Do parents advocate for more special education staff?

Just got off the phone w DS's SLP. Our state says they can have up to 65 students. She has 51, the other SLP is around the same. If i was aware of an issue I would advocate for them. Each therapist has a room they work in, plus a shared office.

I was sitting next to our SLP in the lunchroom yesterday, so I asked her about this. She has a limit of 55 students, but has a caseload of 60 students, plus her pre-k students, plus the students that get "speech improvement" classes, and she has a handful more waiting for a full assessment, because their pre screening assessment showed they needed services. She said she has told her supervisor about his, but so far not much can be done. I believe my district is still short on SLPs.

They need more funding. Contact legislators as well as schools. It really comes down to money.


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Originally Posted by PZMommy

I was sitting next to our SLP in the lunchroom yesterday, so I asked her about this. She has a limit of 55 students, but has a caseload of 60 students, plus her pre-k students, plus the students that get "speech improvement" classes, and she has a handful more waiting for a full assessment, because their pre screening assessment showed they needed services. She said she has told her supervisor about his, but so far not much can be done. I believe my district is still short on SLPs.

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60 is not over enough. If you're a few over, they don't do anything other than ask if anyone can be dismissed, but you need to assess for dismissal and when you have too many students, you don't have time to assess. I'm at 65 and there's other SLPs at 70+. "Speech Improvement" is our RTI for students, and they're not counted in your numbers as you don't document/have IEP meetings and it's for mild articulation errors. I had 10 last year, this year I haven't picked up anyone up yet, as no time to screen them. Some students I had in Speech Improvement last year I need to move over to an IEP. We heard at our monthly meeting that a bunch of SLPs got moved to preschool team, but that's left all the school SLPs short staffed. They need to figure something out. One of our SLPs is a union rep and said she'll be raising this with administration. We can volunteer to go over max caseload and get paid extra, but for those of us that are over without volunteering, we aren't getting any extra pay for the extra work.