5 Reasons You Should Consider a Placement in Schools

5. Holidays

Being in the school system guarantees you to have off on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other federal holidays. This is especially nice when your family lives in a different state. You have these vacations built in so you don’t have to request it off. Two weeks off for the holidays? Yes please!

4. Staff

You really get to be a part of and collaborate with a diverse team in the school setting: general education teachers, special education teachers, psychologists, other therapy disciplines, and outside providers. Collaborating with so many different views challenges you to be a better speech pathologist; you will learn an incredible amount.

3. Generalization

You have the opportunity to monitor your student outside of your therapy sessions when they are in their classroom or during different times throughout their day. You really have the opportunity to see how your student is doing in a more natural environment and make sure they are carrying over the lessons they are working so hard on in therapy.

2. Diagnoses

In the schools you could potentially work with every division in speech pathology: cognition, articulation, social, language, swallowing, voice, augmentative and alternative communication, and fluency. You also could potentially see students from pre-school all the way to seniors in high school. Being prepared for the vast differences in age and diagnoses takes skill and preparedness as well as a SLP who is willing to continue to learn and better themselves as clinicians to provide the best treatments possible to their students. Such a placement will assure that you constantly learning new therapy techniques.

1. You are the difference

Many insurances don’t cover speech services that are developmental or congenital (such as articulation or the treatment associated with autism), or if they do, coverage is limited. Because speech services are expensive, many times the only place these students can receive the interventions they need is at school. You can be the difference maker between a child’s success or struggle. It is incredibly rewarding to be able to stand in the gap for these students and watch them grow and flourish with speech intervention.