general guideline about the entire process.

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