We plan, God Laughs.

So last weekend I started working on a post about my current lesson for my pre-school classes, but this week happened instead.

• Monday was just one of those days that I could not get anything done.  
• I thought I would do some progress notes during my half hour lunch break.  Not even 5 minutes into my break a parent shows up with their child.  The child is normally brought by her grandmother, but today her father brought her.  A half hour early.  So I put down my lunch and work with the child.   
• It's just as well I worked with the child when I did, because as soon as the parents leave and I get situated with my now cold lunch someone else knocked on my door.  Turns out it was a diagnostician trying to find who was serving the students she was testing.  A little research, and I manage to figure that out.  
• While the diagnostician was there another parent showed up.  The parent was confused by my very bad Spanish, and thought I had wanted her to bring her son back this afternoon.  
• After the parent left, with the Diag still in my room, our new speech therapist showed up. This was exciting and wonderful, but there went my lunch and my time working on daily notes.  Such is the life of the SLP. 
• I am a member of our district's SLP instructional council and Monday evening was the meeting for November.  With all the chaos in my room, is it any surprise I showed up almost 1/2 hour late. Fortunately it's a good group, and I wasn't the only one late.  We discussed the following topics:
• What is an appropriate service time on IEP's.  Typically SLP's in our district put one hour a week on the service schedule.  Less if the child has less need, and more if he needs more.  Some SLP's will put 4 hours a month with the idea that somehow they are giving themselves more flexibility.  My personal stance is that service should be offered per semester and we should be leaving room for activities such as assemblies, field trips, and special events by the school.  I believe this for three reasons: 1) By putting 1 hour a week we are legally obligating ourselves to provide 1 hour of service for every single week that school is in session. This includes the first week of school when we might not (and probably don't) know where the child is, and the last week of school where we are often in the process of closing up shop.  This means that any cancellations not done by a student being absent is a cancellation that has to be made up. 2) By writing 1 hour a week on an IEP we are saying that the child will not be able to access their special education or regular education program without our support every single week.  And this isn't true for most students.  Most students function just fine missing one or two weeks of service.  There are students who do not succeed without weekly intervention, and we need to plan accordingly, but most students don't need 18 hours of service a semester (i.e. 1 hour a week.)  3) Putting hours on a weekly basis reduces our flexibility in meeting a students needs.  One SLP in my district tends to work heavily with her high functioning autism students at the beginning of the year, where they need help designing schedules to help them stay organized, but once that is done they need less support.  A middle school fluency student might need heavy support in October as he prepares for a big presentation in his class, but might not need the support in September and November. My suggestion is 12 hours a semester for my typical student,  less if they need less more if they need more. 
• Too much paperwork.  This is a long standing problem in the schools.  The level of paperwork far exceeds the amount of time we spend working with a child.  
• Too high of a caseload.  Most of our SLP's have high caseloads.  As  a preschool therapist, mine was particularly high, and I made a comment about it in the meeting.  However, I was optimistic because we did finally have a replacement for an SLP that had left at the end of October.
• Tuesday- Actually nothing extreme happened on Tuesday.  It might have been the only normal day of the whole entire week.  The new SLP was there and while she was waiting for her caseload list she cleared off a chunk of screenings. That was quite nice. (I had to come back and edit Tuesday, something exciting did happen.  I got an email from the district administration, asking me if I would like to supervise an Apprentice.  She's in grad school and  wants to work.  I know this is a lot of work, but I love supervision. After all, it's like having a captive audience.  She has to listen to all my crazy ideas and act like they are brilliant.  Kidding, I'm kidding. Of course she won't have to act.) 
• Wednesday- Wednesday is a half day at our school. I do see some students, but typically I have the afternoon off for meetings and/or paperwork.  On this day we are doing an addendum for a student who had been evaluated over the summer and given an IEP.  For reasons unknown to us, they (the mysterious "they" who wrote this IEP)  gave this child 1.5 hours of SL service a week.  (She's in my highest group.) In addition "they" gave her special education services with no goal.  So we were cleaning that up.  Our district employs "IEP Specialists"  Some are good and some are okay.  The one running this IEP is amazing, but we start off on the wrong foot.  She is extremely reluctant to put 12 hours a semester, because someone in their infinite wisdom had told her that SLP's couldn't do that.  If you have actually made it this far in reading this post, you know full well that I completely disagree with her.   A phone call to the district is made and we have an uneasy truce.  This has apparently started a dialogue with the district so that's good. We shall see what happens. That said, this woman is brilliant.  It was one of the best IEP's I've ever seen. She earned her paycheck.  And in random gossip news it turns out that she's friends with our new SLP, Karol (that's not her real name, but just in case I want to talk about her later, I thought I'd give her a name so you guys could follow along.) 
