I grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts before starting my career as an SLP in the Berkeley Unified School District in California. My transition from rural to urban living is typical of the urbanization that is occurring all over the U.S.—especially with young adults. This has created a rift between the many children in rural and suburban areas that are in need of special education services, and where most special education providers live. Since I grew up in a rural area, I feel a strong connection to children growing up in similar environments and want to support them by providing my services via teletherapy. We are lucky that we now have the ability to use video technology, thereby helping to level the playing field for our rural students who are in need of special education services. I first began delivering speech therapy services via teletherapy in 2018, and have worked with preschool, elementary, and middle school students. My routine is pretty much the same every day—I take my dog for a walk and then head to my dedicated home office to start my therapy sessions for the day (usually with my pup on the couch behind me!) I work for a few different schools within the same district, and typically do 2-3 hours of therapy at a time. An issue that I’ve encountered while working in teletherapy is sitting for long periods of time. I try to stand up and stretch as much as possible between sessions, but could certainly do better. I also try to do yoga stretches in the chair and some progressive relaxation exercises—tensing and releasing muscles in my body, below the screen—while I’m working. I work with PresenceLearning, the leading provider of live, online, special education- related services to K-12 schools. The most amazing thing about working with this company is its online platform. I love the activity library. Before PresenceLearning, I found the most frustrating and time-consuming part of being a school therapist (and I think a lot of therapists would echo this) was creating and organizing therapy activities. It can be an incredible brain drain to first find and choose the appropriate activities to address your student’s needs and then physically print, laminate, organize, and store those activities—especially when you are doing this 12 times a day. It requires a very serious level of organization—not a joke! When I was working on-site at a school, I could really tell the therapists who had their systems down because they had 20 filing cabinets, each with a million files, each of those files had its own subfiles—it was a very well-oiled machine. And then there’s the rest of us—papers everywhere, drama, and trying to remember where we put this activity versus that one. Having the activity library online where I can create my activity queues in advance, look and see what I need to target and then just click on an activity and use it—it’s just mind blowing! My day is now spent providing services to students and conducting meetings with my students’ IEP teams. I participate and lead IEP meetings, communicate with parents, and coordinate with teachers to ensure they are making their classes accessible for students with special needs. An unexpected outcome of teletherapy is that it offers me the ability to connect with people in different ways. For example, sometimes my students like to look out of my window and see what the weather is like in Reno. They’re curious since they know I live somewhere different and I can offer them a glimpse of something new. Today it’s been snowing on and off all day, and my students love to see the snow. It’s completely different from their weather in the Central Valley of California, and by showing them this, I’m not only strengthening our therapeutic alliance, I’m also exposing them to something new. Through teletherapy, we’re doing more than simply providing services to someone on the other end of a computer screen. We’re also connecting to individuals we would likely not have met in real life, and showing them that the world is full of good people. We are no longer limited by how far we can drive each day to see students, and instead can help students anywhere and at times of the day that are convenient for our schedule. I have talked to many SLPs (we are a chatty bunch) about teletherapy companies and PresenceLearning both has the most to offer from their technologies, and is very respectful of us as independent contractors. I always knew I wanted to be on the forefront of whatever industry I was working in, and with PresenceLearning I feel that I’m achieving that goal. Source
