Why School-based Speech Therapy SUCKS

Hey, this is Ming here. Today we talk about why school based speech therapy sucks. Okay? I know this is a loaded topic and the reason why I want to do this is because just to share my opinions and my experiences and these are solely my personal opinions. Okay? Don't take me out of context. And I'm not representing anyone, any organization or the collective opinion of speech therapists. It's just myself. Okay? So that's that. So my gripe is with the system not just doing therapy in school. I think that's fine. The system and how it's implemented is where I don't like it. Okay. And why I'm not doing it anymore. Okay, the first thing is everyone hates it. What do you mean by everyone? So the teachers, the children, the therapists, the parents all don't like it. The reason is the teachers don't want you to take the kids out of the respective classrooms. Right. There are subjects every hour and a speech delayed child or language delayed child will have usually difficulty in subjects, you know, like academically challenged sometimes. And if you take them out of math, then the math teacher is going to say, hey man, don't do that. They're not very good if you take them out of English and then they're going to say hey man, don't do it. They're already fallen behind and it's very hard to find. So what do you do as a speech therapist? You go and then you pick them up during PE or during DMT or art lessons or music. And then what's the child going to say? They're going to come in and shout at you and say hey man, why am I here? Instead of like playing music with my friends or singing. And then you're going to say I don't know, that's, that's how it works. And then it will be really hard relationship to build upon because it's already sour. It's like it's very hard. So why do the therapists hate it? Why did I hate it? It's because of the two reasons above, first of all, Second of all, there's, you know, you see a lot of kids in, in one day you can see up to like 14 kids. And I'm not joking. Each session is around like 30 minutes. So you can see around 14. Some people push it to 15 or 16 if you're working extra hard for no particular reason, I would believe it's not good for anyone if the therapist is overworked and at the same time the parents aren't going to like it because they won't be able to see the therapy itself. That's number one. And number two is, hey man, they won't have any hormones work to do. And it's very hard to follow up. And the only time that the parent gets to see you is during Parents Day, which is crazy because that's for general subjects. Right? So the second thing I really don't like is the documentation of bureaucracy. So I really think that in school based therapy, meaning the therapist going to the school, like for instance a primary school or secondary school, sometimes kindergarten, is that the documentation comes before it comes ahead of the therapy because we have to tell the education bureau in Hong Kong at the very least. I don't know about other countries, I'm not entirely sure, but I see a lot of these discussions on Facebook and forums and stuff. There's a lot of document documentation that needs to be done in a short period of time. And at the same time I have to do like the therapist needs to decide how many children have to be mild, have to be, you know, moderate and severe. And the therapist, according to those guidelines, creates a therapy plan that allocates the time and resources to those who need it more. But at the same time, who says that mild cases don't require more speech therapy sessions because they're going to get more out of it more than those that are severe? Okay. And it's really by case, by case basis and you cannot argue against that if you're working under that bureaucracy. It's very hard. Okay? I really don't like it. And I see a lot of therapists, all right, that will start doing the documentation as they're doing therapy. And for someone who has gone through that gruesome documentation, where you have to produce like 60 to 70 case reports, one case report, right? One assessment report, and then one session, you know, what do you call those session summaries, right? And at the very end you have a progress report. It's just gruesome. Like times that by 70 children per school. That's crazy. So how much of the energy of a therapist has gone into being an admin rather than being a therapist? Right. I think it's very crazy. All right. And the last thing I want to talk about is how should school age speech therapy be like, so the first thing is I think every kid should have already been allocated that speech therapy time without the speech therapist having to do the admin. So I see more and more now in, in Hong Kong, where I'm from, where the speech therapist becomes a full time staff Inside of the school. Right. Whereas more often than not, how the system is is that the school bids for services from other vendors, from like independent speech therapists, independent contractors, whatever companies, NGO so on to buy service from them and to plant SLP or ST there to fulfill those services. So having a full time, 100% employed speech therapist at that school is actually a good idea. All right. I would think so. Because you get to know the kids more. You know, like for mild cases I might see the kid once per month. Right. One on one particular kid I might see like a few kids, I might see them once per month. And that's appalling in terms of like just therapy. It's very, very hard to get the goals going if you only see that kid once per month. That's just crazy. Right? So how should it be is that I think therapists who like this sort of school age therapy should be there as a full time staff. Second of all, the documentation should be reduced by a lot and there should be a special admin for therapy or whatever, special needs, individual needs people like just in general to help them with these documentations. Because you don't want to take away the time from the therapists and the frontline workers. Admin staff that would help out on this would be great. And the last thing is how to incorporate this with the parent. So a lot of the times I, what I see working during the pandemic is the zoom calls that have the therapist, the kid and the mom together on a zoom call. So how can we replicate this in terms and in real life? I really don't know, to be honest. And that's the whole school age school based speech therapy is not my focus. My focus is to teach parents to help with speech and language problems for the child. So during the symptoms, school visits and so on, I find it very difficult to implement speech therapy goals. All right. And I know there are a lot of schools out there which has individual needs or special needs departments. Right, Those are great. But how do we integrate that together and make sure that the goals are implemented inside of the school? All right, this is a very, very difficult question because there are so many needs for students nowadays. You know, you've got to learn your math, you're going to learn English, you've got to have like extracurricular activities. You know, if you're an IB school then you know, you got to have also like community service, whatever. You know, there's a whole load of stuff going on and sometimes the most basic stuff are overlooked. From my perspective at the very least. Right. So that's pretty much it for this video. I mean, it's just a ranting video. If you haven't, Please go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab a list of tools and toys that we recommend you getting when you start home therapy. All right, that's all. I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.