Explaining my job

As part of one of his classes, my husband recently had to give a presentation on Speech Language Impairment as an eligibility for IEPs.

You can imagine that he jumped on the topic once he saw it, because he figured he'd have the inside scoop.

I'm pretty sure the parrot explains how our conversation went.

I was credited in his presentation as being a "professional source", and he asked me questions about how I choose my assessments, what I look for, how I qualify students, and what that means for a Speech Language Impairment as a primary or secondary disability.  He also asked what I would want teachers to know. Oh boy, what an opportunity! Where to begin? Not to finish sentences for students who stutter (pet peeve!)? Making sure students with processing disorders can see your face when you are talking to them? The connection between speech, reading and writing?  I decided that I needed to start at the beginning: I don't just work with kids who sound funny.

In my current district, we are not involved in the STAT/Problem Solving Meeting unless a student is already being seen by us and we ask to be involved.  Technically, the meeting is held outside of school hours (starting 15 minutes before our contract day starts), so we are not seen as integral members of the team that need to be paid extra to be there.  Instead, I might not know a kid is having difficulties until I get to a domain. And even then, if I don't have a chance to screen the kid first and ask the teacher, they will say, "no, speech sounds fine."  When I get to the meeting, parents and teachers say the student doesn't follow directions in the classroom and looks at them like they don't understand novel directions.

It's taught me to always screen a student before I walk into a meeting.

More importantly, it's taught me that I have to continually educate people on what areas I play a role in, how that translates to the classroom, and the training I have that can help the team servicing a student.  I am lucky to have a very involved principal, so I've started my effort there. He is the type of administrator who not only knows the names of almost every kid in the school, but he has a nice way of suggesting people do something without actually ordering them to do it.  The result is that if he says, "why don't you ask Speech to screen him?", the teacher will do just that.

It's my first year in this district, and I came from a district with more "across the board" policies. We all used the same screening forms, same referral forms, and even the same "permission for RtI services" forms.  The idea was to present as a united front and develop a standardized way of measuring who needed services.  The nice thing about the referral forms was that it made teachers think about language skills more than they seem to in my current district.  As the Common Core creeps up on us, we are working on creating many of the same relevant materials. 

This year has been a year of testing the waters. I started with the principal and special education teacher in my elementary building, and I definitely feel like I am making headway.  Not all buildings have such great staff, though, and some of the speech paths worry that if they introduce new things, it will be received poorly.  We've gone back and forth about whether using one of our School Improvement afternoons to present would be a worthwhile cause.

So how about you? What do you do to educate people on your job?  If you could tell teachers one thing, what would it be?