Soapbox Saturday: Can’t we all just get along?

We aren’t the Jets and the Sharks rumbling in the middle of the night.  But sometimes it feels like it.  I started talking earlier this summer about why collaboration between school and outpatient therapists needs to happen more.  It shouldn’t be that one is better than the other.  My thoughts are that most students benefit from both because they really are two distinctly different service models.

I’m fortunate that I am able to work in both school and outpatient settings.  When I am in the clinic, I love the opportunities to work one on one with my clients.  I can focus in on their special interests and really bend to meet them where they are at.  I don’t need to tie my goals to state standards or common core-but I DO need to make consistent progress in a relatively short time frame in order to continue therapy with the client.  I love that I can be really, really  crazy in outpatient therapy.  (I’m only really crazy during school therapy).  I LOVE the fact that I can get my 16 year clients excited to come to speech because they aren’t fronting for their friends about how much they hate it.  I can work with the families each week and help them understand their child’s speech and language disability as well as give them suggestions weekly for home activities.  It seems important to be helping the families in their homes.

When I am in the schools, I find one on one sessions to be more awkward unless we are beginning to target sounds.  I LOVE the opportunity to work on more academic goals such as Tier 2 vocabulary, incorporate more reading and find the challenge of managing individuals in a group exciting.  I have many more options for servicing children with social language needs.  I can work with the teachers and paras and observe the student throughout the day to see how they are doing.  It seems important to be able to spend so much time with my students in the same building.

Here we have two pretty distinctly different models which clearly address student/client needs in different settings.  When I am in the clinic, I am TOO busy to provide a ton of suggestions to manage the child’s school day-but I can provide suggestions for home activities.  I wouldn’t provide SCHOOL suggestions anyhow-but am happy to collaborate with my peers in the school setting for the benefit of my clients and their students.  It’s great to be able to brainstorm on those tricky kids.  

When I am in the school, I am TOO busy to provide a ton of suggestions to manage the child’s home life-but I can try to help them meet their educational goals.

So why do we still get so caught up in our own egos that we can’t let things go?  When I’m in outpatient therapy, I don’t tell the parents that I work with that they shouldn’t start speech therapy in the schools.  But I’ve had school therapists that have been SHOCKED to find out that I am seeing a client that they think is fine with school only OR they are SHOCKED to find out my recommendations for treatment.  It’s just a different model.

Have you ever heard the band teacher bemoan all of the students who get private lessons?  Does he or she feel like his band is less important because the students are getting one on one instruction?  Does the private lesson tutor try to provide suggestions for how the school should run their band program?  No.  Because they are distinctly different services.  So we need to find a way to work together where we don’t feel like we have failed at our job because a parent has taken their child to an outpatient clinic.  And we need to work together so we don’t come into a school setting and start making recommendations without understanding the law, the particular school culture and the challenges that come with scheduling and caseload sizes etc.

I really, really do think that by working together, we can make the biggest change for our students and clients-which is ultimately why we went into this field in the first place.  Does it really matter if you got the to say the /k/ or I did?  Couldn’t we work together to get the child to say the /k/ phoneme-and wouldn’t that feel just as good?

Next week, I’m finishing up my collaboration Soapbox by providing (my ideas) about how collaboration can help therapists in both settings as well as providing some ways that school therapists can bring up outpatient therapy-without directly recommending it.