July 2017

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted on this blog. Life takes funny turns sometimes and, as I mentioned in my previous post, it is important for telepractitioners to be flexible, among other things!  

About six months ago, I took a position at a university across the country  to assist them in developing their telepractice program for graduate students in the Communication Disorders and Sciences program.  This adventure has been eye opening for me. First, I moved to the East Coast to facilitate working with the faculty and staff at the university. Moving from California (just outside San Francisco) to a less urban, more rural area has been quite interesting!  It has meant getting adjusted to a slower pace of life, learning to do things without my family around and finding ways to entertain myself when I am not working.

As part of my job, I have developed a course in telepractice for the CSD students. I truly enjoy working with these young students who are eager to become SLPs.  They believe that telepractice will be the way of the future with our professions.  At first, they were a bit shy during the first couple of class sessions with me. I suspect that was because there were no  students to ask about my teaching since I am new to the university! However, when they realized that I don’t bite, they’ve opened up and seem excited about being trained in telepractice.

Currently, there are only a handful of universities that offer telepractice training to their students along with some practicum experience. At the university I am working at, they are wanting to offer both.  One of the most difficult parts of my job has been to find practicum experience for them.

Part of the issue is that we wanted to give the students telepractice experience during their summer coursework, a few hours with one or two clients. However, I quickly realized that there are very few companies or telepractitioners that provide services over the summer. Most telepractice companies are providing their services to public schools and very few of these school districts are using telepractice during the summer. I then turned to my private practice colleagues who also turned me down, even if they had telepractice clients during the summer. The primary reason given was that they could not justify a client paying the full hourly rate for services if a student was providing the services-even though the supervising SLP would be observing the graduate student sessions and coaching them 100% of the time.

For full-time telepractice practicum experience we are  looking to contract with local districts-if we can get through to the special education directors! In my research on working with public schools, it seems to help if you know someone who can, at the very least, introduce you to the Special Education Director, or other administrator.

If any of you reading this, have any ideas about how to obtain a few clients, or have a contact with a school district in Florida that might be looking for SLP services, please let me know!

While this new adventure has been challenging, it has given me much insight into the workings of universities.  I can now say that I have worked in all the SLP settings on my bucket list!