B-W: Speech Clinic Pilots Program for Non-Verbal Children

The first few days of Speech Camp were very quiet, according to Christie Needham, supervisor of B-W’s Speech Clinic. But that came as no surprise to the speech therapist who spent seven years developing programs and communication tools for children who are not verbal.

During the academic year, B-W students help to staff the clinic, where they work with children and adults with speech problems. But this summer’s Functional Communications Camp was a pilot program for non-verbal children. The original plan was for five to six students who would participate two hours a day, five days a week for one month, Needham explained, but the word-of-mouth response was overwhelming and highlighted the lack of similar, affordable opportunities within Cuyahoga County.

“We had more than 30 calls with no advertising,” Needham said, “so we ended up with two groups of five students each.” One group involved five pre-school boys who have the ability to talk, and had had speech therapy, but still didn’t talk. The second group included five older children who use some form of computer to communicate. Needham and two B-W students majoring in communication disorders led the groups.

By the end of the sessions, all of the participants were meeting or exceeding their goals. All of the pre-school boys were talking and the non-verbal children were communicating with each other. Needham cited several reasons for their success. The Speech Camp brought the children together, giving them an opportunity to communicate with each other; a switch from their one-on-one experiences with therapists. The other positive factor?

“I have time,” Needham said. “Classroom teachers don’t always have the time to wait for these children to communicate on their own and their families have learned to anticipate their needs. The children have learned that someone will talk for them, she said. At speech camp they learned to talk to each other. Gradually they began to figure out that they could communicate with each other. They began to joke with each other and with Needham and the students. They tried to get someone to laugh.

Needham pointed out that when adults with multiple handicaps are asked about the one thing they can’t do without, the majority say “communication.” The families want their children to learn enough to function more independently and perhaps be able to work. Although they were strangers at the start of the program, the families ended up creating a support group.

If speech camp was a success for the participants, it was just as valuable for seniors Julianne Wolf and Crysten Skebo, the B-W students who worked with Needham. They learned how to program for these students, how to set up vocabularies, facilitate the group, how to deal successfully with the children’s physical limitations and how to do the therapy. They also were a part of the family evaluations for each child. And finally, Needham said, “they learned that silence can be the most powerful therapy.”

The training that B-W students receive through their work with the Speech Clinic, in the summer and during the academic year, is part of the reason that the program enjoys such success with graduate school acceptance. Colleen Visconti, who heads the B-W program noted that, since 1999, 100 percent of the B-W students who have applied to graduate school have been accepted.

“The clinical experience that our students obtain at the Speech Clinic is one of the things that makes them distinctive. They graduate with over 70 clinical hours, which they can take into their graduate programs.” She said there is a tremendous need for speech-language pathologists
and audiologists and that certainly is good news for the 42 students enrolled in the B-W program.

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Speech Clinic Pilots Program for Non-Verbal Children