it's private

It's private only for me this year. As you know, last year I was working 2 days in private schools and 3 days in public schools. Well, things have changed, as they often always do in the Houston Independent School District. This year, I am in private schools only! There is a group of 4 of us working on the SLP private school team, which is great! We divide up the caseload between ourselves, travel around to different private schools, and provide one-on-one speech therapy throughout the week.

Formerly, parents had to take their kids to their "home zoned schools" to receive therapy. Yuck. That meant parents had to drive and we SLPs had to work overtime. Now we come to you, compliments of HISD. This means a lot of driving for us. Silver-lining: it gives me time to finish my coffee, sing a few verses of "Cooler Than Me", and catch up on my non-work related phone calls.

Currently I have 8 kids at 4 different schools including 3 Catholic schools and 1 orthodox Jewish school. This is much different from the Islamic School and Autistic school I had last year. I went from hijabs to beards and yamakas. I had never seen a 3-year-old wearing a yamaka until last week, but I guess we will file that under "perks of the job." Other perks? Less paperwork, more holidays and reimbursement for gas. All in all, it's not bad. I get to do more quality therapy seeing the kids one-on-one, so everyone wins! This year, thanks to Mr. Obama and the stimulus cha-ching, our kids get an hour of therapy per week, which is double from last year. I now see my kids twice a week, which means double the preschool-yamaka-sightings!

I have all new kids, with the exception of A, this year.  A and I worked on his /s/ sound allllll year long last school year. A would say "stink" for "sink" and "stand" for "sand". As last summer approached, I made a homework packet for him to work on during the break. It included fun /s/ games and color sheets. But who really works on that stuff over the "stummer" anyway, right? As I went to pick A up from his Kindergarden this week, I was nervous. I knew he had made significant progress on his sounds, but I was anxious to see if he retained it over the summer or if we would be starting back at square one. As I walked with A to the library I said, "Hey buddy, did you have a good summer?" He said, "Yes." (Not "yet" or ye" but "YES!") Awesome! It was the feeling of pure accomplishment for me, and I'm sure for A as well, that made my day. We now have our /s/ down and are moving on to bigger and better things this year: /r/....dun dun duuuuuun.