As I have just finished up my fourth school year as an educational speech-language pathologist, I look back upon my experiences with my summer jobs. I have worked in a couple different settings with different populations and I have even gotten to travel to work those positions.
I graduated with my master’s degree the first week of May 2007. The November before that, I attended the ASHA Convention in Miami and interviewed with several different companies. The one I ultimately decided to go with offered me a full-time placement in the Washington DC area and said I could start over the summer working the ESY program in one of the local districts.
ESY stands for extended school year and is not considered summer school. For the districts I have worked for, it’s a program that was established for special education students who must qualify for the services. Many of my students have qualified based on the likelihood of regression of skills without continuous services over the summer. The number one reason my Deaf and hard-of-hearing students qualify is based on development of life skills----communication! As mentioned before, the greater majority of the families do not sign with their children so they are severely behind with their communication skills. Attending ESY with other signers—peers and adults—is beneficial not only to prevent likely regression, but to continue development of vocabulary, sentence structure, and social uses of language not to mention maintenance of sanity. Can you imagine getting out of school in the middle of June and not having full access to communication with anyone in your environment for a consistent two months until school starts back at the end of August? ESY tends to run for 4-6 weeks lasting for of 3-4 hours for 4-5 days per week, depending on the district. Unfortunately, ESY is one of the first programs affected by the ever decreasing budget.
My first placement was in a middle school in an affluent area of Maryland for ESY. Most of the students I worked with had autism which was a brand new experience for me. I had learned very little about autism in my graduate program and was clearly not prepared for what I walked into. The two classrooms were directly across the hall from the SLP office with two teachers, two classroom assistants, and about 12 students ranging from upcoming 6th graders to upcoming 8th graders. Many of the students were verbal with productions at the level of very fluent, but empty expressions. Most of their expressions were echolalic, meaning they were simply reciting things they had heard from various places and people. There were also students who were non-verbal and relied on the use of devices to verbalize for them. This was another learning experience for me having very limited practice with AAC—augmentative alternative communication. The students were quick to flip through the many pages of their very advanced devices and got frustrated with me when I slowly searched for symbols.
As I addressed the goals written on each student’s IEP, there was very limited, if any, progress made over the few weeks that I worked with them. I really started to wonder what the point was for any of these students to receive skilled services from an SLP. I started to question how much the parents threatened to sue the district for if their child wasn’t given speech-language services. Realistically, I know that four weeks isn’t much time, especially when I spent the first two and a half weeks building a rapport with the students. By the time I might have been able to make a difference, the ESY program was over. Leaving that placement, I knew that I was not particularly interested in working with this population full-time….at least with middle school age students.
The following summer, soon after receiving my well-earned CCC’s (Certificate of Clinical Competence), I got the opportunity to work in California providing compensatory services in Los Angeles Unified School District. My company sent about 60 SLPs and we met up with about another 40 SLPs from various companies to meet the needs of ESY and compensatory services from students of all ages all over the district. I was placed in an elementary school pretty close to the highway that I used to commute between work and my temporary home in Seal Beach. I had about 20 students on my caseload that I could see either during school hours or directly after school if I made an agreement with the parents. It was a nice school similar to the open concept structures I was accustom to in Florida. The class sizes were small and most of my students were receiving ESY services due to being identified as students with learning disabilities. During the recent school year, most of my caseload had been identified with the same type of disabilities, so I felt very prepared to work with these students. Traveling across the country, I did not bring any therapy materials. My company had a small library of supplies we were allowed to borrow from and the school I worked at had some things. I also relied heavily on my subscription to www.therasimplicity.com. I often printed therapy materials directly from the website. Between that website and a box of Uno cards, it was a good summer full of mostly fun therapy sessions.
During my assignment at this school, I worked with another SLP who was patiently waiting to get her CCC’s from ASHA which held up her ability to become licensed in the state of California. For this reason, she was not allowed to work with students without “supervision” of another licensed SLP, me. We got along well and carpooled so we could save money on the very expensive gas at that time. During that summer, gas prices got up to around $4.50 per gallon, particularly out on the west coast. This was the same summer that I drove out to Las Vegas and married my wonderful husband. At that time, my colleague was waiting for her boyfriend to propose marriage which happened half way through our trip to California when he came to visit. For this reason, most of our conversations related to wedding and bride stuff. When not working with children, we scanned many different bridal websites.
