Sept. 25, 2024 | Ethan Simmons
A team of Applied Health Sciences professors obtained a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education to educate 10 speech-language pathologists
Between stuttering, language delays and articulation problems, Marjorie Campbell saw the gamut of communication disorders while shadowing a speech-language pathologist (SLP) at Champaign’s Edison Middle School.
She also witnessed “how drastically their quality of life improved when they were given effective communication strategies,” said Campbell, who majored in psychology at Illinois.
“It was something I felt like a lot of kids from underrepresented backgrounds don’t have access to because of financial reasons. I felt like that was a need I wanted to fulfill,” she said.
This fall, Campbell is back on the Illinois campus, training to become an SLP equipped to address those same language needs for school children. And her master’s degree at the Department of Speech and Hearing Science will be almost entirely paid for.
A team of Applied Health Sciences professors obtained a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education to educate 10 speech-language pathologists: each trained to serve children with high-intensity communication needs, each coming from underrepresented ethnic, economic or linguistic backgrounds.
The first five-student cohort is now settled and learning on campus—the next five will be accepted in two years’ time, when the current students complete the program.
The project is titled Recruitment, Education, and Advancement of Clinical ScHolars in SLP, or “REACH-SLP,” a master’s level program co-directed by AHS faculty Mary Flaherty, the principal investigator and assistant professor in SHS, and Wes Wilson, the co-PI and assistant professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology. Amy Strohman, a certified SLP and clinical instructor in SHS, also served as project co-director last year.
The grant essentially pays the students through school, covering every SLP-in-training’s tuition, fees and health insurance, while providing a stipend each year they’re enrolled.
“Hopefully they’ll have to take out very little additional loans or hopefully they won’t have to get another job to support themselves, so that they can focus solely on their education, which is what we want,” Wilson said.
In return, each student commits to serving children with communication disorders for at least four years after graduation, in a U.S. school, clinic, or medical setting of their choosing.
“Schools are our goal. We want to flood the schools with these people,” Flaherty said.
Mary Flaherty
SHS assistant professor
Three of the five students in the first cohort are fluently bilingual, and all of them come from diverse ethnic and educational backgrounds. The program is designed to fill two “huge needs,” Wilson added: the shortage of SLPs in school settings—especially those trained for co-occurring communication disorders—and the shortage of bilingual SLPs in general.
Language delays, stuttering or stammering, swallowing problems, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD—any overlaps fall under the “high-intensity needs” banner, Flaherty said.
After their first few weeks on campus, the first members of the REACH-SLP cohort are motivated to make a change.
“I don’t think people realize the shortage of SLPs who are trained to serve that youth,” Campbell said. “I think it’s why it meant so much more to me and the people in the program is we recognize those needs who are often unrecognized by a lot of people.”
Getting the grant
Before coming to Illinois, Marco Barcenas-Consuelo was on what seemed to be a straightforward academic path at the University of Richmond in Virginia. After completing an undergrad degree in neuroscience and minor in linguistics, the Round Lake Beach, Ill., resident was planning to enter the research track.
But after seeing presentations at a linguistics conference, including real-world perspectives from speech-language pathologists, Barcenas-Consuelo realized he wanted to use what he’d learned in school to help children.
He surveyed school openings in his home state, from Northwestern to Rush University to Urbana-Champaign, and learned about the REACH-SLP program at an open house. He sent in his application for the Illinois Department of SHS, not banking on receiving the scholarship. “I liked the program; I liked the rest of what (SHS) offered as a whole.”
“When I first got the general acceptance, I was really, really happy. It’s close to home, it’s a good school. And a couple weeks later they tell you, ‘you got the REACH-SLP, you have the funding, you’ll have this extra support,’” he recalled.
“I was so happy, there isn’t a word to describe how happy I was. For one, it would eliminate any sort of financial worries me and my family had about pursuing this field. And the fact that they’d have monthly meetings giving us guidance, telling you how to work with a specific population, I thought it was a perfect fit.”
He committed to the U. of I. the very next day, without yet setting foot on campus: “Let’s agree to this before they change their mind or something,” Barcenas-Consuelo said.
After spending a year studying abroad in Brazil, and another on a Fulbright scholarship in Portugal, Barcenas-Consuelo is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, the latter of which he grew up speaking in the home.
As part of the program, the REACH-SLP cohort has regular monthly meetups with the faculty leaders. The focus is preparing the students for their future roles in the education setting.
“We’re trying to make it interdisciplinary as much as possible, even though that’s not the main focus of this grant. Because we do recognize any sort of extra enrichment is important,” Wilson said.
Though Wilson’s expertise doesn’t address speech-language pathology directly—he specializes in adapted physical education for students with disabilities—prior experience prepared him to write the grant and help Flaherty run the program.
Wilson pursued a similar collaboration while at the University of Utah, obtaining a grant to train students in both adapted physical education and speech-language pathology. Shortly after accepting his offer to join Illinois faculty, he reached out to Flaherty—before ever meeting in-person—to hit the ground running on a similar project.
Their first interdisciplinary proposal to the U.S. Department of Education didn’t come through, but with a lift from Flaherty, the faculty pivoted. In a matter of weeks, they crafted a new proposal singularly focused on training these skilled preservice SLPs.
The new grant came back from a competitive field in September 2023, two months after their submission to the Department of Education. Wilson decided to stay on the project as co-director.
“I was shocked that we got the grant because I’m not an SLP—I’m more of a hearing scientist. But I work with SLPs. I train SLPs. So obviously, I’m qualified for it. But I just didn’t expect to get the grant as easily as we did,” Flaherty said.
The REACH-SLP project addresses a soft spot for Flaherty’s work as well: Diversifying the speech and hearing science field.
“There is a lack of representation of those groups within the field, SLPs are serving tons of underrepresented groups, but they are not themselves representing that,” she said.
The mission of diversifying the field motivates the project leaders and advisors—including SHS Professor Fatima Husain, chair of the College of Applied Health Sciences’ DEI initiative, and Jennifer Dahman, an SLP and clinical instructor in SHS—as well as the students themselves.
“We all have our own little niches—serving kids who are bilingual or come from low-income communities—I think it’s amazing how all those different issues can come together, and how we can all fill different gaps that need to be filled in speech-language pathology, and provide support for these children who really do need these individualized services.”
Editor’s note:
To reach Ethan Simmons, email ecsimmon@illinois.edu.
