Annie, a bright nine-year-old girl at a public elementary school, reads a book about monkeys at the zoo to her speech-language pathologist Dr. Robin Alvares during a one-on-one meeting. She breezes through the sentences with ease until she reaches the name "Elizabeth." The "th" sound is difficult for Annie to pronounce, but she works through the word and her speech continues to improve as she progresses through the story.
Miss Robin, as she is referred to by her students, has been Annie's school speech-language therapist since Fall 2007, but they have never met face-to-face in the same room. They have been communicating via the Internet with web cameras and computer screens each week for Annie's 30-minute speech-language therapy sessions. Alvares' office is located in the Speech and Music Building at the Kent campus, and Annie's elementary school is located in Hardin County, a small rural Ohio county 65 miles northwest of Columbus.
For the last year, Alvares has provided speech-language therapy services at a distance to 37 students in grades K-7 at four Hardin County schools as part of a telepractice research study. This four-year project, funded by the Ohio Department of Education, will examine the use of telecommunications technology for medical diagnostic, monitoring and therapeutic purposes.
Because of staff shortages, clinicians like Alvares are providing school-based services via telepractice to populations in geographically-remote, underserved locations, yet there are no research projects which have evaluated the efficacy of telepractice in these settings with school-aged children.
In addition to providing services, Alvares, project coordinator; Dr. Susan Grogan-Johnson, project director and co-principal investigator; and Dr. Lynne Rowan, co-principal investigator and the College's Speech Pathology and Audiology (SPA) program director, are conducting research to see if telepractice is an effective method of service delivery that could be used to help reduce the shortage of speech-language pathologists in Ohio's public schools.
The SPA program has agreed to serve as the telepractice site for this study and has been in existence at Kent State University since the 1940s with more than 1,500 alumni who hold positions in school systems, hospitals and medical practices, and in community, private, and university clinics.
SPA offers a full-service Speech and Hearing Clinic for people of all ages with hearing and language impairments and provides therapy and treatment. The clinic provides a full range of hearing tests and also fits, distributes and repairs hearing aids.
The Month of May is Better Hearing and Speech Month. To make an appointment at the Speech and Hearing Clinic or for more information about SPA's undergraduate and graduate degree programs, visit www.ehhs.kent.edu/spa.
