-: All right, so my name is Ashley Morella,
and I am a speech-language pathologist
in two middle schools in the Wilson School District
located in Reading, Pennsylvania.
So as a speech pathologist,
I diagnose and treat students
with speech and language impairments.
And so I typically work with students who are,
as you say, typically developing,
but they may have a fluency disorder,
maybe they're a student who stutters
or maybe they have articulation needs,
maybe they can't say their R sounds.
Then I also work with students
who may be on the Autism spectrum,
have Down Syndrome, have other health impairments
that kind of inhibit their speech and language skills.
And so then I identify the needs that they have
and then I provide treatment to them.
So if I'm working on articulation with a student,
I will have them kind of practice certain words
that have their targets in them.
For example if they have difficulty with R,
I'll have them work on words that have er in them,
such as soccer.
We'll go over those words,
make sure they understand where they need
to put their tongue, and so on and so forth.
We go through a continuum.
We start at words, we go to sentences,
reading out loud, and then hopefully
back and forth conversation is the main goal.
If it's language, maybe they have difficulty
explaining and describing different things.
So I'll give them a picture of, let's say a dog.
And I say, okay, what group does a dog go in
or what category?
And hopefully they tell me pets or animals.
And try and help them kind of,
in their file folder in their mind,
come up with different words to describe a dog.
This helps with storytelling and writing
and being able to kind of get their thoughts out into words.
And so every day is kind of different,
but I see students starting at 7:30 in the morning
to about 2:40 in the afternoon.
And so it depends.
Sometimes I have a heavy-loaded schedule.
Some days I might be able to pull kids for evaluations
or for paperwork.
So every day for me is kind of different, which I enjoy.
You just have to be able to time manage
and remember which school you're supposed to be at
and things like that, so,
it's fun though, I enjoy it.