Returning to classrooms

• A staggered schedule means less access to students. Services can’t be delivered efficiently with students in attendance half or a third of the usual time. Providers with split assignments will be especially challenged to meet student needs. Imagine servicing students who only attend on Monday/Wednesday and students who only attend on Tuesday/Thursday, and you are at that school one day per week.

• Some necessary parts of the job are not possible with safety equipment. Speech-language modeling with masks/PPE? To say nothing of students complying with masks.

• Logistical feasibility of securing safety equipment. The idea of protecting the physical safety of providers and students is so challenging that it may be impossible under the conditions. It will be difficult to pay for, difficult to implement, and a system that does adequately protect providers and students will impede therapy. Schools will face all those challenges just to cover the needs of typical GenEd classrooms and teachers. Our needs are even more specific and even higher risk, and historically the district has struggled to meet the needs of typical classrooms, with an even worse record of meeting the needs of specialized service providers.

• High-Risk Population. Lack of compliance with disinfection and self-care guidelines, especially among students with significant needs. Many providers see a history of students sent to school despite being very apparently sick, casting doubt on the compliance of parents with self-quarantine guidelines.

• Any face-to-face plan can--at best--lower an infection risk, but frequent daily close contact with high-risk populations means that the risk cannot be lowered to anything close to safe levels. The level of PPE that would be adequate for our work is on the level of hospital nurses, and even then we are at risk. There are too many scenarios to list, but most SLPs have such a high level of contact with students at a high risk for infection, that eventually even a safety-compliant SLP is likely to need weeks of quarantining, if not medical care. Infection among staff providers may be impossible to avoid, and that should really scare anyone proposing a safety plan for this situation. Have any of the district’s proposals or deliberations included contingencies for the high number of infected staff that are the most likely outcome from returning to work at school sites?

• Infection will cause more problems than a return to classroom services solves. Even one exposure implies huge ripple effects: self-quarantine, more makeup work, and more lost service time, to say nothing of the physical danger to everyone involved and everyone in contact with those involved. That single exposure incident can undo weeks of work, and it appears to be impossible to prevent.

• Personal Health. Provider health is as much a concern as student health! As much as we focus on students first, the needs of providers with and without health conditions also needs to be prioritized. Asking staff to work face-to-face with students is putting us in physical danger, even if we take steps to partially mitigate that danger.

• High-Risk Workers. We are an extremely high-risk group. We work in close contact, many of our students have low compliance with hygiene and self-care steps. We contact several times more students in a given week than teachers do and create contact between individuals who would otherwise not have contact.

If LAS does continue via remote learning in some form

• Providers need training for teletherapy! Other districts have done this. We are not within our scope if we do teletherapy without this training. We’re also unprepared to rationalize or justify our teletherapy recommendations if we haven’t been trained in that practice.

• We shouldn’t need to invent our own materials. The LAS program should standardize what a distance-learning curriculum looks like (as PT/OT have done). Providers are needlessly sourcing/prepping/adapting/sharing their own libraries of materials, when we can and should be teaming up to use similar materials and share ready-to-use lessons. A shared curriculum, or at least a shared folder for materials, should be organized, either officially or unofficially. It’s one thing to have a forum to ask on an individual basis, but it should be ready to go before each of us individually exhaust our own searches and ask around.

• Parent engagement during school closure has been very underwhelming. How can parents be held more accountable? An absence agreement or policy?

• Language barriers inhibit effective family involvement. Monolingual providers trying to support culturally/linguistically diverse families. Perhaps a temporary special assignment to support parent communication during distance learning?

• Audio-visual equipment is often not good enough for teletherapy. Both providers AND students need adequate equipment to conduct teletherapy. NOT just cameras and internet. Needs appropriate audio equipment.

• Work spaces in our homes or at schools are often not good enough for teletherapy. Many providers will still be trying to juggle their own children’s needs. And/or will be one out of multiple working people in the same home who are trying to simultaneously share bandwidth, space, and noise. At schools, we often work out of makeshift spaces that are poorly set up for teletherapy being run from the campus.

• Our roles change. A drastically different form of therapy means a brand-new work flow. We have to adapt our materials, find new materials. Work expectations should account for these additional responsibilities.

Negotiation topics

• Providers amid inconsistent district action. A double standard exists for providers. We are left to our own “clinical judgment” for developing and implementing a remote learning curriculum, but we are expected to match a vast difference in expectations from families and schools. Parties looking to fight and make demands (parents, advocates, lawyers) are in position to win huge concessions from the district, and those concessions will fall to providers to fulfill.

• Union strength. How to press the district effectively on this? How strongly can the union push?

• Federal politics rippling out to impact local schools. A larger political battle is also playing out, to bankrupt and privatize public education. Even worse, this privatization will selectively reject students with more severe needs. The public system will be doubly hit by budget cuts as well as still being left holding the bag for unserved minutes.

• Sick leave changes. The district has been accommodating on sick leave in the past, and we should continue to fight for this. Covid infections at school are a work-related injury! It would not be fair for staff to be left to use our own leave time to recover.

• Insurmountable backlog. We aren’t just talking about how to move forward. We’re also ultimately obligated to take care of thousands of unserved minutes from the school closure. AND assessments that were not completed.

• As political and financial pressure mounts, an ultimatum may come. What happens if we are ordered to return to school sites without providers’ safety being guaranteed?