-: So my name is Sean Knapp.
I am a Speech Language Pathologist,
or a Speech Therapist,
in a high school within a specialized program
called the Meadowood Program.
And I work with kids with mild-to-severe
intellectual disabilities and I try to help them
on their way to vocational tasks.
Like jobs, things that they could do outside of high school.
Some of my kids use speech
and work on higher language skills
and more subtle pragmatics or social language tasks.
And then I also have kids who are what
I would consider beginning communicators,
who only have one to five
expressive and receptive concepts
that they can use and understand readily.
On a busy day, I would say I get in at 7:20.
I check emails for about 10 minutes.
Then from 7:30 to 8:00, I see one student in particular.
She is working on social skills,
those basic responding sort of back and forth
Hi, how are you, how are you doing kind of thing,
and then hopefully that student is also
coming up with their own questions,
and doing that kind of thing from 7:30 to 8:00.
And then from eight to roughly nine o'clock,
I will see one to three different types of students,
depending on the day.
I also am doing two different types of
literacy interventions with two students.
'Cuz neither of them know how to read,
even though they're both 18.
So I'm doing, this one student has been flying
through the program that I know
that was developed here at Penn State.
And he is now reading consonant, vowel, consonant words
very well in isolation.
And the other student that I'm working with is
working on some really basic sound recognition
skills that she will hopefully be able to transfer
those skills to reading, literacy skills.
On a different day, I will go into the community with them.
Whether it's Walgreens, 'cuz some kids help stock shelves.
Other kids do recycling at different events,
different buildings around in the area.
So because I have such a complex case load,
my load is much lighter compared to another SLP
that would work in like a regularized school.
I've heard case loads go up to 60, 80, 90 kids.
And I have 20.
But my intervention load is heavier.
So I have students that I only see for 90 minutes a month.
But then I have a student that I see
for four hours a week.
So it's a huge differentiation in the amount
of intervention these kids are getting.
And the types of intervention.