• Thursday- Well that is a tough day.  I wake up sick.  Feverish, achy, congested and with a sore throat.  But I can't miss today. 1) Because there is so much to do, and 2) today is the day I get to give up some of my caseload.  Yay!!!!  I actually spend most of the day trying to figure out what students were actually on the SL caseload. We get stuck by a couple of roadblocks.  Karol took the place of Jennifer.  When Jennifer left she hadn't quite finished everything she needed to. I am fully confident that she would have finished on her own time, but that weekend she was involved in a major car accident, and while it wasn't life threatening, she did spend the night in the hospital and is in major pain. She left our wonderful group to start another job, but hasn't been able to start the job yet, and it's been a month.  So there have been a few things that weren't big deals when she left but eventually turned into a crisis.  (Let this be a lesson to you: Don't procrastinate.) So after putting out a few fires, the four SLP's sit down and sort out caseloads.  I pick students for Sandy, my new apprentice.  (I am so going to have write a cheat sheet for what I've named everybody.) And we manage to balance caseloads.  In addition we also manage to create a master list which actually identifies who is responsible for what.  We send it to head special ed teacher and she is overjoyed. 
• Friday- Still sick.  But again, I can't call in because today is the day Sandy (the apprentice) shows up.  She is right on time, and followed me as I served kids.   I do make it through most of the day, but I leave early and pass out in bed.  
• Saturday-Still sick, but at least I can spend my day in my jammies.  I review ASHA's, my States, and my districts guidelines on having an apprentice.   I'm excited, but I'm nervous as well. This is a big responsibility.  I've done supervision before of graduate students who are doing their clinicals.  This is different because they usually take over my caseload, and so I can just follow them around and observe.  But she is going to be running her own caseload, and ironically she hasn't done her clinicals yet, so she has less experience than anyone else I have supervised.    Still she is smart, has that natural talent that you can't teach and appears to have a good work ethic. I can work with that.

So last weekend I started working on a post about my current lesson for my pre-school classes, but this week happened instead.

• Monday was just one of those days that I could not get anything done.  
• I thought I would do some progress notes during my half hour lunch break.  Not even 5 minutes into my break a parent shows up with their child.  The child is normally brought by her grandmother, but today her father brought her.  A half hour early.  So I put down my lunch and work with the child.   
• It's just as well I worked with the child when I did, because as soon as the parents leave and I get situated with my now cold lunch someone else knocked on my door.  Turns out it was a diagnostician trying to find who was serving the students she was testing.  A little research, and I manage to figure that out.  
• While the diagnostician was there another parent showed up.  The parent was confused by my very bad Spanish, and thought I had wanted her to bring her son back this afternoon.  
• After the parent left, with the Diag still in my room, our new speech therapist showed up. This was exciting and wonderful, but there went my lunch and my time working on daily notes.  Such is the life of the SLP. 
• I am a member of our district's SLP instructional council and Monday evening was the meeting for November.  With all the chaos in my room, is it any surprise I showed up almost 1/2 hour late. Fortunately it's a good group, and I wasn't the only one late.  We discussed the following topics:
• What is an appropriate service time on IEP's.  Typically SLP's in our district put one hour a week on the service schedule.  Less if the child has less need, and more if he needs more.  Some SLP's will put 4 hours a month with the idea that somehow they are giving themselves more flexibility.  My personal stance is that service should be offered per semester and we should be leaving room for activities such as assemblies, field trips, and special events by the school.  I believe this for three reasons: 1) By putting 1 hour a week we are legally obligating ourselves to provide 1 hour of service for every single week that school is in session. This includes the first week of school when we might not (and probably don't) know where the child is, and the last week of school where we are often in the process of closing up shop.  This means that any cancellations not done by a student being absent is a cancellation that has to be made up. 2) By writing 1 hour a week on an IEP we are saying that the child will not be able to access their special education or regular education program without our support every single week.  And this isn't true for most students.  Most students function just fine missing one or two weeks of service.  There are students who do not succeed without weekly intervention, and we need to plan accordingly, but most students don't need 18 hours of service a semester (i.e. 1 hour a week.)  3) Putting hours on a weekly basis reduces our flexibility in meeting a students needs.  One SLP in my district tends to work heavily with her high functioning autism students at the beginning of the year, where they need help designing schedules to help them stay organized, but once that is done they need less support.  A middle school fluency student might need heavy support in October as he prepares for a big presentation in his class, but might not need the support in September and November. My suggestion is 12 hours a semester for my typical student,  less if they need less more if they need more. 
