Let Another School Year Begin

The sun is showing off, and the school bells are starting to ring.  SLPs, another start to the school year is beginning.  There is always an air of excitement and newness as we decorate our new space, buy new supplies and find ways to apply strategies from our summer professional development.  There is also a darker side–changes in campus placements, changes in documentation systems, a return to the daily grind and guaranteed increases in stress and anxiety.

Let Us Unveil

With the start of this year, the people working within our Bilinguistics walls have put considerable thought and heart into supporting your emotional and professional needs.   The past few years have yielded valuable content.  As school-based speech-language pathologists, we need help right now.  Sure, we are always wanting content on communicative disorders.  More importantly, right now, we are needing understanding and empathy and functional solutions.  This year, we will be providing content on executive function, conducting evaluations, and implementing evidence-based intervention strategies, in addition to talking about ways to keep ourselves healthy and happy so we can do our jobs well.  Our SLP Impact community is growing, and we will continue to provide access to our trainings and monthly CEUs.

Here’s the other part.  We are also going to continue to unveil the needed changes within the systems in which we work–let us unveil the unrealistic workloads, let us unveil the need for more (emotional and professional) support, let us unveil the SLP superpowers we all possess when given the opportunity to serve our students well.  There are big systemic problems, and we need to talk about them.  So, we will strive to be transparent, be honest and be empowered to advocate for our fellow speech-language pathologists.

Let Us Change

This means that changes need to be made.  First, the changes need to happen within us as SLPs.  It’s acknowledging our truths and saying that things may not be okay right now.  It’s providing boundaries for our workload to ensure that our human bandwidth is capable of working while maintaining our physical and mental health.  It’s also changing our own mental framework.  New solutions and new ideas shall be attempted and trialed–’cause change cannot happen without….us changing.

Let us Begin

Let us begin this new school year.   We will not see this school year as how it always has been.  We shall move forth seeing the year as how it could be.  Gut tells us this is going to be a dynamic year.   Inhale, exhale.  We have 187 days to connect with our students, and work and walk alongside our scholars as they begin to tell their meaningful stories.