Speech and Language Services

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What is a Speech Language Disability?

  • Children with speech problems may have difficulty with articulation or pronunciation, functional communication, voice characteristics or fluency.

  • Children with language disabilities may have difficulty in expression or understanding of language at an age-appropriate level.

  • Some causes of speech and language disorders include hearing loss, neurological disorders, brain injury, and cognitive deficits, physical impairments such as cleft lip or palate, and vocal abuse. Frequently the cause is unknown.

  • Speech Language Impairment defined in education: A child with a Speech or Language Impairment shall have a communicative disorder which prevents the child from receiving reasonable educational benefit from general education

Our DPS Speech Language Team

  • Speech Language Pathology Services is comprised of over 120 full and part-time Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) and Speech Language Pathology Assistants (SLPAs).

  • Our Speech Language Pathologists have a wide range of skills to diagnose and treat students with a variety of speech and language disorders such as articulation, receptive, expressive language, social language skills, voice, and stuttering disorders to support access to the general curriculum.

  • We have SLPs who can address a wide range of areas such as assistive technology, autism, voice, diagnosis and treatment of speech and language disorders with culturally and linguistically diverse students, stuttering, multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) process, phonology, and pragmatic language.

  • Our educational therapeutic services include screening, assessment/evaluation, consultation, treatment (intervention), case management, collaboration with other special service providers and classroom teachers.

Kid and teacher looking at a poster on the school hall wall