• Too much paperwork.  This is a long standing problem in the schools.  The level of paperwork far exceeds the amount of time we spend working with a child.  
• Too high of a caseload.  Most of our SLP's have high caseloads.  As  a preschool therapist, mine was particularly high, and I made a comment about it in the meeting.  However, I was optimistic because we did finally have a replacement for an SLP that had left at the end of October.
• Tuesday- Actually nothing extreme happened on Tuesday.  It might have been the only normal day of the whole entire week.  The new SLP was there and while she was waiting for her caseload list she cleared off a chunk of screenings. That was quite nice. (I had to come back and edit Tuesday, something exciting did happen.  I got an email from the district administration, asking me if I would like to supervise an Apprentice.  She's in grad school and  wants to work.  I know this is a lot of work, but I love supervision. After all, it's like having a captive audience.  She has to listen to all my crazy ideas and act like they are brilliant.  Kidding, I'm kidding. Of course she won't have to act.) 
• Wednesday- Wednesday is a half day at our school. I do see some students, but typically I have the afternoon off for meetings and/or paperwork.  On this day we are doing an addendum for a student who had been evaluated over the summer and given an IEP.  For reasons unknown to us, they (the mysterious "they" who wrote this IEP)  gave this child 1.5 hours of SL service a week.  (She's in my highest group.) In addition "they" gave her special education services with no goal.  So we were cleaning that up.  Our district employs "IEP Specialists"  Some are good and some are okay.  The one running this IEP is amazing, but we start off on the wrong foot.  She is extremely reluctant to put 12 hours a semester, because someone in their infinite wisdom had told her that SLP's couldn't do that.  If you have actually made it this far in reading this post, you know full well that I completely disagree with her.   A phone call to the district is made and we have an uneasy truce.  This has apparently started a dialogue with the district so that's good. We shall see what happens. That said, this woman is brilliant.  It was one of the best IEP's I've ever seen. She earned her paycheck.  And in random gossip news it turns out that she's friends with our new SLP, Karol (that's not her real name, but just in case I want to talk about her later, I thought I'd give her a name so you guys could follow along.) 
• Thursday- Well that is a tough day.  I wake up sick.  Feverish, achy, congested and with a sore throat.  But I can't miss today. 1) Because there is so much to do, and 2) today is the day I get to give up some of my caseload.  Yay!!!!  I actually spend most of the day trying to figure out what students were actually on the SL caseload. We get stuck by a couple of roadblocks.  Karol took the place of Jennifer.  When Jennifer left she hadn't quite finished everything she needed to. I am fully confident that she would have finished on her own time, but that weekend she was involved in a major car accident, and while it wasn't life threatening, she did spend the night in the hospital and is in major pain. She left our wonderful group to start another job, but hasn't been able to start the job yet, and it's been a month.  So there have been a few things that weren't big deals when she left but eventually turned into a crisis.  (Let this be a lesson to you: Don't procrastinate.) So after putting out a few fires, the four SLP's sit down and sort out caseloads.  I pick students for Sandy, my new apprentice.  (I am so going to have write a cheat sheet for what I've named everybody.) And we manage to balance caseloads.  In addition we also manage to create a master list which actually identifies who is responsible for what.  We send it to head special ed teacher and she is overjoyed. 
• Friday- Still sick.  But again, I can't call in because today is the day Sandy (the apprentice) shows up.  She is right on time, and followed me as I served kids.   I do make it through most of the day, but I leave early and pass out in bed.  
• Saturday-Still sick, but at least I can spend my day in my jammies.  I review ASHA's, my States, and my districts guidelines on having an apprentice.   I'm excited, but I'm nervous as well. This is a big responsibility.  I've done supervision before of graduate students who are doing their clinicals.  This is different because they usually take over my caseload, and so I can just follow them around and observe.  But she is going to be running her own caseload, and ironically she hasn't done her clinicals yet, so she has less experience than anyone else I have supervised.    Still she is smart, has that natural talent that you can't teach and appears to have a good work ethic. I can work with that.