|
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Last week
the Kodiak Island School District accepted two speech and language pathologist
contracts during their regular board of education meeting. While the contracts
were approved just in time for the school year to begin, Superintendent Stewart
McDonald said a shortage of speech therapists nationwide has made the hiring of
these individuals a lot more difficult.
"Speech and language
therapists as well as physical therapists and more specifically occupational
therapists, and as well as school psychologists are definitely a shortage
across the country," McDonald said.
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Last week
the Kodiak Island School District accepted two speech and language pathologist
contracts during their regular board of education meeting. While the contracts
were approved just in time for the school year to begin, Superintendent Stewart
McDonald said a shortage of speech therapists nationwide has made the hiring of
these individuals a lot more difficult.
"Speech and language
therapists as well as physical therapists and more specifically occupational
therapists, and as well as school psychologists are definitely a shortage
across the country," McDonald said. "And many of the school districts in Alaska will literally
share some of these people when the find them and they will often purchase a
contractor service where the service will provide a speech and language
therapist, or some other specialist as it's needed. But you might necessarily
get the same person each time they come out. It's not preferred, we prefer to actually
hire somebody who will live among us and be here and work with us and work with
our kids, but we do as we must as many people in Alaska must do."
McDonald
said Kodiak copes with these personnel shortages in a unique way.
"And what we've done in order
to be as innovative as we can is we've actually trained some paraprofessionals
to become speech and language pathologist assistants. Where they work directly
under the supervision of a speech and language therapist. And we currently
employ two speech and language therapist and have several of these speech and
language assistants that we grew at home with our own programs, working with
some universities. And then we are, in order to meet our own IEP needs, we've
had to contract two more speech and language pathologists to come in an help us
with the supervision of those SLPA's."
Those are
the two contracts that were approved by the district last Monday. McDonald said
Kodiak's method of training assistants seems to be working, but the reality is
there is still a shortage of these professionals.
"It's very interesting becaseu
these are specialty areas that once upon a time schools hired and people
started their career off just to work in a public school. And now more and more
those individuals with those kind of credentials can pretty much independently
contract and either work through a hospital or a clinic or on their own and
find that they have a marketable skill that gives them more flexibility and
more freedom and that seems to be one of the largest driving directions."
He said
there are also not as many people entering the speech and language pathologist
profession as there used to be. For now, KIBSD is safe, but McDonald said if
these trends continue then the struggle for finding speech therapists will only
get worse.
###
|