When I returned to work after getting hitched, I brought my wedding pictures to work to show her. During our final therapy session that day with a 5th grade boy who has autism, the building started making loud, deep noises and shaking. It was an earthquake! Growing up in Florida, this was one natural disaster we had never done drills for. All the drills I knew instructed us to get under the desks and tables around the classroom, so without knowing what else to do, I instructed the student and my colleague to crawl under our therapy table. The rumbling must have lasted 15-20 seconds, but felt like an eternity. Shortly after, the principal calmly announced that everyone was to evacuate the two-story building and report to the black-top basketball court adjacent to the classrooms. As everyone followed the directions of the principal, I tried to calm down the student who was with us as this definitely wasn’t part of his daily routine. When we arrived to our designated safe place, I immediately tried to contact my new spouse to make sure he was OK too. Had the quake been closer to me or him? Which location had felt more of the impact? Immediately following the quake, there was no cell phone signal and my phone would not send a text message or an instant message on AIM. A few minutes passed and I was able to make a phone call to my mom letting her know that I had survived several hurricanes and tornados and now an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4!! I eventually got a message from my husband reporting he felt it too, but everything was fine where he was. Then it dawned on me…my wedding photos were still in the classroom! I talked with another staff member and was escorted back upstairs to retrieve my belongings that were in the same place I had left them. Whew! It was a fun, very eventful summer and I could check off Los Angeles including Hollywood, Malibu, and several other well known beaches as well as Las Vegas on my list of places I wanted to visit during my lifetime.
By the time the next summer came, the company my husband worked for had been bought out by a much larger company and they were not willing to be flexible with his work schedule during the summer. This meant we had to stay put and abide by the typical vacation schedule of most office employees. Fortunately, I was offered a position working with students from my own caseload at my school. Most of the summer therapy sessions were fun and games with a side of articulation therapy. I got the opportunity to do some co-teaching with some of the teachers which would be beneficial to continue when the next school year started. This summer was the first chance I got to start working on grammar skills with the Deaf and hard-of-hearing students. I started out with verbs since those were things we could act out. I supplemented my sessions with a song from a CD by Dr. Jean called “The Verb Song”. The kids loved it! “Verb. Verb. Action word. Things that you can do!” We got to sing and dance around the classroom and by the end of the four weeks, the students had basically memorized the whole song.
This is when I realized this was something that I needed to incorporate into my weekly sessions with all my students. With the help of the teachers and using many different co-teaching models, this could be a great way to help the kids start to understand how the English language works. Typically, this is a very difficult thing for Deaf and hard-of-hearing children to grasp. The biggest reason is because they do not have a good foundation in any language—sign language, English, and sometimes Spanish—but they are expected to comprehend and express in these languages to progress through the curriculum. How can we expect them to progress across all content areas if they have a rocky foundation in language? Language is embedded in all aspects of academics so my goal is to try and create a stronger understanding of how language works even if it means breaking it down to the morpheme level for them to understand.
The next summer, due to budget cuts, contact employees were not invited to work ESY assignments anywhere in the Washington DC area. By this time, my husband had started graduate school and had a busy schedule for summer. If I was to go and work anywhere, we would not be able to travel together. Los Angeles Unified School District did not have the same summer program as they did two years before so that wasn’t an option. I was offered an assignment in Delaware, but turned it down. Instead, I picked up shifts at the hospital every Saturday and Sunday and did some babysitting for friends.
A few months ago, I received a phone call asking if I would be interested in working in Monterey School District in California near San Francisco for four weeks. Was that a trick question? Ha. Absolutely! To top it off, they had called me because the school that was looking for a short-term SLP was a school for Deaf and hard-of-hearing children. I went ahead and renewed my California license and searched flights to have an idea of how much we would have to spend for my husband’s ticket to join me. After months of waiting, the budget was not approved and the trip did not happen.
In the midst of all the discussion about working in a different part of California, I also received word about an opportunity to work in Ecuador as part of a program to help therapists become certified bilingual employees for my company. It involved staying with a host family, working within the community, taking Spanish classes, and immersing ourselves into the culture. This is, by far, the best way to learn a new language. However, this was not exactly the right calling for me, at least that’s how I felt. The reason for that is because upon returning from Ecuador, my company expects the therapists to continue with Spanish classes (which I had taken for several years) and take on caseloads of Spanish speaking children. I understand that these are children that need therapists who understand their culture and can speak and understand their language, but the children I am able to work with are from an even smaller minority. I have the skills to work with children who rely on the use of sign language to communicate; the pool of SLPs with the ability to sign and knowledge of the Deaf community is small. This is personal to me and this is where I need to stay for the time being. No Ecuador for me.
Now, as I am into my second week of summer vacation visiting with friends and family in Florida, I plan to pick up several shifts at the hospital when we return to Maryland next week. I can see myself always having a job like this as a PRN SLP with a hospital/rehab facility to fall back on.
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