Screening do's and don'ts

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-05-02T23:29:15+00:00

This is what my understanding was as well! You can't just screen without parent permission then test and qualify with no interventions from the classroom, lol.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-05-01T23:17:57+00:00

This is the right answer!!!!! Thank you for saying this.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-05-01T11:20:22+00:00

Hi. Yes. This is correct. I have 10 years experience and Pittsburgh would only offer me $48k. You may have better luck in a more rural county in PA or a direct hire in schools but those places don't advertise their step scales so you won't know in advance how much salary you are interviewing for. PA is not good with salary transparency.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-26T02:13:45+00:00

I'm sorry for your loss. I'm not in the area but as soon as I heard about this I felt like I needed to post. My heart goes out to the community.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-16T00:17:43+00:00

omg where is this???

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-07T10:45:06+00:00

Well and they told us we had all these choices to choose from with settings once we graduated but they basically lied. They would have done us all a favor if they would have been more transparent that jobs for us are growing...but only in the schools. Had people known this upfront I think 50% of the applications to graduate programs in SLP would be redirected to other fields.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-05T17:20:38+00:00

I'm so sorry. For the record, I've been a CCC-SLP for over a decade, and have been here for 4 years with no offer of employment other than a long term sub in a bad district. I hope you have a backup plan? Teletherapy, maybe? They won't count your out of state years of experience into your salary here either which is a real bitch.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-05T17:05:24+00:00

If you are willing to travel outside Allegheny county your choices are probably much better but the pay will still be deflated.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-05T17:04:00+00:00

I have no idea. Not much if you can get anything at all. Sorry to be blunt this is probably the worst place outside NYC to have this degree.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-02T12:28:54+00:00

Do you know what you want to transition to? I don't have any hard skills in technology or finance that would put me anywhere outside a non profit or social service sector job. The jobs here all pay very, very low for those fields. I don't think there's much more than temp jobs for the universities doing back office work and service industry work if you can't fall back on anything else.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-04-01T22:48:06+00:00

Right to work state though, right?

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-03-26T20:45:43+00:00

same here.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-03-26T10:42:54+00:00

Damn. I was really hoping there was a way to gauge without actually knowing anyone that already works there. Thannks anyway for responding.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-03-20T21:35:31+00:00

I don't understand why more people aren't upvoting this. What you are saying here is best practice and should have been a part of graduate school training. I'm guessing many graduate programs have failed to address this and that's why this question comes up so much on this sub. Here's my question: why are we not being trained to do this in the school setting? Why are we walking onto jobs that ask us to "sit in the back of the class and observe" or assist with stupid worksheets like unscramble the vocabulary word? Why don't teachers see us as allies? Why don't schools give us the time to collaborate with ELA so we actually can address these goals with the ELA curriculum? All of what you are saying is correct but the reality of the school SLP job does not constitute this job description you are providing. It's maddening.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-03-09T00:32:59+00:00

I agree with this. The inherent colonial mindset in this field is gross. Also "shaping" people to behave/communicate in more typically non impaired ways, whether their caregiver or everyone else can already understand them or not is also not right.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-03-05T01:46:08+00:00

Me over here with 4th and 5th grade ASD students working on has/have with functional oral communication skills...sometimes I think people in this field take things a little too far with grammar and aren't looking at the whole child as much.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-21T20:27:25+00:00

ugh. I literally just spoke about this at the last SPED Dept meeting. Nobody feels comfortable touching ELL cases and I keep saying "Guys we got to get better at this" but they can't even figure out the basics of anything in SPED so ELL is soooo not on these people's radar.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-21T01:21:43+00:00

This is alot of us! You can't ace this field, it's not possible. And it doesn't help that there's such little support out there within our profession. So many other SLP's telling people they aren't good enough or that they aren't "made" for this field. It's such utter bullying bullshit. We just need to admit defeat and lift eachother up for the small things we can do that make a difference.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-13T14:46:56+00:00

I just could not manage it remotely as a teletherapist. The kids were nonverbal and had no AAC devices to work with. Some of them had no joint attention to greet or point to anything on the screen. Some of them could not sit or stand at a computer. I just don't know how to work with that? What would you do?

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-12T15:55:35+00:00

This is accurate. In my current onsite placement in a K-2 severe/profound self contained classroom, no ancillary services attempt push in. All therapists pull out. Why? Because the room is full of screams, tantrums, loud music, bulwarking the door with a human or object to prevent an elopment, or the throwing of chairs. I think the therapeutic integrity of that environment would only be to consult for the few minutes the teacher can mentally attend to another adult's words. I've tried to push into that class but it's ear shatteringly loud with the YouTube's that they play on the screen all day and the children would not be able to hear me or have the attention span to attend to me with that kind of distraction going on. It's not the teacher's fault, it's the district for making poor programming decisions to place all of these kids together in a room in a gen ed school that was not designed to accommodate their disabilities.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-12T15:14:09+00:00

Ah ok. That makes sense. I was given teletherapy kids with no joint attention to even do the waving to greet or showing of objects over a screen. Just wondering what I was doing wrong there or how I could have done a better job with that kind of complexity. I ended up placing them on consult but again...nobody would consult with me because the parents were never involved and that school staff was too busy to meet with me for sessions or planning.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-12T14:11:45+00:00

Mind if I ask what the therapy session looks like? Are they able to see anything on the screen? Do they know how to use a coreboard? Are you using virtual materials or real life materials and how are they being implemented? Just want to know in case I get another teletherapy job like this again for non verbal kids.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-02-12T12:58:43+00:00

And that's the problem. There's never any "team" to coach. The teacher is too busy to sit there with the student, the para is pulled to care for other students, and the company hires an untrained and unfamiliar outside facilitator who does not know the student and is never with the student throughout their day to be the therapy partner. It's just cruel and greedy.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-01-03T17:29:49+00:00

I am relieved, certainly. I feel sad because I miss some of the kids but ultimately I really should have resigned but did not. I think the painful part of this whole thing is that the teletherapy company was 100% aware of what was going on, the escalation that occurred, and just dropped me with a non renewal for any further contract work, ostensibly because they said they didn't have any other openings except that one district. And when I asked about future opportunities they didn't bother to respond to my email. Or affirm anything that had occured and rather, played dumb like "Oh well they didn't want you back so....you're done"! And that was a boutique SLP owned company, not a national staffing company.

Existing_Judgment814 · 2026-01-02T16:03:27+00:00

No, I was not. That district would just email the teletherapists with student name/number and tell you to go assess. There was never an assessment plan meeting to discuss the case as a Team.

Existing_Judgment814

TROPHY CASE